I can confirm that the Missing Museum is still missing. No, not our very own Falconer Museum, whose re-opening is still under discussion, but the forthcoming Missing Museum Immersive Extravaganza at the Tolbooth in March. I can happily report that it is still missing but very much under construction.
In the lead up to the event I have found myself musing on Museums.
What are they for? Why do we have them? How did they come about?
The word itself comes from the Greek, mouseion
- a seat of the Muses. a philosophical institution, a place of contemplation
- a building set apart and dedicated to the Mousa the Muses, the patron divinities of Science and Arts in Greek Mythology
Interestingly, in English, the definition of Museum is a place where objects of historical, scientific or artistic interest are kept’.
Notice the slight shift of emphasis onto ‘keeping things’.
The earliest known public museum is Ennigaldi-Nanna’s Museum. It dates to circa 530 BCE. The curator was Ennigaldi, the daughter of Nabonidus, the last king of the Neo-Babylonian Empire. It was in the state of Ur, in the modern-day Dhi Qar Governorate of Iraq, roughly 150 metres (490 ft) southeast of the famous Ziggurat of Ur.
The museum was discovered in 1925, when archaeologist Leonard Woolley excavated portions of the palace and temple complex at Ur. He found dozens of artifacts, neatly arranged side by side, whose ages varied by centuries. He determined that they were museum pieces, because they were accompanied by ‘museum labels’,clay drums written in three different languages, including Sumerian.
Ennigaldi’s father Nabonidus, an antiquarian and antique restorer, is known as the first serious archeologist. He taught her to appreciate ancient artifacts and influenced her to create her educational antiquity museum. The artifacts came from the southern regions of Mesopotamia. Many had originally been excavated by Nabonidus and were from as early as the 20th century BCE. Some artifacts had been collected previously by Nebuchadnezzar. Some are thought to have been excavated by Ennigaldi herself.
Reading this I couldn’t help seeing the parallels with Hugh Falconer and his niece Grace Milne. He was the one who encouraged her to accompany him on his travels and to pursue her own interest in excavation and recording her discoveries. Who knew that the first museum ever was created by a woman! Another hidden history.
Years later, while studying Philosophy in London, I discovered the British Museum and was utterly transported. I would spend hours there each week in between lectures wandering from room to room marvelling at the incredible diversity of the collection.
Standing in awe looking up at The Haida Raven totem pole in the stairwell that rose majestically through the floors, the massive Assyrian Lamassu, stone lion protectors, Egyptian sarcophagi accompanied by their canopic jars to house the organs. Then there were the tiniest treasures like the Japanese netsuke carvings so perfectly detailed in miniature. In between lectures on Metaphysics, Ethics, Ontology, Aesthetics and other abstract notions, I would wander through the museum feeling reassured by actual, beautiful things.
Over time, the spell that museums cast began to wear off. I went to an exhibition on Ceremonial Objects. One ‘exhibit’ was an exquisitely beaded shirt belonging to a First Nations Medicine Man. It was hanging suspended in a glass case. It seemed like ‘a ghost shirt’ eerily empty, somehow sacrilegious. Seeing these precious, sacred artefacts being stripped of their true purpose, meaning and context, I began to feel a growing discomfort at the inappropriateness of our having cultural ceremonial objects on display which gad been taken from the people who made them, used them and for whom they were imbued with such meaning and significance.
These musings raised so many questions about rights and rites.
What is appropriate and what is appropriation?
How exactly did we come by these objects in the first place.
What right did we have to them.? Did we have the right to keep them?
Whose culture is represented here? How is it being represented?
Whose stories are being told and by whom? How might they be being distorted?
Whose stories are being silenced or erased?
Since then, I have worked in many museums and galleries as an artist educator, devising interpretative performances and workshops around collections. I still love museums, and I still have some ambivalence about them. They allow us to be informed, moved and touched, glimpse other worlds and ways of seeing.
They allow us to step through layers of time and across continents.
This ambivalence is instructive. It requires us to ask questions, to make changes, to see how history lives on in and through us. It is still a dynamic process as we have seen in the revisioning of the history of slavery, whether to remove statues or engage with them as teaching tools.
These questions and others are at the heart of the Missing Museum. Come and join in the exploration on Friday 28 and Saturday 29 March. Book your FREE place here.
What are your memories of museums? How do you feel about them?
Who or what do you think is missing from the local museum archive?
Who or what would you want to include?
Who or what would you like to see removed?
Margot Henderson, Storyteller and Artist
