Museums. Citizens and sustainable solutions

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SUSTAINABLE WINGS – A POST FEMINIST APPROACH TO MUSEUMS In this text, I will argue that sustainability in the museum field is not only a question of changing the mandate – the mission, the vision, the objectives, the results and the resources – or of planning from a more or less locally based starting point. It is not only about a functional or operative aspect. It is not only about ‘reducing, reusing, recycling’, to use an ecological maxim, or to care about controlling the environment and saving energy, or about working in green buildings. This is the case, for instance, at the California Academy of Sciences, which is considered one of the most sustainable museums in the world because they reuse almost 80% and work with user inclusion. Another example is agriculture where they reuse manure to produce fuel and thereby alter the production cycle. Transferred to a museum context, this practice would lead to the reuse of exhibition cases, furniture and fixtures, a reinterpretation of ideas, the reuse of resources found in basements or archives, and an examination of objects that have been covered in a thick layer of dust from a desire to achieve equality or a more socially just perspective. It would also mean the reuse of recycled paper, both in offices and for pamphlets, in advertising banners and in catalogues, and that the noise from tweets, Facebook and Instagram would stop, because they have a cold signal value.2 Here, I would like to focus on sustainability in relation to emotional communication. Emotional communication is related to internal organisational changes, and it starts with the staff. The museum should be understood as a living organism, and not as a factory where communication rests with the experts and in their procedures, which do not only have lucrative purposes. The users experience the balance that emerges when changes start with themselves. This is sustainability in the organism as a healing factor. Two Catalan psychologists, Mercè Conanglia and Jaume Soler, have defined the concept of emotional ecology, the emotions as ecological landscapes.3 They defend creativity as a source of positive energy that can be renewed continually, and as a way to improve ourselves and our relations to other people. In addition to this view, I would like to comment on some ideas and questions that arise when we start examining the balance

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