Mission and vision
Sportimonium is a museum that in partnership with its heritage community seeks to be the national hub and knowledge centre for the safeguard and promotion of the cultural heritage of the sports and movement cultures, with particular focus on games diversity on a Flemish, national and international level. This objective is guided by public focus and social engagement.
Clarification
The name Sportimonium is a melding of the words 'sport' and 'patrimonium' and stands for sports heritage.
Hub contains concepts such as dynamism, stimulation, interactions, (international) cooperation and providing incentives.
- Safeguarding implies concepts such as compilation, identification, documentation, academic research, storage, preservation, transference, promotion and revaluation.
- Movement culture has four overlapping aspects: body culture (activities such as gymnastics, fitness, training), physical competition (top sports, Olympic Games, competitive sports, championships, setting records), games (leisure in the sense of traditional games and physically active recreation) and performance (expressive movement such as sporting spectacles, dance, acrobatics). Sports positions itself in the central intersection of these four components. The movement culture concept allows sports to be situated in a broad historical and transcultural perspective.
- By games diversity is meant - by analogy with the term biodiversity - the perpetuation of the world’s rich and diverse movement culture.
- Social engagement concerns the tracking and fuelling of public debate, including on the policy level, and the continual critical response to social trends, targeting all demographics and with particular focus on vulnerable groups.
