ISS 25 (1995).pdf - The International Council of Museums

to promote communication and education, privileging participative methodologies
which, in turn, develop community critical awareness, where unity and diversity
act as genuine expressions of universality.
The community museum stems from the community's own needs and interests.
As determinants of new methods and objectives, community initiatives and
development link a territory with a heritage - through elements which represent
nature and mankind's creativity - within a geographically limited local population
which is in turn subject and actor of its own culture.
They constitute the conjunction of actions for favouring social, cultural and
economic progress of each community; voluntary, desired development,
implemented and criticized by its own members, both individually and collectively.
As Hugues de Varine says "the natural community framework is a concentric
space which successively involves the family, the professional environment, the
neighbourhood or village, the city or province and finally the region".
At this point, imaginary spaces must be taken into account. Although
immaterial, these are the spaces of creation and emotion which, together with
intelligence, allow to reach total knowledge. What is peculiar about man is his
spirit and it is this spirit which gets to know reality and which apprehends and
updates values. His memory locates the events he recalls in terms which
presuppose an abstract, general time; it is symbolic because it does not only
revive past experiences, but instead rebuilds them. Achieved throughout a
complex, arduous intellectual process, only man has that idea of abstract,
geometric space. It is man who creates culture, uses it in several ways and grows
and develops under its protection, constituting thus an undissolvable unit. Heir of
his past, of a series of bygone experiences which condition it, his distinctive
feature is still his work.
Conditioned by symbolic thought and the pertinent behaviours, the
progress of culture and the continuity in the cultural development of communities
is the basis of the future.
After UNESCO's Fifth Regional Seminar in Mexico in 196i , the museum
was considered the community's cultural centre which • ... must complete and assess
the education system and perform an integration function aimed at the unity,
preservation, analysis, interpretation, conservation and presentation of the community's
cultural heritage and natural realities '.
The community, that heterogeneous social group, joined by traditions,
needs and solidarity, placed within a spatial and temporal framework. Community
, UNESCO's Fifth Regional Seminar ''The museum as the cuffural centre of the community",
Mexico, October 1962.
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