M28 - Motion in City Museums

Author(s)

Peter Lummel (Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin (City Museum of Berlin))

Keywords

Change & Innovation, Berlin, Exhibition: Story of Berlin

Abstract

Berlin is damned forever to become and never to be«, Karl Scheffler, 1910.

The speed of change and the vehemence of changes seems to have been particularly radical in Berlin since about the middle of the 19th century. In 2018, 110 years after its opening, the permanent exhibition „BerlinZEIT“ was opened in the central building of the Stadtmuseum, the "Märkisches Museum". The exhibition focuses on 18 "historical moments" of Berlin's history - all turning points that resulted in major changes for the city's citizens.

How does the Stadtmuseum Berlin deal with the approach of "telling" a city history on the basis of chosen central turning points? What role do the Berliners and their experiences of change play in the exhibition? Who tells the story, to what point are changes in perspective taken into account and how will those who have no interest in the history of the city be reached? Can a city's history provide impulses for a better understanding of current urban development? How can central points of world history that took place in Berlin be broken down into a focus on urban history in the exhibition? And last but not least, the question should be asked to what extent Berlin's dynamic of change differs from other metropolises.

The current permanent exhibition, together with other museum projects, is a test for the new development of the Märkisches Museum after a fundamental renovation and modernisation of the historic building. The lecture will also discuss initial considerations for the future of the traditional house from 2027 onwards.

Author(s)

Jakob Ingemann Parby (Museum of Copenhagen)

Keywords

Museology, Mobility, Urban Change

Abstract

What does it mean to move a museum? And in what ways can city museums work as sites of interpretation of the ephemeral processes of transformation and longevity in urban history. The paper uses the case of the Museum of Copenhagen's transformation between 2015 and 2020 as a case study and starting point for the exploration of such questions and explores the way in which the museum has used categories of topography and time as a guiding principle for the innovative layout of the galleries in the new museum creating a walk through the city inside the museum building and connecting topographies of the contemporary city with biographies, conflicts and ideals from the past.

Mikhael Bakhtin's concept of the chronotope has been translated into a curatorial guideline for the design and layout of the galleries while individual galleries have been developed along thematical lines with userinvolvement and cocreation as significant methodologies.

We reopened the museum on its new location in february 2020 and will include reception and visitor reactions in our presentation.

Author(s)

Xavier De la Selle (Lyon History Museum (Museé Gadagne))

Keywords

Museology,  Exhibition, Urban History

Abstract

The Lyon City Museum is 100 years old this year. Originaly, the first mission given to the museum was to extract the most powerful, pleasant and useful characteristics from the past in order to highlight what was produced in Lyon and signified the greatness of the city. It was a type of patriotic narrative, which aimed to develop or support a feeling of belonging to the « petites patries » (little homeland). 80 years later, a large project of complete renovation of the museum was launched. The new permanent exhibition, opened in 2009, was disappointing. The scenography was very classical and wholly « collections-oriented », very nice to look at, but not significant enough to understand the city.

Thus, a new reflexion began in 2015, in order to propose a more modern narrative of the city and a scenography more interactive which can allow public to project themselves in the city history and make a link with their own history. One of the first issues was the difficulty to define a city, of formulating a defintion of what a city is, accordind to who is being asked ask for : historians, archeologists, geographers, sociologists, etc.

How could the museum depart from the chronological exhibition, which was too much linear, without giving up the narrative approach ? Was it possible to have several narrative in one exhibition ? More than a thematic approach of the city, the museum aims to propose four different narratives, as four ways to tell the story, or four prisms through which on can read or look at the city. So the public can choose to visit just one of the four exhibitions or all the four exhibitions. In the future, the museum will have to deal with the question about updating the narrative in socalled « permanent » exhibition. If city museum are museum of the city includind present time, how far can the narrative go in the time ?

Author(s)

Laurent Védrine (Musée d'Aquitaine)

Keywords

Urban Heritage, Memory, Social Movement

Abstract

Bordeaux is a city that has been on the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2007. Its architectural splendor is particularly linked to the involvement of the Port de la Lune in the Atlantic slave trade in the 18th century. In addition, Bordeaux has benefited for twenty years from a great attractiveness in terms of national mobility and tourism. This attractiveness also has negative effects. Bordeaux was one of the epicenters of the “Gilets jaunes” or “Yellow vests” movement in France in 2020, one of the main causes being these urban changes and the rise in the price of rents which push people to live further and further away. How can a history museum present a contrasting and up-to-date city story allowing it to be attractive to its inhabitants and the tourist public?

