Discovering the Present through the Past and Ourselves through History and Memory

Professor John Pedro Swartz introduces collections conference

The Civilization Sequence Program (CSP) conference, "Collecting Practices in Lebanon: Alternative Visions of the Past," proceeded as planned in West Hall May 24-25 despite the uncertainties triggered by the civil disturbances of early May. In her welcoming introduction, conference organizer Sonja Mejcher-Atassi of the CSP, noted the worldwide increase in museum studies over the past decade. Although Lebanon has lagged behind because of wars and political crises, Atassi foresees expansion in research on museums and other collections. She set for the aims of the conference: "to bring together some of this research,…to trigger further interest in the field," and to promote critical thought on "theoretical and methodological questions." She pointed to a particular application for Lebanon: "Collecting practices tell us a lot not only about the past but also about the ways we approach the past and thus about present conceptions and representations of ourselves and our identity."

Focused on traditional museum collections, the opening lecture by Charles Saumarez Smith, dirctor of London's Royal Academy, reviewed the collecting practices of two other museums he has directed-the National Gallery and the National Portrait Gallery. Conference panels following were organized around material, textual, and urban collections. AUB Museum curator Leila Badre's outline of the history of the AUB Museum and director Suzy Hakimian's overview of the war years of the Lebanese National Museum and its reopening showed conventional museology moving toward new approaches to access, interpretation, and installation.

AUB's Helene Sader exposed a negative side of "collecting practices" in the wholesale looting of antiquities in Lebanon and the Middle East. Blaming collectors rather than poor and ignorant looters, Sader said the government needs to control policies, education, and national pride in the past.

Examples of textual collection began with an account of the Education Ministry's failed project on the Unification of History textbook. Lebanese writer Jean Makdisi then focused on her methodology in writing her memoir, Teta, Mother, and Me. CSP's David Wrisley showed how Lebanese novelist Rabih Jaber preserves memory which "is damaged if it is not written down. "The fiction of Jaber, Wrisley added, is "a textual gallery." Renowned Lebanese novelist Elias Khoury closed the panel with an intimate account of the evolution of his novel Gate of the Sun (1998). In recording the stories of Palestinians in the camps ("I wanted the language of the nakba."), Khoury shunned historical documentation and worked with multiple stories.

The urban collecting practices treated in the conference ranged from Sophie Brones's description of the endeavors to preserve the Barakat Building in Sodeco as a Beirut Memory Museum Project, to Jens Hanssen's imaginative thoughts on "What a Beirut Museum of 'asr al-nahda Might Look Like." May Farhat of AUB and former AUB professor John Carswell examined collections of Islamic art in their papers on Henri Pharaon's "treasure house of modern art," and Sylvia Shorto of AUB revealed reflections of post-mandate national identity in the Donna Maria Palace at Sofa and the Sursock Palace in Beirut.

Dell Upton of the University of California at Los Angeles discussed historians of architecture as curators and collectors., and Monika Borgmann, UMAM D&R,