Adorning the walls of the Manga Lab
“During the 80s most of our cartoons on TV were broadcast on channels from Oman, Kuwait and Saudi Arabia,” Al Halabi explains. “Most of the cartoons they showed originally came from Japan but were dubbed into Arabic and to be honest, we didn’t know where they actually came from at the time.”
For Manuel Rabaté, the Louvre Abu Dhabi’s director, temporary exhibitions not only encourage repeat visits to the museum, they help to reinforce its claim to be the first universal museum in the Arab world.
“The universal narrative that’s communicated through our permanent galleries is our backbone, our DNA, this is who we are and it’s what we do,” he explains. “They present a generous discourse about humanity and cultural exchange because we want to tell the story of the world to the world.”
“What is specific to the Louvre Abu Dhabi is the way that we immediately entered into the global major league of museums because of the unprecedented access we have to the fully mature collections of our partners and because of the commitment of the government of Abu Dhabi,” he explains. “This was and is our responsibility. To make sure that this maturity was evident in the museum from day one. But we are also the museum of Abu Dhabi and this gives us access to friends and partners of Abu Dhabi around the world and throughout the region, so when you have these two networks, working strongly together, there is huge potential.”
An unparalleled investment in culture and education in a rapidly changing, multi-cultural society where 200 languages are spoken, the Louvre Abu Dhabi is simultaneously an intellectual exercise in globalisation and localisation, a vehicle for the projection of Abu Dhabi’s soft power and an important driver in the emirate’s tourism industry.
The Japanese have long understood this kind of hybrid phenomenon and in the 1980s they even developed a word, glocalisation, to describe it. The idea derives from the notion of dochakuka, originally an agricultural principle of adapting farming techniques to local conditions but which also conveys the idea of something that becomes “deeply rooted”.
Both global and local, international and yet a product of its very specific locality, perhaps this is the best way to understand the Louvre Abu Dhabi: the world’s first truly glocal museum.
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