Multaka

Last updated

Multaka: Museum as Meeting Point is an intercultural project initiated in 2015 by four history museums in Berlin with and for Arabic- and Persian-speaking migrants and refugees. Multaka (Arabic: meeting point) was designed as an innovative project for educational exchange between refugees and other visitors from the Middle East and North Africa. Visitor-centered discussions with migrants in their languages are focused on the historical origin and history of acquisition of cultural objects, including the visitors' own understanding of their country's cultural heritage. As a response to increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, a central aim of the project has been the inclusion of Muslim visitors into museums.

Contents

From 2019 onwards, the initial Multaka project has been joined in an international network of similar initiatives at 29 museums in the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece and Switzerland.

History

Statue of the weather god Hadad, Museum of the Ancient Near East Berlin Statue of Weather God Haddad.jpg
Statue of the weather god Hadad, Museum of the Ancient Near East Berlin

"Multaka: Museum as Meeting Point" is an educational programme for intercultural exchange between museum visitors with a personal history of migration from the Near East and North Africa on the one hand, and the museum staff and tour guides on the other. During discussions in the visitors' language, specially trained Multaka Guides provide information and new insights about museum items typically originating from Arab and other Middle Eastern cultures. [1]

The project was initiated in 2015 by the Museum of Islamic Art Berlin in Germany and has since been offered free of charge in cooperation with the Museum of the Ancient Near East, the Bode Museum and the German Historical Museum. Due to the temporary closure of the first two museums located in the Pergamon Museum in October 2023, Multaka tours have also started in the Collection of Antiquities of the Altes Museum, the Egyptian Museum, the Museum for Pre- and Early History and the Alte Nationalgalerie. German history during and following World War II, dealing with war, displacement, exile and reconstruction, has been a particular focus of the guided tours in the German Historical Museum. [2] [3]

Designed to involve visitors into discussions about their own understanding of their country's cultural heritage, the guided tours are intended to help visitors understand the connections between the origin and history of exhibits and the presentation in the collections. The Arabic or Persian-speaking Multaka Guides thus supplement the visitors' previous knowledge in their native language and in dialogues based on mutual appreciation. [4] For Syrian Multaka guide Kefah Ali Deeb, a statue of the Syro-Phoenician deity Hadad is an example of the origins of her homeland's religions in ancient myths. [5]

Further activities

The project's intention to present museum objects as an expression of appreciation for Islamic cultures in an educational way for migrants has been followed by similar activities. Thus, Multaka guides have been conducting interactive games and exercises in Berlin schools and cultural centres. Central to this is how historical exchange between Europe and the Middle East has influenced Western music, clothing and science and, on the other hand, how cultural change in Muslim countries has been shaped by Western modernity. [6]

International network

In June 2019, the founding members of Multaka in Berlin and six similar museums in the United Kingdom, Italy, Greece and Switzerland started the international Multaka network. As a result, 29 museums in these countries developed similar ways of intercultural communication for visitors with a background in migration and have trained more than 100 volunteer museum guides. [7]

MultakaOxford

In 2017, the Pitt Rivers Museum and the Museum of the History of Science in Oxford, United Kingdom, started a similar collaborative and socially engaged project called MultakaOxford. Partners included local grassroots groups and organisations for refugees and asylum seekers. MultakaOxford is focused on the two museums' collections of textiles from the Arab world and on Islamic scientific instruments. Forty tour guides were selected from local communities, resulting in trained guides with different languages from Syria, Egypt, Iraq and Sudan. They have also been involved in writing new descriptions for cultural objects, in public events, and have been running social media channels. [8] [9] - After initial funding for the first two years had run out, MultakaOxford obtained a ₤ 1 million grant for the next five years by charitable organization Alwaleed Philanthropies from Saudi Arabia. [10] [11]

Multaka in Italy, Greece and Switzerland

In Italy, the Egyptian Museum in Turin started a project in 2016 by training women from Egypt as intercultural guides. Since 2018, botanical gardens, archeological and art collections in Fiesole and Florence, including the Palazzo Vecchio have been operating similar tours, focusing on the botanical and cultural diversity resulting from East-Western exchange and their impact on the arts and cuisines in Italy. [7]

