“We were honored to host the ICOM Memorial Lectures 2016 dedicated to our Syrian museum colleagues who were killed defending cultural heritage which they loved and tried to protect. Museums, cultural heritage and professionals have become deliberate targets in armed conflicts. What can we do to confront nationalism, xenophobia, extremism and to promote diversity?”
ICOM Milano 2016 and ICOM Italy – Dr. Alberto Garlandini (Vice President of ICOM and President of the Organizing Committee of ICOM Milano 2016) and Prof. Daniele Jalla (ICOM Italy President 2014-2016)
ICOM Milano 2016 gathered 3500 museum peers and experts from all over the world. It offered unique occasions to build up new professional and personal relations, explore innovative intercultural projects, and develop sound approaches to global changes, and with this, to further the development of peaceful and inclusive museum landscapes.
The ICOM Memorial Lectures 2016 Reader witnesses erudite and reflected, practical museum thinking, as well as international and interdisciplinary co-operation, and merits to be spread widely amongst interested communities, individuals, and groups.
In a cooperation of ICOM International, ICOM 2016 Milan, and the ICOM Committees for Education and Cultural Action, for Exhibitions and Exchange, for Training of Personnel, and for Management and under the auspices of ICOM Austria, an ICOM 70 Years’ Jubilee lecture and the fourth joint Alma S. Wittlin and Stephen E. Weil ICOM Memorial Lectures were held on Tuesday, July 5, 2016. A sad duty within this event was the commemoration of our Syrian museum colleagues, Qassem Abdallh Yehya (1978–2015) and Khaled al Asaad (1934–2015), who had suffered violent deaths at the hands of the IS.
The ICOM-Jubilee lecture by Bernice L. Murphy (former chair of the ICOM Committee for Ethics, director of Museums Australia) was dedicated to and focussed on ICOM’s ongoing humanitarian mission of promoting and safeguarding cultural heritage, offering a historical developmental overview and galvanising outlook. Following this, the two Memorial Lectures explored changing museums’ tasks that arise from various and variable social contexts, and took up the 2016 ICOM theme, Museums and cultural landscapes.”
The ICOM Memorial Lectures 2016 Reader documents the arrangement and the following contributions:
- Bernice L. Murphy: ICOM 70 years on: An ethical vision of nature, culture, heritage, and museums’ continuing social mission
- René Rivard: Museums and changing cultural landscapes
- M. Cristina Vannini: Looking inside the “Cabinet” twenty-one years after
The online publication of the Reader for the ICOM Memorial Lectures 2016, on the occasion of the 24th ICOM General Conference in Milan, Italy, is launched.