MeLa - European Museums and Libraries in/of the Age of Migrations

MeLa is an interdisciplinary four-year programme which will reflect on the role of museums and libraries, dealing with several complex and crucial issues such as history, socio-cultural and national identity, the use of new technologies and, last but not least, exhibition design and museography.

Adapting some well known concepts like the contact zone concept, museums and libraries are being reconsidered as a historical theme, addressed on the basis of new cultural productions and new connections. Consequently their organizational structure becomes an issue of topical, historical, political and moral relations. In a manner which could be somehow utopian, museums and libraries could therefore be re-evaluated at the same time as public venues for collaboration shared control and complex translation, places of power turned into places of cultural integration, places of complex hybrid multi-cultural representation of identity (different layers of identity), places of knowledge, places of conservation and places of meeting and mutual understanding on the free ground of cultural research in every field of human knowledge.

The MeLa Project objectives therefore on the one hand aim to study and deepen the above mentioned theoretical reflections and on the other hand, to evaluate their operational effectiveness and applications on museum and library architecture, investigating how all these remarks, these changes and these new theories have influenced the practice of curatorship, the design of exhibitions and the typology of museums.
To fulfil its objectives the Project consists of nine European partners, including different universities, two museums, a research institute and a small enterprise, which have all been chosen for their specific expertise and skills in the fields of the project. They will develop different kinds of  research tools and methods, some of which are more innovative, such as ‘Think Tank’ modules and ‘Research by Art’, while some others are more traditional, such as desk research and conferences.

At the end of the research project some Guidelines tested by a design application will be developed and collected in a Handbook to support museum and library communities, practitioners, experts and policymakers in developing the mission and forms of museums and libraries in the “age of migrations”.

The project website: http://www.mela-project.eu/