CECA 2009 - Day 2
6 October 2009
We had a total of 18 presentations today, not counting the welcoming speeches and the poster session. The programme kicked off with an overview of museums in Iceland by Rakel Pétursdóttir, Head of Education at the National Gallery of Iceland, which set the scene nicely for our Rekjavík venue.
This was followed by today’s keynote paper, by Prof Ástráður Eysteinsson from the University of Iceland. Prof Ástráður highlighted the importance of the saga manuscripts - Iceland’s “crown jewels” - as the core of Icelandic cultural capital. Further reflections on the relationships between literature and museums included the proposition that a novel can turn a city into an exhibition space (e.g. Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses or Istanbul in Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence), with people subsequently visiting a city to rediscover the novel. Prof Ástráður concluded his keynote paper by saying that, alongside museums, “literature is a key access to realms of memory”.
Further morning presentations included, among others, Nicole Gesché-Koning (from Brussels, Belgium) posing the question “Are museum educators really necessary?”, while Prof Eva Mæhre Lauritzen (from Oslo, Norway) and Zeljka Jelavic (from Zagreb, Croatia) both advocated the importance of sharing ideas to widen perspectives of museum educators.
In the afternoon, presentations included Olga Baird (from Wolverhampton, UK) proposing that playing on stereotypes in exhibitions can diminish its cultural value and message, in her observations on Russian artworks on Charles Darwin as seen by a British audience; while the presentation by Dr Sigurjón Hafsteinsson (from the University of Iceland) about the Phallological Museum and Neoliberalism got a lot of laughs and probably wins the prize for most ‘colourful’ PowerPoint of the day (apparently the curator “wasn’t interested in collecting stamps”). We also learned that Iceland has the “largest number of poets, printing presses and readers per capita.” Two quotes that stood out in the Marketplace of Ideas were “Art, like riding a bike, is an internal mechanism in all of us” (Sanni Pöntinen from Tampere, Finland), and “If you value your own culture and differences amongst yourselves, then you will value other cultures and their inherent differences (Mila Skaric from Zagreb, Croatia.)”.
The day concluded with a reception and study visit at the Reykjavik Maritime Museum (see photograph).
