Extending social care in the museum through art practice: Museo delle Civiltà (Rome) and H.H. Lim (2018)

In her 1996 essay The Discourse of the Museum, Mieke Bal conceives of the museum as a discursive and rhetorical device and introduces the principle of accountability, converging the responsibility of museums toward contemporary social issues. The museum has, in fact, contributed to shaping identities and ideologies by selecting and hierarchizing cultures. Today, the ethnographic museum stands at the centre of debates about its self-reformulation, “cultural property” and the management of collections of colonial origin, occasionally expanding towards new forms of collaboration with communities. In this context, the essay reconstructs the case study of the 2018 project The Making of a Point of View and residency Origin of the Detail by artist H.H. Lim at the Museo Etnografico Luigi Pigorini, Museo delle Civiltà, which critically reinterprets the museum’s Indonesian and Malaysian collections and strengthens its social mission through collaborative projects with local Roman associations engaged in protecting and empowering migrant minors and with young members of the Indonesian community.