2023-04-30 10:00:20
The international forum of museums organized in Dakar is a “first step” towards the promotion of mutual understanding between Africa and Europe.
The Senegalese capital hosted, from April 25 to 27, an international forum bringing together 60 directors of African and European museums from 38 countries. At the end of the meeting, they affirmed, in the Dakar Declaration, their ambition to “build together a common future” with a view to dialogue between cultures, including Léopold Sédar Senghor, the first Senegalese president (1960-1980), was one of the greatest singers.
« The primary function of museums is to link yesterday, today and tomorrow, here and elsewhere, and to promote mutual understanding. Our museums should therefore not be spaces of nostalgia but places of dynamic inspiration where the heritage of tomorrow is also built. “, indicated the directors of the museums including the Senegalese Hamady Bocoum and the Belgian Guido Gryseels who note that this forum is “a first step on a long and exciting path to promote mutual understanding”.
They believe that Africa’s heritage, “a living wealth, with a potential due to the power of images whose interpretation creates the contemporary and the future of society”, has been “long locked” in an “ethnographic vision “. To deconstruct this image, “we undertake to pool our efforts to document, preserve and reinterpret with communities, collections in Africa and Europe and to make them available to the public through digitization, research, education and exhibitions”.
In the same logic, the directors of museums from the black and old continents recall that “we must rethink our practices by relying on endogenous knowledge and expertise to better adapt to climate issues and work on spaces that respect the environment. “.
They therefore undertake to carry the “torch”, in accordance with global cultural governance in the field of museums, because they consider “that the development of joint traveling exhibitions, with multiple partners, circulating in Africa and in Europe is an instrument for transforming the narratives that build our vision of the world and for promoting the new partnership in which we are committed”.
ODL/ac/APA
1682851658
#African #European #museums #strengthen #partnerships #APAnews
