Helping museums in Afghanistan – One visit at a time

Museum’s expert and ‘orientalist’ Alessandro Califano travels Afghanistan for his museum mission.

by Claudia Brose

Alessandro Califano, a devoted and passionate Italian senior curator at Rome’s MACRO museum of contemporary art (Museo d’Arte Contemporanea di Roma), tries to teach Afghans how to set up and maintain museums in their country. Califano ventures into the provinces and gives workshops on why and how the people and the leaders of the various regions might want to be conscious about and believe in their own culture. By directly talking to and teaching the people in the provinces he believes that Afghans can contribute to the understanding and preservation of their own cultural and artistic heritage. Building museums or turning bashed-up historic sites into an open-air museum is his dream for Afghanistan.

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