Beba Pérez Bernárdez is Director of the Museum of Almería

1. Why are you personally on social media?

I’d miss so many things if I wasn’t! Although the time I spend on social networks is usually related to work, sometimes work and personal life merge. I am happy being “social”, I smile more often. My timeline is full of culture, museums and cultural heritage, the line between them is very thin.

Social media gives me a space that is more free and closer in which to share interests and create critical debate. A real space for shared knowledge, where I learn every day and in which information and the museum (my little world) expand.

2. Why did your museum register for #MuseumWeek?

In 2014 we dropped our profile newly created @MuseoAlmeria in #MuseumWeek, a sweeping initiative that taught us to love Twitter and its ability to create community and conversation.

We did not want to miss this occasion and, for the fourth year running, it seems to us to be a unique experience that we can use to interact with our audience. This audience is generally fixed throughout the year, but this week we offer exclusive proposals and also take our presence on networks to a local audience, bringing together the online-offline. It gives us a unique way to expand our area of influence and take our collection and Almería’s thousands of years of history trough media.

The possibilities offered by #MuseumWeek to talk to other cultural institutions and their professionals are infinite. We do #equipomuseos, we learn from other experiences and generate feedback and content  7 days, 7 hashtags, 7 themes to share who we are, what do and also this year #WomenMW. There was no way we could miss it!

3. What are you planning to do to support the #womenMW initiative during #MuseumWeek?

In the Museum of Almeria, from the very moment the museum was conceived, we have aimed to seek a more egalitarian reading of prehistory, history and museums but, despite being an archaeological museums with one of the highest female representation in museography in Spain, still we have a lot more work to do. So, throughout #MuseumWeek we will use the hashtag #WomenMW to show the importance of tasks associated with women and that have been missed off the exhibition speeches. We will show the current work of many of the women that make the museum day by day, also we will make a stop in the intercultural and gender project “Hilando Vidas”, currently one of the temporary exhibitions, and we will show pieces of our collection traditionally associated with women and others which have been associated with men but which archaeological research has questioned. In our square we will also put forward a project with this same motive of making the “other 50 per cent of the world” visible, because – We make history too!