Academic literature on the topic 'Conservation and Museography'

The aim of the Fondation Marta Pan — André Wogenscky is to promote the work of the architect and the work of the sculptor. Nowadays there are a lot of issues that arise regarding the accessibility and the museography of the house/workshop in Saint-Rémy-lès-Chevreuse. This house/workshop deserves a wider recognition and in that sense, before making any changes, the intervention has to be considered in the interest of the work's integrity. The house is a complex heritage object due to its conception made by an architect and an artist at the same time, evolving according to their needs and aspirations.

The Trinitat Fort, built in the mid-16th century, is an extraordinary example of European military architecture from the mid-16th century, conceived as an artillery machine, whose mission was to protect the natural port of Roses (Girona, Spain). The fortification had a long history of warfare that ended with the Peninsular War (1808–1814), which turned it into ruins. In 2002, the Roses city council planned an ambitious architectural intervention to recover the fortification. The works restored the overall exterior volumetry, with current construction materials. The large interior spaces resulting from the intervention had little in common with the original structures. Starting in 2016, the museum projected to open the fort to the public. The strategy focused on 3D works, which were used to plan museographic proposals and to make an interior space understandable, with an aspect very distant from that of the original construction. It entailed extensive fieldwork analyzing the sources and structural remains that were preserved and surmising the possible architectural solutions the fortress originally contained. Based on evidence and hypotheses, the group carried out a reconstruction from virtual archeology, and it developed a didactic iconography to explain the artifact to a broad spectrum of visitors and students. This iconography was applied on the panels, in the scenography and audiovisuals of the museum, and in the dissemination materials. The museography was implemented between 2019 and 2021. Considering the variables and comprehensive needs for a wide range of users and visitors, we completed the virtual archeology proposal based on realistic criteria, giving importance in 3D to textures and colors. It incorporated the anthropic and movable factors through matte painting techniques and images obtained with the support of re-enactment groups.Highlights: - The Fort of the Trinitat, built in the middle of the 16th century, is an extraordinary poliorcetic piece, conceived as an artillery machine, whose mission was to protect the natural port of Roses (Girona, Spain). - Between 2019 and 2021, an ambitious reconstruction of virtual archaeology has been carried out, developing a didactic iconography aimed at broad-spectrum visitors and formal education students. - The didactic iconography proposal developed in the Fort of the Trinitat does not try to compete with the large market productions, but it does try to explore sustainable intervention models to make the past and its heritage known.

The chemical characterization of silk textiles of historic value may be necessary to achieve a better understanding of the production processes applied, to evaluate their preservation, to detect manipulations or forgeries, and to value the combination of tradition and innovation in contemporary manufacturing techniques. The main objective of this work was to study four historical silks from the Garín collection, all of them from the 20th century, although with 19th century designs. To this end, non-invasive spectroscopic and microscopy techniques were applied in order to obtain information on the dyes used during their production and their link with those used in the silk industry in previous centuries, and to ascertain their state of conservation. Moreover, the images in LM, SEM and CM are contributing to the development of a 3D virtual loom that will favor more accessible and inclusive museography in museums specialized in the silk sector. Both the study of dyes and silk fibers and their virtual reproduction through artificial intelligence programs applied to the study of cultural heritage, by specialists from the Robotics Institute of the Universitat de València, has been developed in the framework of the SILKNOW project (https://silknow.eu/).

The Egyptian collection of the Emilio Bacardí Moreau Provincial Museum, in the city of Santiago de Cuba, comprises a variety of objects brought from Egypt in 1912 by its founder, Emilio Bacardí Moreau. The only Egyptian human mummy in Cuba is exhibited next to the lid of an anthropomorphic coffin and the wooden base of another coffin. Additionally, many small objects like shabti figures, scarabs, a stela, coffin fragments and amulets are present. As Bacardí was not an Egyptologist, he also acquired quite a lot of counterfeits; besides, many of the exhibited objects are not properly labelled regarding their dating, context and function. Furthermore, the display lacks an adequate conservation system and a correct museography based on current international standards, concerning the exhibition of human remains. As part of the Cuban Mummy Project—a collaboration between the National Council of Cultural Heritage of Cuba (CNPC) and the Institute of Scientific Studies on Mummies of Madrid (IECIM)—and in cooperation with the Heidelberg Centre for Cultural Heritage (HCCH) of the University of Heidelberg (Germany), the correct cataloguing of all Egyptian artefacts is being undertaken, together with their appropriate display in a new exhibition layout.

