In 2019 we published the first volume of The Museum Is Not Enough, which we conceived as a platform to reflect on and discuss some of the beliefs and concerns that define the CCA’s curatorial activity—why and how it works—and, by extension, the role of cultural institutions in society. Claiming that the museum is not enough meant asking what a museum should be and do, and suggests that its entitlement to concentrate knowledge and meaning has dissolved.
In this second volume, the discussion focuses on how the institution works out and on these questions by rethinking its tools and how it relates to others. The Museum Is Not Enough, no. 10–14 gathers conversations among curators, artists, academics, and architects on how institutions engage multiple contexts, objects, and perspectives: reflecting on strategies to unlearn and decentre established ways of seeing and doing; looking closely at how to describe and document archival sources while interrogating the stakes, and often the harm, in separating cultural objects from their context; questioning the relationship between institutions and “the public”; and discussing curatorial tools—and particularly film—that collapse research and display, observation and action, here and there.
Underlying these reflections is the realization that the museum’s activity can’t be constructed from a fixed position. Unless the questions it deals with are observed from another angle, it is hard not to perpetuate the thinking that created them. The book responds to an urgent need to equip the institution to understand how things around it are rapidly changing, and the importance of conveying and discussing this instability. Here, the museum gets outside its physical walls to explore on-site, to talk with people, to connect and activate collaborators, to design conditions for different forms of dialogue to happen on the ground.
Edited by Giovanna Borasi, Albert Ferré, Francesco Garutti, and Jayne Kelley
With contributions from Lev Bratishenko, Sandrine Colard, Claudio Gulli, Corinna Gardner, Oulimata Gueye, Silvia Gutiérrez De la Torre, Jarrod Ray Hore, Hester Keijser, Renato Leotta, Andrea Lissoni, Ari Marcopoulos, Valeria Meiller, Gili Merin, Marina Oba, Mariana Pestana, Paul R. Spitzzeri, David Stevenson, Ivy Thompson, Jennifer B. Thompson, Philip Tidwell, Hannah Turner, and Akram Zaatari
Graphic design by (Studio) Jonathan Hares
Published in French as Le musée ne suffit pas, no 10 à 14
Co-published with Lenz
24 x 31 cm
Softcover, 224 pages