Author(s)

Liz Stewart (National Museum Liverpool)

Keywords

Community, Co-research, Jewish Heritage

Abstract

One Liverpool street, Pembroke Place, was at the heart of a 2016-2019 Museum of Liverpool project, ‘Galkoff’s and Secret Life of Pembroke Place’. One street tells so many stories and is a route in to so many areas of Liverpool’s community history. Themes of change, migration, and community were revealed through co-research with community volunteers.

The ‘Galkoff’s and the Secret Life of Pembroke Place’ project especially focused on Liverpool’s Jewish community, many of whom lived in that area of Liverpool from the late eighteenth century to early twentieth century.

The project revealed the very diverse people who called Pembroke Place home, especially in the late nineteenth century. This paper evaluates the ways in which a range of approaches were brought together – historical research (especially by a large cohort of volunteers), archaeological excavation, and collecting memories from community elders – to reveal more about the history of the area. The stories revealed are now featured in an exhibition, online, and in interactive content in the Museum of Liverpool.

Building on this project, National Museums Liverpool is utilizing similar approaches to co-research, exploring multiple themes, and creating content through co-creation in our latest amazing project: the waterfront transformation.

Again, one geographical area of Liverpool reveals a huge plethora of stories which reflect the city’s history, the people who lived and work there and Liverpool’s global links, including through the trade in enslaved African people.

This paper will explore the ways in which museums working with communities can capture the history, significance and culture of places which are part of a vibrant and changing cityscape.

Author(s)

Mario Nascimento (Museum of Lisbon)

Keywords

City Museums, Explainig the City, Urban studies

Abstract

Most City Museums have a collection incorporated within the somehow long-time span of their own existence. Their varied nature reflects important mental changes occurred within the different incorporation periods: different motivations, purposes and meanings for a frequently very diverse museum collection.

This presentation focusses on the importance of a new insight and approach to both the collection and the city heritage, having for case study a painting from the long-term exhibition.

The picture depicts an hotel connecting to the central railway station of Lisbon: the place can be considered an historical frontier between the old city and the new city in the 1900’s; It connected Lisbon to Madrid and Paris. The picture conceals several dimensions: produced as an attempt of innovation, emulating Parisian impressionist subjects and criteria, depicting a rather banal – and thus, modern – city life moment, when such “modern” moments could be captured by unartistic photography. 

A second dimension is the context for its permanent display and the dialogues established within the room it was placed in. The innovativeness of the painting and it’s artistical values being underrated, the painting was linked an an illustrative memento of a changing point of the city expansion. 

The present reading proposal integrates the two dimensions of the painting, testimony of a mental change on how the same painting was perceived: as an historical document evoking the expectations, desires and conflicts of a gone-by city era, bridging it with a recent past perspective about the artwork and bringing it to the contemporaneity , simultaneously relating the interpretation of the painting and the geographical site pictured in it.

Author(s)

Kevin Ka-Hin Tsang (Universtiy of Cambridge)

Keywords

Bus, Heritage, Open-air museum

Abstract

This paper discusses the possibility of idea ‘the city as the largest open-air museum’. Material forms and experience of everyday transport, form part of urban history and knowledge, and transport history has been key as ‘public history’ (Scott and Divall, 2001). For instance, the London Transport Museum is centrally located in Covent Garden. Yet this paper seeks to go beyond the static museum site by studying the occasions of which heritage buses under preservation venture out for running in the city they used to serve. The discussion explains how such occasions potentially destabilise the locational boundaries of the static museum sites, incorporating what Featherstone (2007) observes as the postmodern features and playful approach to ‘montage exhibits that offer experiences’. It develops on the connections to the rest of the contemporary city being juxtaposed with the heritage buses from the yesteryear, which potentially activates other artifices in the city as ‘archival devices’ (Featherstone, 2009). 

With the ‘urban embeddedness’ of museums (Prior, 2011), the return of the authentic sight, sound and smell that come with the bus to the cityscape, pushes the limit of the museum and blurs its boundary with wider urban space. It also has implications on how the ‘open-air museum’ can be expanded resembling Marlaux’s (1967) ‘museum without wall’ thesis in the literal sense. The other focus is the sociality generated through the heritage buses in motion, and implications on how this particular form of living history entails an environment of nostalgia-arousal. Whereas Walsh (1992) argues that there is no guide in the open-air museum with visitors being left to admire the thingyness of the object, this paper sheds light on the organically developed conversations of people reacting to the (unanticipated) presence of the heritage bus in the city, triggering autobiographical, bottom-up, fragmented, and non-linear narratives. It discusses how the didactic mission of the museum is fulfilled alternatively, as to democratise knowledge transferral, with self-initiated personal stories being dominant, vis-à-vis the often critiqued authoritative master narratives. The paper concludes by how this case could contribute to the new museology of the city particularly on the mobilities dimension.