(How) can they collect city rhythms, sounds, or smells? Can you collect the people that create and use a city? How can contemporary collecting be inspired by existing collections, and how can looking at collections with new (outside) perspectives bring new insights? What remnants of the past live in the present and how do they manifest? How should museums care for new urban narratives and for the people they concern? When working on a new balance of expertise and expectations, what inequalities and power relations emerge in (city) museums? How do shifting ideas about ownership and authority affect collecting and exhibiting practices? 

For museums, these questions are becoming ever more relevant, as the balance between tangible and intangible heritage is shifting.

Excursions at Imagine IC & the Amsterdam Museum  

• 09.30 AM – 1 PM | Breakfast at Imagine IC & excursion through Amsterdam Zuidoost visiting The Black Archives, OSCAM and CBK Zuidoost. Please sign up here, limited spots available. 
• 1 – 3 PM | Lunch, travel & exploring the city  
• 3 – 4.15 PM | Tours at the Amsterdam Museum, through the exhibitions:
  • Manahahtáanung or New Amsterdam?: The Indigenous Story Behind New York  
  • Collecting the City #4: Museum om de Hoek, Unknown Zeedijk and Kazerne Reigersbos 
  • Panorama Amsterdam: A Living History of the City  
  • Faces of North Holland: Untold Stories from Aalsmeer to Texel  
  • Mini-expo Unboxing: Fashion from the Archives. Please make sure to participate in this guided tour if you wish to participate in the workshop “It Starts With Feeling: To touch and/or being touched by museum objects” on the 10th of October, 13:00 – 14:15 pm.  
  • The Beach
• 4.30 – 6.30 PM | Welcome reception at Amsterdam Museum 
• 6.30 PM | End of day 1

Conference day at Pakhuis de Zwijger 

• 9 – 9.30 AM | Walk-in with coffee & tea  
• 9.30 – 10 AM | Keynote: Re-calibrating the city museum and our professionalism by Léontine Meijer-van Mensch, director of Museum Rotterdam   
• 10 – 10.30 AM | Poster presentations, coffee & tea  
• 10.30 – 11.45 AM | Round 4 parallel sessions
  • 4.1 Paper presentations: City identities – plural narratives 
  • 4.2 Paper presentations: Care: ethical challenges of collecting and collections 
  • 4.3 Paper presentations: Decolonial Practices 
  • 4.4 Paper presentations: Tangible Meets Intangible 
• 12 – 12.45 PM | Lunch & poster presentations 
• 1 – 2 PM | CAMOC & COMCOL meeting (separate) 
• 2 – 3 PM | Round 5 Parallel sessions
  • 5.1 Paper presentations: City Identities & Conflict 
  • 5.2 Paper presentations: The City through the Eyes of Artists 
• 3 – 4 PM | Closing Session: Collecting with(in) the Conference, artistic intervention by Jeroen van der Most 
• 4 – 5 PM | Goodbye drinks  
• 5 PM | End of day 3 

All the locations can be found in the full programme, subject to change.

Amsterdam Museum has been collecting the city in various ways since the founding of the museum in 1926, but in the last decades the focus has shifted more and more to the contemporary city. In 2020 they began the program ‘Collecting the City’, based on co-creation with communities. Imagine IC, a heritage organization based in Amsterdam Southeast, has been active almost 25 years in documenting current social relations through participatory heritage work. The collaboration between the two hosts is a great opportunity to share and explore how city museums and heritage institutions from all over the world deal with (contemporary) collecting and rethinking collecting practices.