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“Resilient, sustainable and participatory practices: Towards the GLAMs of the commons – GLAMMONS” is a three-year project, 2022-2025, funded by the European Commission (Horizon Europe Research and Innovation on Cultural Heritage and CCIs programme). 

GLAMMONS aims to map pre-pandemic practices across the sector, to fully account for the pandemic effects on the sector, and to explore novel solutions that will inform GLAMs (Gallery-Library-Archive-Museum) response and adaptation to the post-pandemic era, under a new conceptual paradigm that will advance GLAMs as the agents of change.

The GLAMMONS website and its social media platforms were launched this week.

Get connected and follow the project deployed by eight European partners: Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Greece), leader of the project, Stichting CREARE Social (The Netherlands), Inpolis Urbanism GmbH (Germany), Technische Universität Berlin (Germany), ESC Dijon Bourgogne – Burgundy School of Business (France), European Creative Hubs Network-ECHN (Greece), Mazomos Landscape and Heritage Consultants BVBA (Belgium), and NOVA ISKRA Creative Hub (Serbia).

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Launching of a new Horizon Europe project: GLAMMONS (2022-2025).

On the 17^th and the 18^th of October 2022, “Resilient, sustainable and participatory practices: Towards the GLAMs of the commons – GLAMMONS”, a three-year project funded by the European Commission (Horizon Europe Research and Innovation on Cultural Heritage and CCIs) was launched in Berlin, hosted by the partner Technische Universität Berlin.

The outbreak of the pandemic created unprecedented challenges for galleries, libraries, archives, and museums (GLAMs), which were already struggling during the last years with issues of underfunding, increased maintenance and operational costs, and challenges imposed by over-tourism.

The COVID-19 pandemic served as a wake-up call to rethink how cultural production and consumption are organized and articulated with different sets of actors and local contexts, towards safeguarding sustainability, access, and the well-being of the sector, its workforce, and surrounding communities. Long before the pandemic crisis, European cultural policy already encouraged museums to embrace participatory governance and digitisation, to become more financially self-reliant, and to diversify their income-generating activities.

GLAMMONS involves 8 European partners: Panteion University of Social and Political Sciences (Greece), leader of the project, Stichting CREARE Social (The Netherlands), Inpolis Urbanism GmbH (Germany), Technische Universität Berlin (Germany), ESC Dijon Bourgogne – Burgundy School of Business (France), European Creative Hubs Network-ECHN (Greece), Mazomos Landscape and Heritage Consultants BVBA (Belgium), and NOVA ISKRA Creative Hub (Serbia). They propose to map pre-pandemic practices across the sector, to fully account for the pandemic effects on the sector and to explore novel solutions that will inform GLAMs’ response and adaptation to the post-pandemic era, under a new conceptual paradigm that will advance GLAMs as the agents of change.

Conceptually developed around the theories of the commons, the GLAMMONS project aims to provide answers to the above challenges, advance research, and inform related policy. The project will provide in-depth analysis and evaluation of ongoing shifts (with a specific focus on both pandemic-driven transformations and digitalisation) in the field of GLAMs. It will also explore and assess practices (concerning management, finance, and participation) that emerge around small-scale, community-led GLAMs and the possibility of transferring relevant knowledge to other cultural institutions to secure the sustainability of the sector.

The following three years will see the delivery of GLAMMONS; an ambitious work programme, rooted in a track record of internationally recognized research excellence and world-leading practice, allowing the development of a novel conceptual approach: the GLAMs of the commons.

On the 17th and 18th of October 2022, the partners gathered in Berlin at the Technische Universität Berlin-TUB for the Kickoff of the GLAMMONS project.

After an introduction on Horizon Europe expectations by Mrs. Hinano Spreafico (EC Project Officer), the partners presented the general project overview, the timeline, and the Scientific contribution of the GLAMMONS project as well as the Challenges for the GLAMs: mapping the field across Europe before and after the pandemic.

Each partner gave a presentation of its work package and discussed the collective research and the different topics that will be developed through the three years of the project:

-The content and resources for GLAMs under commons,

-Communities, commoners and trauma,

-Exploring resilient financial and sustainable management processes and their impacts under commons,

-Informing policy towards the GLAMs of the commons,

-Management, data management, and ethics,

-Dissemination, communication, and exploitation activities.

Finally, the partners visited the Schwules Museum. Coming from a grassroots movement, the Museum remains a civil society project upheld by the voluntary commitment of many contributors that holds a special connection to the queer communities. 

The story of the Schwules Museum begins in the year 1984, at the former Berlin Museum. At the initiative of three museum guards, the museum’s director allowed himself to be persuaded to take an innovative step. The three students and their activist ally Manfred Herzer had proposed to develop an exhibition on homosexual men and women in Berlin. In the summer of 1984, the legendary exhibition “Eldorado – the History, Everyday Life and Culture of Homosexual Women and Men 1850-1950” took place in the Berlin Museum, curated by the three initiators in collaboration with a group of lesbian activists. With over 40,000 visitors, the exhibition was just as successful as it was controversial. The resolution to fund the Schwules Museum crystallized out of this success. 

In the offices of the “Allgemeine Homosexuelle Arbeitsgemeinschaft AHA” (General Homosexual Working Group) in Friedrichstraße, the foundation was laid for a museum, a library, and an archive. Today, the SMU stands as the most important international center for researching, preserving, and presenting the culture and history of queer individuals, sexual and gender diversity, and is a sought-after collaborative partner for museums, universities, cultural support institutions, artists, and activists from around the world.

The Schwules Museum is a perfect example of a collective space to engage with history and envision a future.