The Critical Visitor

The project investigates how heritage institutions can achieve inclusion and accessibility for outsider groups and marginalized voices, today's 'critical visitors'. It is part of the NWO Smart Culture programme and builds on the new national 'Cultural Diversity Code'.

The Critical Visitor project takes an intersectional approach towards questions of inclusivity and accessibility. The project works with a consortium of fifteen prominent, Dutch cultural partners from the heritage sector, ranging from architecture, the arts, media studies, social histories to ethnography. Supported by this broad national network, five work packages are implemented:

• two PhD projects on museology and archiving practices,
• a series of Field Labs with the consortium of cultural partners, to tackle theoretical, practical and ethical tensions at play between institutions and activist approaches,
• a series of Archival Interactions with artistic research projects that explore alternative value systems and counter-archival practices, to be concluded with a public symposium,
• a public seminar series The Queer Salon, which debates methods of connecting institutionalized heritage spaces with outsider initiatives. 

The aim is to enable cultural institutions to implement working practices (selection, collection, preservation, display, interaction) that alleviate structures of exclusion. Through the method of triangulating 'theory-ethics-practice', the project will innovate the field of critical heritage studies and propose a palette of inclusive practices that fulfill today’s ethical standards set by governmental bodies and critical voices in heritage spaces. The policy-driven, scholarly, artistic output of enhanced tools and concepts will establish a new benchmark in museological theory and practice.