ICOFOM had a very intense curriculum for 2020. We held several symposiums, supported and enabled the organization of many online meetings, published two issues of “ICOFOM Study Series” and five monographs.

 

ICOFOM Annual Symposium

Due to the COVID-pandemic, it was impossible to organize the physical in-person annual symposium in Montreal, Canada, which was to be held in March 2020, and eventually had to be postponed to 2021. Nevertheless, we decided to convert one of our ordinary symposiums to an annual symposium in order not to skip a year. The symposium was devoted to “Museology in tribal contexts” and was co-organized with ICOM US, the Association of African American Museums, and Southern New Hampshire University. It was held entirely online, and the audio, as well as video recordings of the four keynote speeches and 16 contributors can be accessed over the official page of the symposium (click here). Topics for discussion included the significance of indigenous oral history within the museum paradigm and the rise of relevance and community empowerment in American museums.

Other meetings

On 3 and 4 December, ICOFOM, together with ICOM Brazil, ICOM Canada, ICOM Chile, ICOM LAC, MINOM, and the Museums Association of the Caribbean held an online International Symposium and VIII Seminar of Experimental Museology on “The Museum experience: museums, community action and decolonization”. It was part of the Special ICOM-supported Project “Museums, community action and decolonisation”. The host institution was the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). The presentations were in Spanish and Portuguese with some of the keynotes in English. The conference was recorded and all the videos are available on YouTube (click here).

 

Regional subcommittees of ICOFOM

ICOFOM has two regional committees — ICOFOM LAC (for Latin America and Caribbean countries, called ICOFOM LAM between September 1992 and October 2020) and ICOFOM ASPAC (for the Asia-Pacific region).

 

ICOFOM LAM / ICOFOM LAC

 

Together with ICOM Brazil, ICOFOM LAC organized the “XV Semana de Integração do PPG-PMUS. Museums and Museology in Latin America: sharing actions for research, capacity building and inclusive strategies”, which was held between 2 and 8 March 2020 and touched upon the topics of Research in Museology and Cultural Heritage in Latin America and the Caribbean, public policies and inclusion, and museum definition.

At the end of the year, there was a reelection of the Board and the Chair of the ICOFOM LAM. Olga Nazor from Argentina, who served the subcommittee for six years, finished her second term. The committee’s new chair is Luciana Menezes De Carvalho, Director of the Museum of Memory and Heritage at the Federal University of Alfenas, from Brazil. The new leadership at the ICOFOM for Latin American countries decided to slightly rename the committee’s title into “ICOFOM LAC” to include the countries from the Caribbean region.

Between November 4 and 6, the 28th ICOFOM LAC annual regional meeting, “Towards a definition of the museum from a Latin American and Caribbean perspective: epistemological foundations” was organized and delivered online with the help of ICOM Argentina and Museo de Itaipu. The online format allowed participants from three continents to join the discussions of the museum definition process.

In 2020, within the yearly framework of “Revisiting the classics”, ICOFOM LAC was promoting Nelly Decarolis’s contributions to Museology in Latin America and the Caribbean.

 

ICOFOM ASPAC

ICOFOM ASPAC held the fourth scientific and practical conference on “Modern trends in the development of museums and museology” in Novosibirsk, Russia, on October 22 and 23. There were 60 presentations that covered a broad range of topics from theoretical to practice-oriented ones.

 

Publications

ICOFOM Study Series

Since 1983, ICOFOM has been publishing its own journal, “ICOFOM Study Series”, accepting articles in English, French and Spanish. For the first 30 years the journal was published as conference proceedings that were read by the participants of our annual symposium beforehand to be ready to discuss them during the symposium. In 2013, it was decided to make it a peer-reviewed journal which also meant that it would take more time before it gets published. So ICOFOM is publishing “Materials for discussion” that are provided to the participants before the symposium. The best short papers from the symposium are then selected for the ICOFOM Study Series. In 2020, ICOFOM started publishing two volumes a year, which means that only one is linked with the annual symposium’s theme.

The topic of the first issue of the 48th volume was “The future of tradition in museology”, which was the theme of our Kyoto’s annual symposium. The second issue of the same volume was “Defining the museum: challenges and compromises of the 21st century”, which had a separate call for papers and attracted many viewpoints on the background trends of the definition process. After the peer-reviewed articles, we published the results of ICOFOM survey on the ICOM new museum definition. The survey and its analysis took place at the end of 2019 and the beginning of 2020 and was also submitted to the page on the ICOM member space to be considered by ICOM Define in 2021. The survey was published in three official languages of ICOM.

Monographs

In 2018, ICOFOM launched a new series of monographs. Each publication is available online, the first monographs in 2020 were also printed. In April 2020, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, we decided to publish only digital versions. Here are the titles of the monographies published in 2020:

• Mairesse, F. (ed.) (2020). Histoire de la muséologie. Quelques figures marquantes du monde muséal francophone. Paris : ICOFOM. ISBN : 978-92-9012-476-4. (digital and in print).
• Bergeron, Y., Debary, O., & Mairesse, F. (ed.) (2020). Écrire l’histoire des musées à travers celle de ses acteurs. Enjeux et responsabilités de l’histoire biographique. Paris : ICOFOM. ISBN : 978-92-9012-478-8. (digital and in print).
• Brulon Soares, B. (ed.) (2020). Descolonizando la museología. Vol. 1. Museos, acción comunitaria y descolonización / Decolonising museology. Vol. 1. Museums, community action and decolonisation. Paris: ICOFOM/ICOM. ISBN: 978-2-491997-15-1. (digital only, articles in Portuguese, Spanish and English).
• Carvalho, L. (ed.) (2020). XXV Encuentro de ICOFOM LAM – Anales de la mesa “Revisitando los clásicos”, La Habana, 2017. ICOFOM LAM, 159 p. ISBN:978-2-491997-13-7.
• Carvalho, L; Escudero, S. (eds.) (2020). Latin American Museological Theory: Waldisa Russio Camargo Guarnieri. Nazor, O. (ed.): Latin American Museological Theory. Fundamental Papers. ICOFOM LAM, 136 p. ISBN: 978-2-491997-03-8.

 

All our publications are Open Access and can be downloaded from our website.

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Written by Anna Leshchenko, also published in ICOM Germany’s bulletin in 2021.