På det livgivande seminariet Creative Space, som professorn i museologi i Umeå, Kerstin Smeds, arrangerade 1-3 oktober i år, möttes forskare och praktiker från in- och utlandet för att diskutera utställningsmediet. Bland de inbjudna fanns UEForums chefredaktör Eva Persson som i en workshop ville slå ett slag för nya former av grundforskning kring museiföremål.

UEForums bloggare Birgitta Fridsdotter har kommit över hennes inledning till workshopen och fått tillåtelse att publicera den.

I HAVE A DREAM

Welcome to this dream session!
I call my dream A phenomenology of objects.

”LEVANDEGÖRA” is a Swedish word which is extremely popular among museum people. Museum directors, museologists, researchers, exbibition curators all repeat the phrase ”VI MÅSTE LEVANDEGÖRA VÅRA FÖREMÅL” like a mantra. What they mean is that the museum must BRING the material heritage in their reserves TO LIFE – in exhibitions.

Museums have tried for decades to bring the objects to life. Using different methods and according to different theories. Today the object is brought to life in expensive scenographies, seductive light and sound installations and complicated digital arrangements.

I´m dreaming of a ”RETURN TO THE OBJECTS THEMSELVES”
- to quote Edmund Husserl, founder of the philosophy of phenemenology.

And therefore: in my dream I see the staff of the museum sitting around a table and on its surface a heap of artifacts brouht from different reserves of the museum. All people are looking at, touching, feeling, smelling, tasting and listening to the objects, trying to find their most distinctive qualities – from a sensorial point of view. They are comparing their experiences, but every curator categorises his or her chose of object according to his or her personal taste, smell, vision, feeling, touch and hearing…

After many such workshops in the museum, the exhibitions would change, new topics would be found, new ways of putting objects together would be invented and a sense of lust, reality and poetry would diffuse and scatter in the exhibition hall. Or least in my dream of the future of museology and the thinking about exhibitions.

THE END

Now it´s up to you to do the same. Choose three artifacts (belonging to the room, on your body, in your handbag), and explore them through your senses and categorise them: do they belong to vision, smell, hearing, feeling, touch or taste?

Eva Persson
Creative Space Umeå, October 2008

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