Verso un museo postuniversale

Abstract

The future of a post universal museum will have to undo a number of assumptions, beginning with the museum in the context of world heritage itself. Many proposals have been made, for example, to reconcile old museum infrastructures with their contemporary critique. Notable propositions include those of former director of the Museum of World Cultures in Germany’s Frankfurt am Main, Clementine Deliss (2020) or the frank account on looted objects by Dan Hicks, curator at the Oxford Pitt-Rivers Museum (2020), which have suggested museums as “investments in critical discomfort” (Modest 2020).10 Such investments may challenge the very infrastructures, personnel, and programming of museums, or reconsider what a museum may do - whether it has to be immobile, institutionalised, or cannot be reconsidered as an apoptotic archive that allows for its objects to be rehabituated, resocialised, or even abandoned, as exhibition-maker Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung intimated.