In 2022, museums and archaeological sites in Athens, Greece, launched tours with intercultural guides for Greek, English, French, Arabic and Persian. [12] The same year, the Historical Museum in the Swiss capital Bern started a new Multaka project, after having organized and trained local guides from Afghanistan, Iran, Kurdistan, Palestine and Eritrea since 2015. [13]

Multaka Kids in Baghdad

In Baghdad, museum educational workshops and guided tours for children and young people have been organized as Multaka Kids in a joint project of the Goethe-Institut and the Iraq National Museum. [14]

Awards and recognitions

For Multaka Berlin:

For MultakaOxford:

Literature

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museo Egizio</span> Archaeological museum in Turin, Italy

The Museo Egizio or Egyptian Museum is an archaeological museum in Turin, Italy, specializing in Egyptian archaeology and anthropology. It houses one of the largest collections of Egyptian antiquities, with more than 30,000 artifacts, and is considered the second most important Egyptological collection in the world, after the Egyptian Museum of Cairo. In 2019, it received 853,320 visitors, making it one of the most visited museums in Italy.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Pitt Rivers Museum</span> University museum of archaeology and anthropology in Oxford, England

Pitt Rivers Museum is a museum displaying the archaeological and anthropological collections of the University of Oxford in England. The museum is located to the east of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History, and can only be accessed through that building.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">History of Science Museum, Oxford</span> University museum of the history of science in Oxford, England

The History of Science Museum in Broad Street, Oxford, England, holds a leading collection of scientific instruments from Middle Ages to the 19th century. The museum building is also known as the Old Ashmolean Building to distinguish it from the newer Ashmolean Museum building completed in 1894. The museum was built in 1683, and it is the world's oldest surviving purpose-built museum.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">German Historical Museum</span> German history museum in Berlin

The German Historical Museum, known by the acronym DHM, is a museum in Berlin, Germany devoted to German history. It describes itself as a place of "enlightenment and understanding of the shared history of Germans and Europeans". It is often viewed as one of the most important museums in Berlin and is one of the most frequented. The museum is located in the 17th century Zeughaus (armory) on the Unter den Linden, just across the Spree from Museum Island. The museum's attached Exhibition Hall was designed by I. M. Pei in the late 20th century. The Zeughaus is closed for renovation, while the Exhibition Hall remains open.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bode Museum</span> Art museum in Berlin

The Bode Museum, formerly called the Kaiser-Friedrich-Museum, is a listed building on the Museum Island in the historic centre of Berlin. It was built from 1898 to 1904 by order of German Emperor William II according to plans by Ernst von Ihne in Baroque Revival style. The building's front square featured a memorial to German Emperor Frederick III, which was destroyed by the East German authorities. Currently, the Bode-Museum is home to the Skulpturensammlung, the Museum für Byzantinische Kunst and the Münzkabinett. As part of the Museum Island complex, the Bode-Museum was inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1999 because of its outstanding architecture and testimony to the development of museums as a cultural phenomenon in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is a German federal government body that oversees 27 museums and cultural organizations in and around Berlin, Germany. Its purview includes all of Berlin's State Museums, the Berlin State Library, the Prussian Privy State Archives and a variety of institutes and research centers. As such, it is one of the largest cultural organizations in the world, and also the largest cultural employer in Germany with around 2,000 staff as of 2020. More than four million people visited its museums in 2019.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Friedrichswerder Church</span> Neo-Gothic church in Berlin

Friedrichswerder Church was the first Neo-Gothic church built in Berlin, Germany. It was designed by an architect better known for his Neoclassical architecture, Karl Friedrich Schinkel, and was built under his direction from 1824 to 1831.

