Museum in an age of migrations : Oslo Kulturhistorisk Museum

The world we live in it’s becoming everyday more a world of ‘others’ rather than a world of ‘self’. Students, workers, professionals and tourists are the new nomads, protagonists of a dynamism now more intense than in the past and which interests all kind of spheres: from the economical to the demographical one, from the political to the cultural one. This phenomenon, increased by internet and globalization, is being responsible of a change in our way to perceive the history, art and the idea of nationality. In this climate of transculturalism and transnationalism, a multiplicity of voices is required for the narration of different stories, which is why the ethnographic museum as it was in the colonial era is not appropriate anymore. Ethnographic museums’ role today should be to express the contemporary age by representing all the different points of view through different ‘lens’. But, how to represent each identity without giving a wrong interpretation? How to neutralize the political influences? What to show and how to make it talk to the visitors? What to tell them and what not to tell? Those choices are turning the institution of the ethnographic museum from a temple of conservation of material colonial memory to a forum of debate and experimentation, a place of meeting and discussion among cultures. A new approach to the museum and exhibition design, possibly enriched by the use of new succesful tools, will be essential to acquire a new sensitivity with which to generate a new museum type. My design-based discourse will focus on a new Kulturhistorisk museum in Oslo and on how to rethink the way its ethnologic section works and exhibit in a post-colonial era.