Learning from the World's Maritime Museums: Notes from ICMM 2026
September 22, 2026 – Pasay City, NCR, Philippines
Article by AIMS Museo Maritimo Team Every two years, maritime museum professionals from around the world gather to compare notes on a question none of us ever fully answer: how do you tell the story of the sea? This September, that conversation took place in Sydney, Australia, where the Australian National Maritime Museum hosted the 22nd Biennial Congress of the International Congress of Maritime Museums (ICMM) — the first time the congress has been held in Australia. Under the theme "Maritime Museums in Action — Moving Forward with Courage and Conviction," the week brought together delegates from Europe, the Americas, Asia, and the Pacific.
AIMS Museo Maritimo was represented at the congress by Daryl Lorence Abarca, who attended to present research and — with real gratitude — to receive the ICMM Richard Foster Bursary Award. It was a chance to listen more than to speak, and to see, in concrete terms, just how many different ways there are to do this work well.
So Many Ways to Tell a Story
If anything stood out, it was how differently museums around the world are approaching the same basic task — and how much there still is to learn from each of them. Keynote speaker Kim Sajet opened the congress with a reminder that courageous leadership asks for vision, values, veracity, and vulnerability together, which felt like a fitting note for a week spent mostly listening.
In China, Feng Zhao spoke about connecting maritime culture to the everyday experience of shipping, and about the idea of museums acting as "connectors" within a wider, collaborative network. In Sweden, Lars Amréus described the long, patient work of preserving the Vasa — a reminder that some of the most important museum work is slow and unglamorous. In Ukraine, Dmytro Kobaliia spoke about preserving archaeological sites amid active conflict, which put a lot of smaller frustrations into perspective. In Western Australia, Corioli Souter shared early plans for the Batavia 2029 project, built toward the 400th anniversary of the Batavia shipwreck.
Other sessions were a reminder that good intentions aren't enough on their own. Brazil's Larissa Nabuco Nogueira spoke about how her museum grew out of a single expedition, and the ongoing work of preserving its purpose while still being willing to change — investing in people, building trust slowly, and recognizing expertise that already exists in-house rather than assuming it needs to be imported. A session from the Western Australian Museum touched on weaving Indigenous practice into exhibitions, and a presentation by Mereoni was a strong reminder that relationships and community consent have to come before research, not after — and that not everything a community shares is meant to be published.
Technology came up often, but almost always as a tool in service of something else. AI integration, VR tours, and discussions of discoverability were framed less as innovations to chase and more as means to an end — the story still has to come first.
A Few Quiet Threads Worth Following
One session, on the ICMM Ibero-América network, offered a modest but useful model: museums sharing exhibitions and resources so that smaller institutions aren't starting from scratch. It's the kind of idea that seems obvious in hindsight and hard to build in practice — but worth exploring.
A number of early, informal conversations also began during the week — about ocean literacy with colleagues at the Hong Kong Maritime Museum, about Austronesian research with counterparts in Fiji, Samoa, Barcelona Maritime Museum, and the Galleon Museum, and about what a loose network among Philippine maritime museums might even look like. None of this is further along than a conversation yet, and much of it may not go anywhere. But it felt worth writing down.
A Small Note of Thanks
Receiving the Richard Foster Bursary Award was humbling — it's a reminder that this work is seen and valued elsewhere, and an encouragement to keep at it rather than a mark of having arrived. If there's one thing the congress made clear, it's that no single museum tells the whole story of the sea, and everyone in that room is still figuring it out together.
AIMS Museo Maritimo is grateful for the chance to have been part of that conversation, and hopes to bring some of what was learned into future work here — one small step at a time.
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