Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-gvvz8 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-21T12:13:20.806Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Other Spaces: migration, objects and archives

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2016

Jo-Anne Duggan  and
Enza Gandolfo
Jo-Anne Duggan
Affiliation:
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Human Development, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
Enza Gandolfo*
Affiliation:
Faculty of Arts, Humanities and Human Development, Victoria University, Melbourne, Australia
*
∗ Corresponding author. Email: Enza.Gandolfo@vu.edu.au
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Other Spaces is a collaborative creative arts exhibition project that explores visual and material expressions of cultural identity with a particular focus on museum collections. This project aims to provide a rich examination – visual, emotional and intellectual – of the multiple cultural narratives that contribute to the social fabric of Australia through a unique marriage of contemporary photomedia and creative writing practice. This project explores the ways that migrants and refugees have found to express their cultural identity through the material objects they have brought with them to Australia. Many of these objects are not only of great personal value but often of cultural, historical and religious significance. Some are very ordinary everyday objects but they can be highly evocative and symbolic of the relationship between culture and identity, and between the places of origin and an individual's present home in Australia. This article, through a combination of photography, creative text and scholarly discussion, will focus specifically on Italo-Australian migrants and on some of the material objects that they have donated to museum collections, and use these objects to explore notions of cultural belonging and identity.

Keywords

creative artsmaterial culturemuseumsItalian migration
Type
Research Article
Information
Modern Italy , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , August 2011 , pp. 315 - 328
Copyright
Copyright © Association for the study of Modern Italy 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Albano, C. 2007. Displaying lives: The narrative of objects in biographical exhibitions. Museum and Society 5, no. 1: 15–28.Google Scholar
Anderson, M. 1997. Material and cultural environment: Objects and places. Canberra: Environment Australia.Google Scholar
Anderson, M. and Reeves, A.. 1994. Contested identities: Museums and the nation in Australia. In Museums and the making of ‘ourselves’: The role of objects in national identity, ed. Kaplan, Flora E.S., 79–125. London and New York: Leicester University Press.Google Scholar
Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS). 2006. http://www.censusdata.abs.gov.au (accessed October 20, 2009).Google Scholar
Baldassar, L. 2004. A brief history of Italians in Western Australia. http://www.italianlives.arts.uwa.edu.au/__data/…/Italians_in_WA_history.rtf (accessed October 10, 2009).Google Scholar
Baldassar, L. 2005. Italians in Australia. In Encyclopedia of siasporas [electronic resource]: Immigrant and refugee cultures around the world, ed. Ember, M., Ember, C. R. and Skoggard, I.. Boston, MA: Springer Science+Business Media.Google Scholar
Baldassar, L. 2006. Migration monuments in Italy and Australia: Contesting histories and transforming identities. Modern Italy 11, no. 1: 43–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Baldassar, L. and Pesman, R.. 2005. From Paesani to global Italians: Veneto migrants in Australia. Crawley, WA: University of Western Australia Press.Google Scholar
Bennett, T. 2005. Civic laboratories: Museums, cultural objecthood and the governance of the social. Cultural Studies 19, no. 5: 521–47.Google Scholar
Bennett, T. 2009. Museum, field, colony: Colonial governmentality and the circulation of reference. Journal of Cultural Economy 21, no. 2: 99–116.Google Scholar
Bianco, J. L. 1998. Italian culture and language. In The Australian people: An encyclopedia of the nation, its people and their origins, ed. Jupp, J., 509–11. North Ryde, N.S.W.: Angus & Robertson.Google Scholar
Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F.. 1991. What is philosophy? New York: Columbia University Press.Google Scholar
DeSilvey, C. 2006. Observed decay: Telling stories with mutable things. Journal of Material Culture 11, no. 3: 318–38.Google Scholar
Eisner, E. 2008. Art and knowledge. In Handbook of the arts in qualitative research, ed. Gary Knowles, J. and Cole, A. L.. Thousand Oaks, CA, London, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Farago, C. and Preziosi, D.. 2009. Culture/cohesion/compulsion: Museological artifice and its dilemmas in the Migration Memories exhibition. Human Research XV, no. 2. http://epress/anu.edu.ac/hrj/2009_02/pdf/whole_book.pdf (accessed May 10, 2010).Google Scholar
Greenblatt, S. 1991. Resonance and wonder. In Exhibiting cultures: The poetics and politics of museum display, ed. Karp, Ivan and Lavine, Steven. 42–56. Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press.Google Scholar
Hall, S. 1990. Cultural identity and diaspora. In Identity: Community, culture, difference, ed. Rutherford, J., 222–37, London: Lawrence & Wishart.Google Scholar
Hamey, N. D. 2006. The politics of urban space. Modes of place-making by Italians in Toronto's neighbourhoods. Modern Italy 11, no. 1: 25–42.Google Scholar
Hecht, A. 2001. Home sweet home: Tangible memories of an uprooted childhood. In Home possessions: Material culture behind closed doors, ed. Miller, Daniel, 123–45, London: Berg.Google Scholar
Hirsch, M. and Smith, V.. 2002. Feminism and cultural memory: An introduction. Signs 28, no. 1: 1–19.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hooper-Greenhill, E., ed. 1999. The educational role of the museum. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hooper-Greenhill, E. 2000. Museums and the interpretation of visual culture. London and New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Hutchison, M. 2009. Dimensions for folding exhibition: Exhibiting diversity in theory and practice in the Migration Memories exhibition. Human Research XV, no. 2. http://epress.anu.edu.au/hrj/2009_02/pdf/whole_book.pdf (accessed May 10, 2010).Google Scholar
Italian Historical Society. Fact sheet: Statistics on Italians in Australia. COASIT, Melbourne. http://www.multiculturalaustralia.edu.au/doc/Stats_Italians_Australia.pdf (accessed October 10, 2009).Google Scholar
Lipsitz, G. 1990. History, myth and counter-memory: Narrative and desire in popular novels. In Time passages: Collective memory and American popular culture, 211–31, 287–88. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.Google Scholar
McNiff, S. 2008. Art-based research. In Handbook of the arts in qualitative research, ed. Knowles, J. G. and Cole, A. L.. Thousand Oaks, CA, London, New Delhi and Singapore: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Miller, D. 2008. The comfort of things. Cambridge, UK and Malden, MA: Polity.Google Scholar
Parkin, D. J. 1999. Mementoes as transitional objects in human displacement. Journal of Material Culture 4, no. 3: 303–20.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pearce, S. M. 1992. Museums, objects & collections: A cultural study. Leicester & London: Leicester University Press.Google Scholar
Pulvirenti, M. 1997. Unwrapping the parcel: An examination of culture through Italian Australian home ownership. Australian Geographical Studies 35, no. 1: 32–39.Google Scholar
Rappoport, A. 1981. Identity and environment: A cross-cultural perspective. In Housing and identity: Cross-cultural perspectives, ed. Duncan, J.S., 6–35. London: Croom Helm.Google Scholar
Serrano, D.C.C. 2004. Colombian migrants in London: Movement, identity and materiality. MA in Material Culture, University College London.Google Scholar
Wallendorf, M. and Arnould, E. J.. 1988. ‘My favorite things’: A cross-cultural inquiry into object attachment, possessiveness and social linkage. Journal of Consumer Research 14: 531–47.Google Scholar
Witcomb, A. 2009. Migration, social cohesion and cultural diversity: Can museums move beyond pluralism? Human Research XV, no. 2. http://epress.anu.edu.au/hrj/2009_02/pdf/whole_-book.pdf (accessed May 10, 2010).Google Scholar