The working group "Time"
This group was dealing with „Time” as a possible topic for the future children’s exhibition in the Världskulturmuseet. As we were a lot of members in the group, we first had to figure out how we can divide into smaller groups to provide a productive working progress. The first thing we did was to approach the notion of “time” with a broad brainstorming to find out which aspects of time are interesting to deal with. A lot of things came into our minds before we finally decided to split up into three subgroups which devoted themselves to the three periods of time “Past”, “Present” and “Future” in very different ways.
Past
„Pieces of Memory“ sketches a project that aims to involve the different communities of Gothenburg and enables them to create and curate their own exhibition in a participatory process. In cooperation with schools, the children collect their families' stories via an object and written texts and get the chance to display them publicly, for example in the glass cases on the Avenyn in the city centre. Encouraging a dialogue between the children and their parents and grandparents, the project raises questions about the families' identities and connects stories from families with different cultural backgrounds. A digital version of the object and its story will finally be fed into an online archive and thus be connected to the potential Time-Exhibition at Världskulturmuseet.
Present
This group was inspired by the principles of LARPING (live action role-playing) to create a participatory exhibition scene where the visitor is involved in generating the exhibition’s content. The creation of such an open an experimental space encourages the visitor to contribute to the collaborative creation of a story by interacting with the shown objects and other visitors. Every participant can have a different interpretation of an object and therefore also a very personal reading of the whole exhibition. So the experience people make while visiting the exhibition is always depending on the other “players” which finally means that the “game” can always be repeated, the visitors can acquire different knowledge whenever they come back. This possibility of repetition also constitutes a significant advantage for a permanent exhibition. Click here for further information!
Future
Talking about the identity crisis of the museum, being a normal state of mind, inspired us to use this topic as a basic idea of our subgroup work. The question of identity is mostly connected to the future. We think that not knowing how to deal with certain problems somehow connects the museum and its visitors. This is why we created two small video drafts for a provoking campaign that shall generate participation where it happens today: in the social media. The videos show dystopic settings of participation in the Världskulturmuseet of the Future and deal with two problems that were discussed with the museum:
How can we bring back the objects?
How do we bring in visitors?
Dealing with its weaknesses or uncertainties via this campaign, the museum would at the same time confront the visitors with its own questions:
How do they want to participate? How far would the museum like to open its doors?