The founding of the World Federation of Friends of Museums in 1975, inspired by the International Committee of Museums (ICOM) and its structure, has met the need to create an international network of friends of museums to foster international cooperation among associations of friends of museums, promote their mutual understanding, exchange information and share experiences in order to intensify the life and development of these associations for the benefit of museums and the public. 

In the fall of 2019, after the WFFM General Assembly was held in Montreal, the Fédération Française des Sociétés d’Amis de Musées (FFSAM) agreed in turn to organize it in May 2021 in Marseille, with the assistance of the Society of Friends of the Mucem, the year after the triennial World Congress of Friends of Museums that was to be held in March 2020 in Canberra and Sydney, Australia.

Unfortunately, the Congress was cancelled ten days before its opening due to international health restrictions imposed by the Covid pandemic.

For the same reasons, we had to postpone the General Assembly of the World Federation to June 2022. It is the determination of the preparation team during these two and a half years that allowed this meeting to be a success, with a dedicated site www.wffmmarseille.org , and its smooth running in the three official languages, French, English and Spanish.

We succeeded in welcoming, as we had hoped, about sixty delegates from fifteen countries, the presidents and representatives of the following national federations: Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Norway, Portugal, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States; and representatives of the associate members from Luxembourg, Switzerland and Uruguay.

On this occasion, Luxembourg, Norway and Switzerland has returned to the world federation which they had left some years ago.

The Young Friends project has been a constituent of the world federation since 1984, strongly revitalized in 2014.

In Marseille, a third of the delegates represented Young Friends sections from seven countries, Argentina, Canada, France, Germany, Portugal, Spain, and the United States; Young Friends, as usual, developed a specific program of meetings and reflection, here on the first two days of the general assembly.

After a privileged welcome in the vestiges of the Ancient Port, under the auspices of the Mayor of Marseille, the participants discovered the emblematic heritage sites of the city and its museums: the Préau des Accoules, a museum dedicated to children, the dolias of the Roman Docks, an in situ museum, the dazzling decorative arts at the Château Borély; the exceptional reserves of Marseille’s museums not open to the public and the spectacular ones at the Mucem’s Conservation and Resource Center, for the Young Friends; the exhibition on migratory objects, which are part of our civilization, at the Vieille Charité; the “Connectivités” exhibition at the Mucem, offering a global, Braudelian approach to the Mediterranean; the “Couleurs des Suds” exhibition of the painters of Provence in their setting at the Regards de Provence museum.

Two important moments for thoughts were shared during these meetings:

 – A conference on “how to exhibit an idea”, given in the Eugénie room of the Palais du Pharo, by Barbara Cassin, academician and curator of the exhibition “Objets migrateurs, trésors sous influences”, explaining her conceptual museum approach to highlighting ideas, with the view of Nicolas Misery, director of the museums of Marseille.

– A striking and relevant round table on the help that digital technology can bring to the Friends of Museums, led at the Museum of History of Marseille by the young generation of experts, Bérénice Kübler, PhD student and teacher in Management Sciences at Aix-Marseille University and Bérénice Billiez, independent consultant in the fields of cultural mediation and digital communication.

Finally, the institutional meetings of the world federation at the Mucem, in addition to the exchanges held between the national federations, underlined, after these difficult years, the importance of a federating project of the Friends of Museums and reinforced the intention to launch an annual European day of the Friends of Museums to meet the public, around the same date and a common annual theme, in order to contribute to the emergence of a European public of museums.

 

Report of the French Federation