I have used this slide many times for my different audiences, students primarily but professionals too (and internationally), to lay a basis for general understanding of the world. Again, the idea was always simple: how on Earth one can be active in the area of public memory and now knowing what is happening around that conditions our entire destiny? Why would museums, dealing with the present by using the filtered experience of the past be spared of the obligation to understand the reality of their users: present and potential ones? So cropping the Internet one finds the texts and pictures that grab the spirit of the time just in a way a curator would, - or, rather, should. An, my job was making the real new ones or ameliorating the present ones.
This phenomenal photo is at least five years old but in a nutshell, explains the reality ever since and the main features of it in the future. http://time.com/2894694/massimo-sestini-boat-italy-migrants-mare-nostrum-risk-europe/
The text attached says: Every year, more than 40,000 asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East reach Italian shores, crammed into small powerboats like this one, limited in supplies. Unlike most of the EU, Italy has vowed to show support. Today (June 20th), for World Refugee Day, TIME published a collection of images taken by Italian photographer Massimo Sestini who accompanied the Italian Navy on rescue missions earlier this month.
In brief, - since the world is getting worse and we learned that, even so imperfect, it is not leading to progress but it can reiterate, degenerate, disintegrate and regress instead. It is so appealing to realize.
This crowded ship of destinies of those harmed by the West becomes, ironically the picture of the West itself, facing the end of the species scenario. Nobody leaves his/her country voluntarily. He or she is expelled and forced by urge for survival. Moralizing? So what? We never thought that we shall discuss the bloody hands of the West and the background of their obscene wealth and profligacy, extravagance and endless, sleazy leisure. Maybe the de-colonisation of museums is, after some five years of fervent discussion, diluting into the bureaucratic mentality of the profession and corrupted politics, but it will never die. It is a nightmare revealed and awaken and so be it.
We are all potential refugees. Our billionaires declared so a long time ago by longing for a new planet to misuse. Rotten scientists always regrettably followed rather sources of their useless research then the priorities of the world. Their corrupted mind, like of the bad curators do not perceive the common good as a motive for their very existence.
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