Thousands of museum workers from all over the world are meeting in Prague, they also want to discuss the pandemic
Museum lovers from all over the world have been meeting in Prague since Saturday to debate the shape of the museum in the 21st century. They will deal with the issues brought about by the global pandemic of the covid-19 disease, i.e. primarily the transfer of activities to a virtual environment. The war in Ukraine then turns attention to the protection of cultural heritage in similar conflicts. Experts will also deal with the effects of climate change on their field and the topic of sustainability. At the end of the conference, they want to adopt a new definition of a museum.
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Prague Congress Center (pictured on August 19, 2020).
| Photo: CTK
Over three thousand museum workers will represent museums established by public organizations and private institutions. The General Conference of the International Council of Museums (ICOM) is held once every three years in major cities of the member states of the council. She was last in 2019 in the Japanese city of Kyoto. The next conference will be held in Dubai in 2025, during which the Prague organizers of representatives of the United Arab Emirates will hand over the organizing flag at the National Museum (NM).
“Representatives of museums from all over the world will come, there probably isn’t a bigger platform for meeting and sharing experiences and debates. The Prague conference has acquired a new dimension. It is supposed to address the new definition of a museum, as it was already established three years ago. this means that the functioning of the world has changed, the functioning of museums has changed, the way of communication with the public has changed. This has brought a lot of new question marks into the museum industry and a lot of demands for the future, which will no doubt be addressed at the conference,” National Museum Director General Michal Lukeš told ČTK.
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The war in Ukraine then introduced another aspect to the field, i.e. the question of the protection of objects of cultural heritage during wartime conflicts. “Of course, this is nothing new, the National Museum, for example, has been working in Syria for years, it has worked in Afghanistan and other countries where there is such a danger, but the war in Ukraine brought this issue much closer to us and became more relevant. This will also be one of the topics Originally, the conference was supposed to be very academic, but I hope it will also be very practical,” said Lukeš.
On the occasion of the conference, the National Museum also prepared an exhibition that maps his expeditions and foreign activities. “So that we can familiarize our foreign visitors from abroad with how wide the foreign interests of NM are, but of course we also want to show the Czech public,” he added.
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The organization of the conference was initiated by the Czech Committee of ICOM, one of the founding members of the International Council of Museums. ICOM is the most important museum professional organization in the world, which now brings together almost 45,000 museum professionals and over 20,000 museums from 138 countries. ICOM ranks among the largest professional organizations in the world and is the most important international think tank in the museum industry. The ICOM General Conference is the highest assembly of the Council.