The Antikensammlung Berlin is one of the most important collections of classical art in the world, now held in the Altes Museum and Pergamon Museum in Berlin, Germany. It contains thousands of ancient archaeological artefacts from the ancient Greek, Roman, Etruscan and Cypriot civilizations. Its main attraction is the Pergamon Altar and Greek and Roman architectural elements from Priene, Magnesia, Baalbek and Falerii. In addition, the collection includes a large number of ancient sculptures, vases, terracottas, bronzes, sarcophagi, engraved gems and metalwork.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alexander Baerwald</span> German architect (1877–1930)

Alexander Baerwald was a German Jewish architect best known for his work in Haifa, today in Israel, during Late Ottoman and British rule.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Vorderasiatisches Museum Berlin</span> Archaeological museum in Berlin

The Vorderasiatisches Museum is an archaeological museum in Berlin. It is in the basement of the south wing of the Pergamon Museum and has one of the world's largest collections of Southwest Asian art. 14 halls distributed across 2,000 square meters of exhibition surface display southwest Asian culture spanning six millennia. The exhibits cover a period from the 6th millennium BCE into the time of the Muslim conquests. They originate particularly from today's states of Iraq, Syria and Turkey, with singular finds also from other areas. Starting with the Neolithic finds, the emphasis of the collection is of finds from Sumer, Babylonia and Assyria, as well as northern Syria and eastern Anatolia.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Bern Historical Museum</span> Second largest historical museum in Switzerland

The Bern Historical Museum is the second largest historical museum in Switzerland. It was designed by the Neuchâtel architect André Lambert and built in 1894. Since it was initially conceived as the Swiss National Museum, the architect took as his model various historic castles from the 15th and 16th centuries. An extension to the original museum building was completed in 2009.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prussian Heritage Image Archive</span>

The Prussian Heritage Image Archive is an agency of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. The archive is housed at the Otto Nagel-Haus in Berlin and offers photographs, cartoons and drawings in the fields of history, culture and fine arts. The collection also contains the personal estates, archives and portfolios of many famous photographers who documented life in Germany. Organizationally, the archive is a division of the Berlin State Library.

The Ibero-American Institute or IAI is an interdisciplinary institution located in Berlin, Germany, for academic and cultural exchange between Germany and Latin America, Spain, Portugal and the Caribbean. It is the largest non-university research center for Latin American Studies outside of Latin America. It also features the largest specialized library in Europe on Latin America, Spain, Portugal and the Caribbean. In addition to a large rare book collection, the IAI collects and preserves magazines, electronic documents, maps, audio media, photographs, videos, DVDs, papers and diverse additional materials. The IAI is a member of the research association CEISAL and the documentation network association REDIAL. Founded in 1930, since 1962 the IAI has been an agency of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation. It is located at the Kulturforum near Potsdamer Platz in Berlin-Mitte.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Prussian Privy State Archives</span>

The Secret State Archives Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation is an agency of the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation headquartered in Berlin, Germany. A Federal statutory body, it is one of the largest repositories of primary source documents in Germany and spans the history of Prussia, Brandenburg, the House of Hohenzollern and the Prussian Army. Insofar as the agency represents over 400 years of archival work of the former states of Brandenburg-Prussia, including their main roots in the Teutonic Knights, the Archives can be said to cover "nine centuries of European history between Königsberg and Cleves."

<span class="mw-page-title-main">National Gallery (Berlin)</span> Art museum in Berlin, Germany

The National Gallery in Berlin, Germany, is a museum for art of the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries. It is part of the Berlin State Museums. From the Alte Nationalgalerie, which was built for it and opened in 1876, its exhibition space has expanded to include five other locations. The museums are part of the Berlin State Museums, owned by the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation.

AthenaPlus is a CIP best practice network started in March 2013 which aims to facilitate access to networks of cultural heritage, enrich metadata, as well as improve search, retrieval and re-use of Europeana's content by enhancing multilingual terminology management and the export/publication tool. By the end of the project, AthenaPlus will contribute more than 3.6 millions of metadata records to Europeana, from both public and private sectors, focusing mainly on museums content. In addition to enabling access to cultural heritage, AthenaPlus is also focused on creative use of content, and adapting data to users with different needs by means of tools that support the development of virtual exhibitions, tourist and didactic applications.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museum of Islamic Art, Berlin</span> Museum in Berlin, Germany

The Museum of Islamic Art is located in the Pergamon Museum and is part of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Museu Nacional de Antropologia (Angola)</span> National Museum of Anthropology (Angola)

