 This is a composite presentation by two persons for this particular reason. So let me start by stating the obvious, since I've been the teacher for the whole of my professional life, so I'm stating the obvious to start with. We are talking about archaeological collections. Very broadly speaking, archaeological collections in general are treated by, observed by, perceived by. Something is done to them by two groups of, well, two groups of individuals, two groups with different starting positions. One is professionals, which is us, and second is the public. We should bear in mind that somehow what we do with the collections eventually ends up in one way or another, in one form or another, in some public domain. So there is definitely some kind of relationship between professionals dealing with the collections and non-professionals or the wider public also wanting to know something. Otherwise, we would be completely redundant. If the public, the people not being professionals, were not interested in what we are doing, then what the hell? So those professionals are, in fact, offering or are supposed to offer some kind of an invitation of these archaeological collections for the public. So again, there are two ways of doing it. First of all, by presentation, which is quite conventionally thought of as a museum practice. So there are people, professionals doing interpretation in order to present things in the museums. On the other hand, there is research, of course, and research is somehow seen as a thing located very, very firmly in academia. So we have people doing in museums, people presenting things in museums, and on the other hand, people researching and doing some kind of academic, very serious work. And for one reason or another, especially in the, judging by the experience from my own academic community, from my own professional community in the country I come from, these two groups of professionals don't communicate quite well. And that's one of the reasons that Tatiana, who is a museum expert and myself, who come from academia, decided trying to do things together and to try thinking over this bridge inside the professional community dealing with collections. So what we are going to talk today is more or less one of our efforts, one of our attempts to try and bridge the gap inside the professional community dealing with collections. So we, in fact, have the same professional training, but for the best part of our professional lives, we have different experiences, different aims, and more or less different priorities. And there's quite a lot of very severe problems for our profession. So to start from my point of view, somebody had to be first. Not the professor. Let us, for the sake of argument, imagine that there is some definite thing called the past. And that definite thing called the past, of course, is a kind of a construct, but for the sake of the argument, as I said, let's start there. And now I'm building very hardly on the things done by Kevin Lucas, and he's talked about total record. So one part of this, the past, is then being preserved because of all kinds of physical and other agencies. Yet smaller part of it is being retrieved by archeologists. Even smaller part of it is being studied by archeologists. And finally, we are shrinking to the part which is presented. And in each and every cycle of selection, there are some intentional and unintentional criteria that are being employed in order to shrink these cycles. So what we get in the end is a very small part percentage of the whole possible potential past that we might be collecting, studying, and presenting. So from the point of view of an academic archeologist doing research, that's how things are for me. And now a slightly different view is going to be presented by time. Oh, sorry, it's not. So now we are moving to the Ringelow Museums and we do have there something that is archeological record that our colleagues are sometimes nice, sometimes not nice to give us. While they are giving us my lot of material. It is great when the material is coming to the museum and it could be acquired in completely different ways. One is research done by a museum or by an institution. And then happily we do have all the data we need to explain that record. And they could come as well as gifts or donation or purchases and probably most of the time with not really accurate and really true data that we have. So we are insisting on the context. We are then processing material, making that selection even smaller, doing first our favorite description. And then we are categorizing things into something called the collection and something called static collection, giving already that some kind of selection. And then we are valorizing those objects first of all in the terms in my country, is it really normal cultural heritage or is it extraordinary? But basically we are valorizing objects in the terms of could they be exhibited? So do they possess quality to be in some kind of presentation? And then we are exhibiting them, giving tiny little part again of the whole collection we have. And you know that usual numbers for museums are, the most is 10% and I think that people are usually lying about that because it's not. And then finally you have some kind of mediation. So in that process you have several selections going again, several psychoses, but in this case one very important moment is really moment of categorizing because that is the moment that objects are transforming into heritage and they are now written in the records as something that is recognized in heritage and the moment of exhibition when they are losing the context we really wanted in the first place. We don't really care in museum about context because you're never ever going to reconstruct the context that someone else destroyed. And then we are doing it by the criteria that are really connected with the training that basically personal, even if there is a policy of a climate that acquisition we are doing it personally, we are doing that very intentionally and we are not objective at all. So we are not neutral. So every our decision about what to keep, how to divide, what to collect, what to exhibit or more