2020 | Building Peace through Heritage
Museums as a tool for intercultural dialogue with refugees and migrants from Near-East Asia and North Africa
Giuseppe Maino 1 , Isber Sabrine 2 , Donatella Biagi Maino 3
1
New York Academy of Sciences , New York , USA , giuseppe . maino . 53 @ gmail . com
2
CSIC – Agencia Estatal Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas , Spain ; Heritage for Peace , Barcelona , Spain , esper . 1985 @ yahoo . com
3
Alma Mater Studiorum – University of Bologna , Ravenna campus , Italy , donatella . biagimaino @ unibo . it
Abstract : We present our activities , including an international workshop and an interdisciplinary laboratory realized by the University of Bologna in collaboration with the NGO Heritage for Peace , aimed to demonstrate how cultural heritage can act as a tool for social integration and how it has already served this purpose in the past . It is worth mentioning the Multaka and Abuab projects , carried out by the museums in Berlin , Germany , and by the Institution Milà i Fontanals of the CSIC and Girona University in Spain , respectively . In today ’ s society , migratory and reception / inclusion phenomena require the awareness that the individual no longer has a welldefined identity but , faced with the risk of losing it and no longer having any ( the migrant ), can and must assume multiple identities , from that of origin to those of the new reality of which she / he is a guest and to which she / he can usefully contribute with her / his own experience of life and knowledge . In the same way the citizen of the host society can and must enrich her / himself culturally and not only by contact with other cultural realities , thus acquiring new identities in addition to and complement her / his own .
Keywords : Migrants ; Social Inclusion ; Museum ; Intercultural Dialogue
Introduction
Some of the most important experiences at the European level of enhancement of the museum as a place of social inclusion , recognition and intercultural mediation will be illustrated and discussed within the context of reception and inclusion of migrants mainly from Near-East Asia and North Africa in the European societies . In particular , we outline that this work with immigrants and refugees could help to make reconciliation and respect in the both involved sites – migrants and citizens – a result strongly needed in our now days in Europe . It should be remembered that in 2017 the number of people forced to flee to the world due to war , violence and persecution reached a new record for the fifth year in a row . This was determined in particular by the crisis in the Democratic Republic of Congo , the war in South Sudan and the flight to Bangladesh of hundreds of thousands of Rohingya refugees from Myanmar ( see Figure 1 ). In its recent annual Global Trends report , the United Nations Refugee Agency ( UNHCR ) remarks that at the end of 2017 there were 68.5 million people forced to flee . The total of 68.5 million also includes 25.4 million refugees who have left their country due to war and persecution , 2.9 million more than in 2016 , the largest increase recorded by the UNHCR in a single year . Between 1 January and 31 August 2019 , 61,500 migrants arrived in Europe by sea . In the first eight months of 2018 there were about 87,000 . But , unfortunately , the consequence of European and Italian policies to curb migration is that many more people die trying to cross the Mediterranean , or in Libya . From 2013 to 2019 , 18,669 people died in the Mediterranean Sea , considering only the victims we have become aware of .
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