The Museu Nacional de Antropologia is an anthropological museum in the Ingombota District of the city of Luanda, Angola. Founded on 13 November 1976, it is a cultural and scientific institution, dedicated to the collection, research, conservation, presentation and dissemination of the Angolan cultural heritage.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Michael Eissenhauer</span> German art historian

Michael Eissenhauer is a German art historian and was director-general of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kefah Ali Deeb</span> Syrian writer, artist and human rights activist (born 1982)

Kefah Ali Deeb is a Syrian human rights activist, artist and writer. She left Syria after persecution during the Syrian war and has been living in exile in Berlin, Germany, since 2014. In Germany, she has been interviewed and published her own opinion columns about the life of migrants in German newsmedia and online projects. Since 2015, she has also been active as a museum guide for the Multaka project, an initiative of Berlin museums to convey art historical contexts to Arabic-speaking visitors. As writer and translator she also has published several books for children in Arabic.

References

  1. ↑ "Multaka: The Museum as Meeting-Point – Refugees as Guides in Berlin Museums". www.smb.museum/en. Retrieved 2024-05-14.
  2. ↑ "Multaka: Treffpunkt Museum. Eine Führung über Kunst, Politik und Widerstand - Deutsches Historisches Museum" (in German). 2024-05-12. Retrieved 2024-05-12.
  3. ↑ "Syria's cultural heritage recreated in Berlin's Pergamon Museum". euronews. 2016-07-04. Retrieved 2024-05-20.
  4. ↑ Gram, Rikke (2023). "Willkommen im Museum. Making and Unmaking Refugees in the Multaka Project". In Macdonald, Sharon (ed.). Doing Diversity in Museums and Heritage. A Berlin Ethnography. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag. pp. 247–260. ISBN   9783839464090.
  5. ↑ "Kefah Ali Deeb: Weather God Hadad. Multaka in 4 Berlin museums". universes.art. Retrieved 2024-05-19.
  6. ↑ Ingolf Kern, Stefan Weber (2016-04-11). "Es geht nicht um Religion, sondern um kulturelle Identität" [The point is not religion, but cultural identity] (in German). Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. Retrieved 2024-05-09.
  7. 1 2 "Multaka". amir project. Archived from the original on 2024-05-15. Retrieved 2024-05-14.
  8. ↑ "Q&A with Nicola Bird". Museums Association. 2019-01-24. Retrieved 2024-05-14.
  9. ↑ "Multaka-Oxford: a 'meeting point' for people and cultures". museum-id.com. 2019-03-23. Retrieved 2024-05-14.
  10. ↑ "Alwaleed Philanthropies supports the Multaka-Oxford initiative to promote tolerance and demonstrate the values of Islamic art and culture". Alwaleed Philanthropies. Retrieved 2024-05-14.
  11. ↑ "Spotlight on Multaka". www.prm.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2024-05-14.
  12. ↑ "The "Multaka Athens" project for the promotion of intercultural dialogue has been launched". ACCMR. Retrieved 2024-05-19.
  13. ↑ Aline Minder (2019-05-08). "«Multaka»: Menschen mit Fluchterfahrung führen durch das Bernische Historische Museum" (in German). Burgergemeinde Bern. Retrieved 2024-05-10.
  14. ↑ "Multaka Kids". www.goethe.de. Retrieved 2024-06-05.
  15. ↑ "Vermittlungsprojekt "Multaka" für neuen Sonderpreis der Regierung nominiert". www.preussischer-kulturbesitz.de (in German). Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz. 2016-04-11. Retrieved 2024-05-12.
  16. ↑ "Begegnungen im Museum | zenith Photo Award 2017 | Islam in Europa" (in German). 2017-11-14. Retrieved 2024-05-12.
  17. ↑ Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. "Staatliche Museen zu Berlin: Syrian Heritage Initiative" (in German). Retrieved 2024-05-11.
  18. ↑ Bird, Nicola (2024). "MultakaOxford - Cultural meeting points for curious minds". hsm.ox.ac.uk. Retrieved 2024-06-18.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.