STAM's permanent collection tells a coherent story about Ghent by bringing together elements from the city's memory. Its core collection, the Bijloke collection, illustrates social life in the city between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries. For the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries STAM needs to draw on objects from other collections.
The ‘Ghent collection’ is a core concept in the STAM set-up. It comprises all the items, material and immaterial, that form part of the heritage of Ghent and its inhabitants, from the very first traces of settlement to the present day. It includes all the museum items, objects, documents (from the archives and elsewhere), archaeological sites, and so on, that are to be found in municipal and other institutions and in private collections, both in Ghent and elsewhere. In a word, the ‘Ghent collection’ is the memory of the city, spread over many existing collections.
One of STAM’s credos is collection mobility. By means of reciprocal arrangements with other collections, it aims to establish long-term loans that will enable items from the ‘Ghent collection’ to be displayed in the place that does them most justice. Ghent already has a long tradition of collection mobility. STAM will give it a new impulse: it will become more intensive, on a larger scale and go beyond the city boundaries, including non-municipal collections. The emphasis is on two-way traffic where possible and appropriate.
Less visible, but equally important, is the iconographic material that is coming to STAM from many different institutions at home and abroad. This wealth of digital visual material underpins the story of the city and feeds both the permanent circuit and the multimedia.
