Geography in the museum – a sense of place— Álvaro Domingues
In times of accelerated globalization, the world's sense seems increasingly vague and unstable: sometimes we live in places obsessed with heritage, with a mythical past or branding maneuvers to maintain visibility and atractibillity; sometimes, everything dissolves in the global magma incapable of fixing localisms and identities.
The truth is that the cartography of social relations does not fit into confined places of the same geography. As Doreen Massey wrote:
Instead then, of thinking of places as areas with boundaries around, they can be imagined as articulated moments in networks of social relations and understandings, but where a larger proportion of those relations, experiences and understandings are constructed on a far larger scale than what we happen to define for that moment as the place itself, whether that be a street, or a region or even a continent.
In places, coexistences are defined, things happen, worldviews are shared. Because they are heterotopias, museums can be exceptional points from where you can build senses of places, summoning people, challenging them to look at each other and where they live.