Enabling Multiple Voices in the Museum: Challenges and Approaches

Within the recently launched SPICE project, citizen curation methods and tools are being co-designed through five museum case studies in Finland, Ireland, Spain, Italy and Israel. In each case study a museum is working with partner groups and organisations to introduce tools and methods that support citizen curation for visitor groups that tend to be underrepresented in cultural engagement, including people living with disability, older people, asylum seekers and minority religious communities. Museums, rather than providing an authoritative account, increasingly attempt to present multiple voices related to their collection and exhibitions. Our question is “how can museum visitors be helped to engage with multiple voices?” Citizen curation is proposed as a way of achieving this aim by supporting citizens to share their own interpretations of museum objects and reflect on the variety of interpretations contributed by others. We define citizen curation as users applying curatorial methods to archival materials available in heritage and memory institutions as well as to items depicted in exhibitions in order to develop their own interpretations, share their own perspective and appreciate the perspectives of others. Related uses of the term can be found in the work of Mauer (2017) and Hill et al (2018). Mauer (2017) defines citizen curating as enlisting citizens to curate exhibitions using archival materials available in museums and other institutions. Within the SPICE project we aim to operationalize citizen curation more broadly, to encompass participatory museum activities in which citizens can productively contribute and share their personal perspectives, potentially on a larger scale and without prior training in curatorial methods. The following sections outline three challenges to be addressed in order that citizen curation can be used to create an active space for interweaving voices and perspectives.