Looking for a Rationale behind Museum Practice: Building Bridges at the Reinwardt Academie

The paper focuses on curriculum development at the Reinwardt Academie (Amsterdam) and the role of (theoretical) museology in it. The Academie, founded in 1976, developed its curriculum from a new understanding of professionalism, referred to as the emancipation of museography, with Museology as the binding rationale behind the curriculum instead of a collection related subject-matter discipline. Museology was seen as a genuine discipline, with its own lecturers, not as an applied science. The present author developed a different approach to museology, very much influenced by Zbynĕk Stránský, Ivo Maroević and other Central European museologists, in which a structured approach towards the object as data carrier was key. Throughout the 1990s, new ideas on value assessment, social inclusion, participation, and learning were introduced in the curriculum, being a mixture of British New Museology and Portuguese/Brazilian Sociomuseology. In 2001 the existence of the Academie was threatened which made to re-define the study programme as Heritage Studies. In line with this integrative thinking, a spatial turn became visible in the curriculum focusing on the concepts of lieu de mémoire, cultural biography, and heritage community.