The Concept of Satellite Museums in Regional Development

In the last decades of the 20^th Century we saw a very interesting trend in the museum branch internationally.

Many people inside and outside the museum world asked themselves what was happening and questioned the sanity of the initiative when the Guggenheim Museum opened in Bilbao in 1997. Already in 1988 Tate Liverpool opened as a satellite to Tate Modern in London. These two initiatives have many similarities but are also examples of two different trends in the satellite museum development which has become even clearer during the first years of the 21^st Century. There are now several examples internationally and the newest is the Guggenheim museum in Abu Dhabi which is expected to open in 2017, Louvre Abu Dhabi opening 2015, and the Hermitage-Barcelona Centre due to open in 2015 and the Hermitage-Siberia in Omsk due to open in 2016. These initiatives all belong to the category where a global museum enterprise such as Guggenheim, Hermitage and Louvre make an investment in becoming even more global by opening satellite museums. Another type of initiatives we see when Tate Modern established itself in for example Liverpool or Louvre in Lens in Northern France. These initiatives are reinvestments of national capital in the shape and form of relatively large museums established in less privileged and museum unaccustomed regions.

To see the above examples belonging to two categories is of course related to a perspective where some museums of national importance engage within their own nation state whereas the same major museums or other major museums can make satellite museums in other parts of the world is seen as another matter. In a globalized world we can argue that these major engaging museums are really doing the same thing within their own country and in other countries and in both cases the four main aims are the same.

The museums create satellites because they want to:

• increase access to their collections and productions
• stimulate tourism and regional economy
• reach a broader public in socio economic sense
• strengthen its own brand

These four main aims may naturally be prioritized differently from case to case but reading about a great number of them confirm that these aims are always there more or less outspoken.

On a smaller scale we can let us inspire from these examples from the big world in smaller countries and even on a regional level.

The Jämtland-Härjedalen region in the middle of Sweden located some 550 kilometres north of Stockholm in what we call the northern inland of Sweden close to the Norwegian border has only 125 000 inhabitants but the region has the same size as Scotland or Denmark. The region is a typical European marginalized area far away from the capital with a strong regional identity and not least economically dependent on tourism. The traditional hunting, fishing and foresting is today still of importance but are bypassed by large of tourism and related businesses in terms of employment.

The strong regional identity in combination with engaging with tourism has since the 1970’ies been a success story for Jamtli Foundation who runs the regional museum. The museum is located in the only city in the region – Östersund – which luckily is placed in the middle of the region with 2-3 hours driving distance from the city to each corner of the region. The Jamtli Museum is relatively large and the founders are the City Council of Östersund, the County Council of Jämtland-Härjedalen Region, and The Jämtland Association for Local History and The Jämtland Art Association. The museum has clearly stated regional heritage responsibilities. At the same time Jamtli museum in Östersund has during almost four decades grown to become one the largest tourist attractions in the city and in the region which have had as a consequence that the foundation is a major employer and is one of the largest non-government museums in the whole country even though the region is one of the poorest and less populated ones.

A very effective political excuse for the investment in the Jamtli museum in the city has been that half the population in the region actually lives in Östersund. At the same time the foundation has from time to time come under pressure from municipalities in the countryside around the city for doing more in their area.

A short description of the development of regional engagement from the museum which in most part is shared with the other museums with regional responsibilities in Sweden and even in Norway illustrates the challenge as it has changed in form and solutions.

In the first many decades of the 20^th Century Jamtli had a few curators, building historians and archaeologists who travelled in the region in order to document and collect. They brought the empirical material to the museum in Östersund and the museum created exhibitions from this. The specialists also provided guidance for municipalities and owners of the land in issues where historical or archaeological knowledge were needed. The population in the region were very happy with this arrangement and it was clearly important that the collections and exhibitions in the museum in the city had representation from the whole region.

“White spots” on the regional map of collections was considered a major failure.

From the 1970’ies the situation changed. Political pressure to be visible in the countryside grew parallel with the investments and growth in visitor numbers for the museum in the regional capital. In the 1970’ies and the 1980’ies a popular initiative from Jamtli was to equip a bus with collections and professional staff and visit small villages and schools. There Jamtli delivered pedagogical programs for school children and visited the local centre for elder care during the day and gave popular lectures in evening. That was very popular but became much too expensive as petrol prices went up and so did the wages. At the same time it became ever more expensive or even impossible for the museum as an employer to have the same staff working day and evening and even spending the nights in private homes and small hostels for longer periods at a time.

