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The Theme of an Exhibition and the Balance between an existingCollection of Museum objects and the Acquisition of new ones( with special reference to the exhibition" Love is in the air"- Lovegifts in the traditional Slovene culture)

Bojana Rogelj Škafar, Ljubljana/ Slowenien

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As an introduction I would like to quote some ideas put for-ward by Ivo Maroević in the final section of the paper he presentedat the 3rd General Conference of the European Network of Ethno-graphic and Social History Museums( NET) in Namur( Belgium, 10.12. 2. 1999). Addressing the essential tasks of these museums inthe new millennium, Maroević wrote that they will turn into oases ofknowledge about the ways of living of peoples and societies, but alsointo places which will encourage people to relativize the present.Museum installations of the past, set up in the present, will help peo-ple to avoid essential errors in the future( if only they want to under-stand the message, I would add). The use of museum objects willcontribute to the credibility of an exhibition's story and message. It isimportant, however, that the installation of an exhibition( its" insce-nation") is neither aggressive nor conservative. The modern commu-nication media and objects used and the intended messages will haveto be in a language the visitors of an exhibition will understand astheir own. That, in Maroević's opinion, is the entire wisdom of futuremuseological options: the coexistence of the material and immaterial,of Body and Mind( I. Maroević 2000, s. 43).

I use these ideas as a starting- point for my reflections on theexhibition" Love is in the air- Love gifts in the traditional Sloveneculture" in the light of the balance between the use of the existingholdings of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum and that of newlyacquired objects, including modern communication media in supportof the latter group of objects.

The theme of the exhibition indeed required the acquisition ofmodern objects, complementing the existing collection of objects,which were largely acquired before the Second World War. Thisnecessity confirmed once more that the changing social conditions