On 10 March, the French branch, supported by Icom Europe and Germany, invited all Icom representatives to a forum in Paris. Some expressed alarm at the omission of words such as “education” or even “collection”, which they consider essential to a museum’s mission.įollowing the conference, Aksoy entrusted a revision of the text to the same commission, with the addition of a few members including Juliette Raoul-Duval, the chair of Icom France, who was among the first to denounce an “ideological manifesto”. Multiple national Icom branches opposed the September vote, seeing the new definition as a fuzzy collection of political correctness and trendy posturing that would have little legal value. The text defined museums as “participatory and transparent”, working “in active partnership with and for diverse communities” and “aiming to contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing”.
The new definition proposed in Kyoto was a 99-word statement presenting museums as “democratising, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures”.
Two days later, the board elected an Italian successor, Alberto Garlandini, to chair the membership association of almost 45,000 museum professionals and institutions worldwide. In a letter sent to Icom’s executive board on 19 June, Aksoy resigned with immediate effect, citing a lack of support from the Paris-based secretariat. Now, both Aksoy and Sandahl have resigned from their posts. The delay came as a blow to Icom’s Turkish president, Suay Aksoy, a driving force behind the project to draw up a new definition, and to the head of the committee that developed the text, the Danish curator Jette Sandahl. In September 2019, a bitter debate divided the organisation over a question that goes to the core of its existence: what is a museum? After four hours of heated arguments at Icom’s 25th triennial general conference in Kyoto, 70% of the delegates refused to vote on a new definition of the museum, choosing instead to postpone the debate indefinitely.
#DEFINITION OF TURMOIL SERIES#
The International Council of Museums (Icom) has been shaken by a series of resignations in the wake of the identity crisis that erupted last year at its conference in Kyoto.