Pratiquer la présence : la fabuleuse vocation du musée-du-monde

Abstract

For the past three years, museums, like us, have existed in a completely unpredictable and changing world, face with new expectations and complex tasks to perform. The half-asleep world of museums has been confronted with a relatively lively debate on its reason for being and has been forced to face both moral dilemmas and economic difficulties. Despite this adversity, it seems promising that museums may become more ambitious, providing meaning both for themselves and the world. These aspirations seem to be a response to a growing feeling of ontological insecurity, often shown by a loss of meaning in actions, which is expressed in essential epistemological questionings. By dealing with these issues, I maintain that, if we believe that museums are open to the world, both affecting it and opening itself up to vulnerability, their capacity for action is linked to politics and ethical practices. This means that we must recognize that simultaneous action of two effects, which we will call presence and meaning, in order to incarnate an ethical and political project for museums which, by definition, is never completed.