New Museologies: Current Relevance of a Paradigm in Present-Day Museum Practices.

In the early 1970s, the critiques emanating from feminism, decolonization and popular education supported the paradigm known as the New Museology (Rivière, 1989; Desvallées, 1992; De Varine, 2017) from an intellectual movement that proposed a profound renovation of museums. Emerging in the early 1970s in France and strongly spread in Latin America, this current sought to reform the museum to put it at the service of society, as opposed to the dominant cultural models focused on the safeguarding of objects and collections. The new museologies (NM) placed communities at the center of the museum device, proposing a new conception of the museum as an institution open to society and to the challenges of its time. Thus, concepts such as the expanded museum or ecomuseum represented a utopian horizon in which the museum sought to project itself “beyond its box” (Mairesse, 2000), that is, beyond its walls and the classic functions of collecting, conserving, studying, interpreting and exhibiting (Ruiz Balart, 2022). The communication presented here aims to address the validity of this current in current discussions on museums and museologies based on the perspective of the international circulation of ideas. Considering the processes of redefinition of the museum (ICOM, 2019; ICOM, 2022), this project aims to address the reception and local appropriations of the new museologies (NM) in different museums in Chile, investigating the paradigms, ideas and values that are mobilized in the daily museum practice of museum actors based on the perspective of Institutional Analysis. We will be interested in analyzing the tensions and oscillations between traditional museologies and the paradigm of the NM, inviting us to rethink the social role of museums in the face of the multiple crises affecting our societies today.