By the middle of the 1980’es the “museum bus” retired and Jamtli instead invested time and money in erecting local exhibitions in some villages. They were called visitor centres and the purpose was for tourists in the region to be able to get information and to experience interesting local history on the spot. The foundation got extra funds from the regional authorities to finance the building of the visitor centres and everybody were happy when they opened one after another in the 1980’ies and 1990’ies. Unfortunately nobody had the responsibility to take care of these small local exhibitions after the staff from Jamtli had gone home. After some years they were not as attractive as when they were new and later again Jamtli has removed the name of itself from most of the small exhibitions as it is considered bad for the brand to imply any responsibility.

Around 2000 the foundation invested in a collaboration local museums in the South and East and helped create professional exhibitions and even offered guidance for the local association about how to run the museums which had no or very little staff and certainly no professional or museum trained staff. Both engagements was popular in the local municipalities but when the permanent exhibitions was all the visitor could experience the result became obviously that the visitor numbers fell dramatically after 2-3 years.

This sum up the experience Jamtli Foundation have had with regional engagement and therefore the management and the board in 2006 took an initiative to explore the possibilities for combining:

• sustainable permanent professional museum activities outside the museum in the city
• local engagement
• local visibility and engagement for Jamtli Foundation
• financial risk minimizing for Jamtli Foundation

At the same time it has been evident that regional initiatives from Jamtli Foundation have to be matched by continued engagement in positioning the Jamtli Museum in Östersund.

So far this work has led to engagement in three local museums and plans for engagement from a national museum in Stockholm to establish a satellite museum at the Jamtli Museum in Östersund.

The three local museums are all organised as companies where the shareholders are the local municipality, the local association involved with the local museum as owners of the collection or likewise and the Jamtli Foundation. In all cases the companies are only in control of the management but are not owners. In all cases the companies have Jamtli Foundation as majority owner. In practical terms this ensures that the collections are never brought in to danger as the owner is the local association and if the local museum should get in to financial troubles it does not automatically means financial troubles for the foundation.

The companies work under the understanding between the partners that the municipality ensure the political engagement and provision of finances for basic running costs. The local association ensure the long term ownership of the collection and the foundation ensure access to professional museum competences. Practically this means that the municipality appoints the chair of the company – so far always a politician and the foundation recruits the managing director who is the local manager and is the direct link to all the staff at the Jamtli Museum in Östersund. The business idea is for the local museum to be recognised as the museum for that municipality and with its own brand and to engage in tourism with the ambition to double or triple the economic output on the basis of the municipal annual grant.

So far this has gone quite well! We can see the small museums growing in to small entrepreneurial companies with a handful employees and growing visitor numbers. Most important from the perspective of the Jamtli Foundation is that “our own museum” is now visible in the countryside and is talked about at the mayor’s office in the smaller municipalities in positive ways and we rightfully can see that we contribute to local and regional development. We can also see that the wellbeing of the three regional companies is visible and important for all heads of departments in “our own museum” in Östersund. From a regional perspective we see that the numbers of people who engage with the museums has grown.

In Östersund the Jamtli Museums has for decades invested proportionally much effort in developing pedagogical methods and running these which has been important as the main tool when the museum was developed as a tourism attraction. The Jamtli museum reaches an audience which is very close to the average of the population in Sweden but with an over representation of young families. With this as a basic Jamtli Foundation has together with other heritage organisations in the Nordic and Baltic countries established The Nordic Centre of Heritage Learning & Creativity (NCK).

The NCK has its offices in Östersund and has now for some years positioned itself as an entrepreneurial little company with expert competences in heritage learning from praxis, political and research perspectives.

The Jamtli Museum has together with The National Gallery of Sweden (Nationalmuseum) come up with the vision to establish a National Gallery North as a satellite museum at Jamtli Museum. When writing this paper it seems to be realistic to open the national gallery at Jamtli museum in 2017 or 2018. It is expected that Jamtli Foundation with this will then employ 6 % more staff and that the visitor numbers is estimated to grow with 8-10 percent. If Jamtli Foundation and the National Gallery of Sweden succeed with our ambition of creating an unorthodox and exciting meeting between world class historical art collections and world class original pedagogical work the Jamtli Museum will have the potential of achieving national status and receive international interest.

The satellite museum concept is naturally another sign of the globalization where demand for access wherever people can be used in different ways to develop larger museum organisations and regions. The process of course comes with a prize! The relation between location and brand is challenged but that challenge can as illustrated in the example from Jämtland-Härjedalen Region in Sweden. The example seem more to be challenging and maybe disturbing to the nation state identity as museums as one of their primary tools can’t be counted on to be fixed in certai locations.