The Reimagining Heritage, Archives and Museums: Today/Tomorrow convening took place from 13th to 15th February 2024 at the Homecoming Centre in Cape Town.
The institutions and practices that collect, exhibit, and preserve our cultures need money to keep fulfilling their purpose and serving the people.
Ngaire Blankenberg (Founding Director of the Institute for Creative Repair), Dawn Robertson (Head of Projects at Jozi My Jozi), Ryan Pillay (Deputy Director of Arts, Culture and Heritage at Nelson Mandela University), Lucy MacGarry (Co-Director of Latitudes Online and RMB Latitudes Art Fair), Dr Paul Bayliss (Absa Senior Specialist, Art and Museum Curator), and Laurent Serrano (Representative of French Ministry of Europe and Foreign Affairs) sat down for the last panel discussion of the convening to have, as described by Blankenberg, “a hard talk about money”.
The main idea taken into the conversation is that museums and heritage spaces are not enterprises that make substantial amounts of money, which begs the question of how they get funding and how they sustain themselves and continue operating.
Watch the full discussion in the video as the speakers tackle this sensitive, yet very necessary, subject. You will also find out more about who is funding many of the museums and institutions of preservation and archiving, as well as a few of the different operational models used to build sustainable institutions.