The authors present the less known activity held at the Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography from 1937 to 1957 towards: Research and Conservation of the Folk Cultural Heritage; Development of a network of ethnographic museums; Establishment of circles of ethnographic researches; Capitalisation through exhibitions and publications. For the research and preservation of the folk cultural heritage there were organised research and acquisition campaigns and there were made questionnaires for finding the buildings for the National park which unfortunately could not be completed because of the war, and after the war because of the political changes. The preservation and capitalisation of the folk heritage could be done successfully only by institutions and qualified individuals, so that the Museum intervened with the bodies of central and local authorities for the establishment of some museums or ethnographic sections in Iasi, Cernauti, Timisoara and Craiova and by ensuring qualified staff trained within the Department and Seminar of ethnography and folklore. An intense activity was made during 1939-1946 towards organizing Circles of ethnographic researches in the main cultural centres of the country, so that their union to re-establish the Romanian Ethnographic Society. The opening of the permanent exhibition in the building of Bărnuţiu Garden represented a very important moment for the Romanian museography by the implications it has had on the followings: the exhibition furniture, the theme and the exposure system, which represented a model for efforts of some institutions to present the collections of objects which they held between 1937-1940. The authors present then some aspects of Museum work during the refuge in Sibiu (1940-1945) and the difficulties for restoration of the building in the Park in order to organize the Exhibition following the model of the one in 1937. The change of political regime in 1947 coincided with the forced retirement of Professor R. Vuia. There are presented the attempts to continue in 1948-1950 the projects started after returning from refugee interrupted by the change of the director (May 1950) and of the staff (1951). In November 1951, by the Decision of the Committee for Higher Education, the Museum was passed to the Committee for Cultural Settlements, receiving the name "Historical-Ethnographic Museum of Cluj Region". In 1951, the Museum staff have drawn up a Directory for the organization of the new museum exhibition, which the authors, taking into account the fact that this is the only document on how a permanent exhibition theme is made, publishes in its entirety. The theme was sent to the Committee for Cultural Settlements that rejected and outlined the directions the exhibition named "The issue of living and evolution of the society beginning with human formation until nowadays " to be made. The intense discussions regarding the exhibition theme were held in 1953, after which it was established the thematic plan of the exhibition, which was opened on 24th of May 1955, for which it was made an illustrated guide that was to be printed in 1957.

The author presents several archive documents regarding the relations between the Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography and the Kings of Romania, providing useful information for knowing the Museum’s history. The first document presented is Decision 7487 of December 21, 1922, signed by Prince Carol; this Decision, by appointing Professor Romulus Vuia as the institution’s director, recognizes all the achievements of the Commission that Professor Vuia had established in the spring of 1922 for the purchase of A. Orosz Collection, in order to set up an ethnographic museum in Cluj. The article presents the List of objects to be collected for the Ethnographic Museum; in this list the first attempt was made to specify the notion of ethnographic object and to establish the field of ethnography as an independent science. In the next part of the paper, there are some documents showing the contribution of the Royal Foundation and of the Ministry of Arts and Religious Affairs to supporting Professor Vuia in the creation and development of ethnographic museography by establishing modern systems of evidence, conservation and valorization of the museum heritage. At the end of the article, the author presents several documents regarding the two visits of King Carol II to the Museum, the first visit in 1930, with the Queen Mother, and the second in 1937, when the Museum was inaugurated in the City Park building; the author also presents two photos taken during the visit of King Michael and Queen Anne at the Museum in 2008.

This article presents a history of the European bison specimens preserved at the National Museum of NaturalHistory (MNHN) in Paris. The inventory made in 1945 by Jacques Millot, who first noticed the importance of these collections for the conservation of the species, constitutes a starting point of the present analysis. The oldest European bison of the MNHN collection came from the royal menagerie of Versailles. Louis Jean-Marie Daubenton was the first who has published a description of the species, four years before publication of Systema Naturae by Carl Linnaeus. Then Georges Cuvier, when working on the MNHN collections, distinguished the European bison from aurochs and compared it to the American bison. His research has contributed to the development of the notion of “extinct species”. This article presents also the history of the European bison from the Zoo of Cologne and the specimens from Petersburg, by Friedrich von Brandt, with a focus on the difficulties of obtaining specimens of the European bison in XIX century. European bison specimens from the National Museum of Natural History in Paris have played a particularly important role in the history of the species biology. They also offer an interesting perspective for genetic studies on the species.

