Open Museum helps Brussels' museums become more inclusive, so they can better represent and welcome our beautiful city in all its diversity. Find out who we are and what we do.
Read our missionOpen Museum Report: Personnel Recommendations
The Open Museum initiative was created in 2019 at Brussels Museums with the ambition to provide support to Brussels’ museums on their journey to becoming more inclusive spaces that better represent, and welcome, our beautiful city. A series of discussions with museums and with activists are planned from May 2021 to June 2022 from which recommendations will be produced to bring to light challenges and solutions to common problems.
Open Museum organized an open call to people working on anti-discrimination projects in the city to develop a set of axes on which museums could concentrate on as they become more inclusive spaces. With the help of these people, five central themes were developed: Personnel, Public, Partnerships, Place, and Programming. For each theme, a meeting with the activists is organized where the attendees can express themselves freely and give their proposals for more representation museums. Afterwards, museums are invited to participate in a co-reflection meeting on the same topic.
Following these sessions, recommendations are formed from the concerns and solutions presented by both parties. These recommendations are meant as a starting point for museums – a safe place to question their practices and adjust their vision of the future. They are intended to provoke thought and to aid in the deconstruction of exclusionary practices.
In May and June 2021, Open Museum organized brainstorming sessions around the first of the five P’s: Personnel. The activists, referred to as the Think Tank, met on May 27th and the first co-reflection meeting with museums took place on June 18th. The Think Tank proposed a series of questions and interest areas for museums to think about, while simultaneously presenting challenges and solutions. These included: What are the (invisible) barriers that make the museum sector attractive or not as a place to work? What work needs to be done for recruitment & selection? Personnel management? Internal communication? External positioning?
If you’d like to know the results of our discussions on the “P” of Personnel, please download the pdf below.
On 30 March 2022 at TOUR A PLOMB, the 2022 Open Museum Conference offered a moment to re-imagine the human side of museums. Through practices designed around empathy & continuous introspection, our speakers demonstrated the benefits of polyphonic perspectives in all facets of cultural institutions.
Developing further 2021 Conference’s perspective on “safer spaces”, this year’s conference focused specifically on museums’ personnel, partnerships, and publics through inclusion, diversity, equity, and accessibility ideals.
Watch our videos below as we dissect these ideas and learn from inclusive museal practices already in place.
Want more insights? Check out our “Publics” Recommendations.
An engaged initiative of Brussels Museums
