CIMAM Toolkit on Sustainable Museum Practices: Latest Update
As part of its ongoing commitment to promote sustainability in the cultural sector, CIMAM shares the October updates of its Toolkit for Sustainable Museum Practice.
Action Plans, Guidelines and Protocols
ICCROM’s Our Collections Matter (OCM) Toolkit: The OCM initiative was launched in 2020 to support collection-based organizations in turning their sustainability aspirations and commitments into action.
The programme’s backbone is the 3Ts approach: Tools, Training, and Transformation. With the open-access tools and training provided through OCM, museums from around the world can boost their ‘SDG-literacy’, have easy access to knowledge and resources to concretely enhance their contribution to sustainable development through collections-based work by searching through the “5Ps” (People, Planet, Prosperity, Peace, and Partnership), the 17 SDGs, the SDG targets, or a selection of sustainable development-oriented actions, and lead positive transformation in the heritage sector and in the communities they serve.
Rethinking Touring Exhibitions: A tool to help reduce the environmental impact of touring exhibitions. October 2024. Art Fund, in partnership with the Design Museum and The Exhibitions Group, have produced this touring tool to support museum professionals to ask the right questions at the right time. It also signposts a variety of resources to help teams gather data and access further research to make informed decisions. This tool was created for UK institutions developing or co-producing touring exhibitions, but can be adapted for other types of projects. Underpinning this tool are the 5 Ps of Sustainable Development – People, Prosperity, Peace, Partnership and of course, Planet.
Using the Resources at Hand: Sustainable Exhibition Design, October 2024. Every step of exhibition design, from the initial organization to the deinstallation, can benefit from a lower carbon footprint. The guide offers tips for low-carbon design, outlines resources in Southwestern Ontario (with a focus on London) and includes information on borrowing and sharing resources and materials at Western University and elsewhere. Version 4 also includes examples from galleries across Ontario and Quebec, student projects, and new information on sustainable materials and approaches to exhibition design.
Inspiring Projects, Platforms, and Resources
Mental Health and Well-being: The challenges of international cultural mobility: This report is built on the contributions that have been kindly provided by the panellists in On the Move’s Cultural Mobility Webinar on the mental health and well-being of artists and culture professionals, as well as through additional interviews with experts in the field, with the aim of highlighting the stressors and risks they face when engaging internationally. In addition to the range of benefits that arise from transnational cultural mobility, artists and cultural workers face pressures and uncertainties whose presence is structural, related to developments in the cultural ecosystem, systemic inequalities and even the biological and psychological experience of being human.
Reading List
Museums, Art and Inclusion in a Climate Emergency: A book By Janice Baker, Routledge, 2023. The book considers the impact of the Anthropocene on history and memory, approaches to objects and agency and the incommensurability of western and Indigenous ontologies.
Drawing on Indigenous knowledge, humanities and museological literature, continental philosophy, contemporary art and popular culture, Baker acknowledges the autonomous agency of geological forms, including soils, minerals and fossil fuels. Demonstrating that this has implications for an expanded idea of an ‘inclusive’ museum and its relationship to entities beyond ‘life’ and living species, the book argues that the ‘inclusion’ paradigm needs to include nonlife actors. Gesturing to a geontological ‘turn’ through developing notions of geo-inclusion, the mineralhuman and approaches to object agency that connect with Aboriginal ‘heritage’, Baker exposes the ongoing destruction of Country by mining interests in Western Australia and elsewhere. By addressing the need for urgent change through the artifice of the museum, the book identifies an expanded approach to inclusion beyond the limits imposed by the politics of identity.
Please send your contributions to info@cimam.org. With your valuable insights, we'll be delighted to expand our Toolkit for Environmental Museum Practices.
Thank you for your ongoing dedication to sustainable practices in the arts.