importantly what not is really very subjective and very political and connected with different aims, objectives and everything even if we have same training. And we wanted to show you really on the example of the collection of the National Museum how those selected representation of the past finally look. So for the National Museum in Belgrade which is the central institution of Serbia, museum institution, Asian, Greece and in this busy talk was from the 1930s. We then gained the beautiful building which was previously meant to be a court building and it was under the name of the Museum of Principle and a huge part of it was re-collection. Then represented the museum with the idea to show really European origin of our culture and connections with European ideas. Then in a new building in the 1950s when we got the new building which was previously a bank central Greece was even physically in focus because it's the atrium type building which continued until 98. And again Greece being in focus but do we really have Greek sites in Serbia? We don't. All the material is coming from the excavations National Museum done in Montenegro and in Macedonia. Finally, in one point of time we got our own Greek site which was the obviously most northern site with Greek material and most southern site with Celtic material. And we were so happy, it is called Kalikršica and it is beautiful and very important site. And we were so thrilled and the excavations were done by Archimagic List, the Geotank by National Museum and the Museum. We made a couple of exhibitions showing them not just in Belgrade but in other cities in Serbia and as well as in Slovenia in one moment of time. Finishing with great big exhibition with a strange message that you are going to hear more about after us. But after that great big exhibition that took like 80% of our exhibition space Kalikršivica is now in our new display just one showcase. So did we shrank the importance of Kalikršivica or what is going on with that? So the site is still relevant. The site is really very important but as we want to show and we are basically showing in our permanent displays those prestigious windows of tower and progress and idea of how old nation is and how beautiful things are. We were creating kind of very false past and history and expecting and that is happening the public to bow to our authority and what I'm asking and what is happening is how our collections are really mediating past in this way. What tiny little part of the past we are doing. This collection is now, Kalikršivica is now in inventory of the National Museum of Allegrate Greek and Hellenistic collection but that's not the only thing that we have. We have some other important things that. So among the collections in the National Museum among the objects held in the National Museum of Allegrate are things from the Princeton graves and I won't dwell upon Princeton graves it's another issue but that was a particular focus of my research as a researcher and I was doing stuff such as this thing which is from Novipazar and also another thing held in the Museum of Belgrade which is material from Trebenista. So I simply took out of the collection of the Greek collection in the National Museum the pieces I wanted to take care of to think about to study. So I simply fragmented again not only myself that's what we do. I took out of the collection the pieces I wanted to study. So they are together they are physically stored together does that make them a collection? Or perhaps collecting and collating through research I was making another collection. I was in fact devising, constructing another collection by joining these artifacts with another simple set of, similar set of artifacts which was found in another museum. So I was in fact joining the material from the National Museum of Belgrade with the museum in Sofia with the museum in Sarajevo collating in fact all kinds of different material different collections, different physical collections different museum collections into my own assemblage for the sake of my own research. I was merging collections in order to back up my authority of researcher. So in fact, the collection may be what is collected in physical sense but also a collection that we are making through research sometimes doesn't overlap neatly with what's being stored together. We are in fact inventing collections all over again. Now back to that. Yeah, so as you saw the first slide with Treveniste and this is actually one site divided in three, three states. Three states? Yeah, so we have on one side that authority of creator and we have collections. So what were our question about the different cycles of selection and election because I really do think and we both think that our authority is really creating what do we think it's heritage and archeological material. So are the collections things that are sorted and packed or just part revealed because the public can't see everything. And when we are thinking about that you have to really be aware that we are talking, we were talking today quite a lot about history of what's happening in about 19th century and 20th century but what we are doing now is the same thing. So we have also really interesting histories of collections happening right now and you have really to be aware what we are doing, both of us, what researchers are doing with giving us material, what archeologists, creators are doing, showing material and we are so proud, museums are really proud that we have all the evidence thinking it is real. It is really showing something but with that kind of selection, my question is really, oh, sorry, that's not my question. I'm sorry. Yeah. Is this selection when you neatly pack your material and put it in a storage? What kind of selection is that and what kind of accessibility we do really have? And we had to think about that because really what we are doing now and what kind of selection we are making and what kind of connections we are making is really creating archeological heritage for the future. And we do have to think about practices and we have to think about new policies and we have to think about better cooperation in between two of us. Yeah. Thank you.