La ricerca si occupa delle trasformazioni degli edifici storici in spazi espositivi permanenti, quindi del dialogo che intercorre in queste operazioni tra restauro, riuso e museografia. L'importanza di attribuire una funzione al costruito storico ne assicura una conservazione e una re-immissione nella realtà contemporanea; una valorizzazione che deve essere compatibile, ovvero che metta al primo posto la qualità materiale del bene, le sue caratteristiche fisiche, tipologiche e formali. E' in questo scenario che si colloca il riuso culturale attuale, che assegna al museo un ruolo fondamentale nella promozione dello sviluppo sostenibile, in quanto strumento di salvaguardia del patrimonio culturale materiale e immateriale, mobile e immobile. E allora questa ricerca parte da alcune necessarie premesse: analizzare come il tema del riuso museale si sia nutrito nel tempo delle elaborazioni teoriche dei tre termini, con la volontà di tratteggiare gli scenari attuali della tematica. Nella prima parte vedremo quindi, in parallelo, come cresce la consapevolezza dell'importanza che un edificio ospiti una determinata funzione e della compatibilità degli interventi realizzati a questo proposito con la fabbrica storica. Nella seconda parte si entra nella contemporaneità. La convergenza delle operazioni di conservazione e progetto del nuovo all'interno dello sviluppo teorico del restauro, nonché la necessità di una tutela attiva del patrimonio culturale che vede nell'istituzione museale un presidio territoriale, si raffronta con i profondi mutamenti che hanno investito l'istituzione museale negli ultimi anni. E quindi si sceglie di partire proprio da questi mutamenti per individuare tre aree tematiche - relative alla spazialità del museo, alle nuove funzioni e identità urbana e ai modi di costruire una narrazione interna - da riportare nello studio delle esperienze di riuso museale attuale, alcune delle più importanti realizzazioni europee dell'ultimo ventennio. Le argomentazioni saranno sostenute, poi, dallo studio di due casi studio significativi, il Neues Museum di Berlino e il Museo della Montagna nel Forte di Bard, scelti per la componente critica, conservativa e creativa dei loro restauri e per la riconosciuta efficacia del loro programma museale. Il quadro d'insieme che si tratteggia, a partire proprio dai cambiamenti delle tematiche individuate, permetterà alla fine di definire le tendenze progettuali in atto in questo fenomeno sempre più in ascesa e di tratteggiarne le linee di sviluppo. -------- (english text) The research deals with the transformation of historical buildings into permanent exhibition spaces, and therefore deals with the dialogue that takes place in these operations between restoration, reuse and museography. The importance of assigning a function to historical buildings ensures their conservation and re-entry into contemporary reality; an enhancement that must be compatible, that is giving priority to the material quality of the asset, its physical, typological and formal characteristics. The current cultural reuse is therefore placed in this scenario, which assigns the museum a fundamental role in the promotion of sustainable development, as a means of safeguarding the tangible and intangible cultural heritage. And so this research starts from some necessary premises: analyze how the theme of museum reuse has nourished over time the theoretical elaborations of the three terms, with the will to outline the current scenarios of the theme. In the first part we will see therefore, in parallel, how the awareness of the importance that a building hosts a specific function grows and of the compatibility of the actions realized in this regard with the historical factory. In the second part we enter the contemporaneity. The convergence of the conservation project and the design of new architecture within the theoretical development of the restoration, as well as the necessity of an active protection of the cultural heritage that sees in the museum institution a territorial garrison, is compared with the deep changes that have invested the museum institution in recent years. And so we choose to start from these changes to identify three thematic areas - related to the museum's spatiality, to new urban functions and identity and to ways of creating an internal narration - to be reported in the study of the experiences of current museum reuse, some of the most important European achievements of the last twenty years. The arguments will be supported, then, by the study of two significant case studies, the Neues Museum in Berlin and the Mountain Museum in the Fort of Bard, chosen for the critical, conservative and creative component of their restoration project and for the recognized effectiveness of their museum programme. The overall picture that is drawn, starting from the changes in the issues identified, will ultimately define the design trends in progress in this increasingly rising phenomenon and outline the lines of development.

Abstract Yaku Viajero is a travelling exhibition created by the Yaku Water Museum in Quito, Ecuador that aims to raise awareness among citizens about the importance of water conservation for the city and the world. It deals with five topics: water history in Quito, water quality, the right to water according to the constitution of Ecuador, Water Footprint and the social and hydrographic basin of the Guayllabamba, which provides water to the city of Quito, capital of Ecuador. This chapter describes in depth how the concept of the social basin is applied through educational and museographic resources and how it aims to promote the development of empathy as a fundamental basis of citizenship education.