Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

This paper discusses museum practices aiming at new forms of engagement, inclusion, and social emancipation of visitors by enhancing interactions between current exhibitions and the visitors’ own life experiences, expressed in narratives. The point of departure is a series of workshops at the regional Västerbottens Museum’s (Umea, Sweden), investigated with ethnographic methods, including participant observation, conversations, and in-depth interview. Regional museums are traditionally repositories of canonical culture and historical knowledge, but in Västerbottens Museum, there is a pronounced shift towards “narrative” as a crucial and omnipresent human practice, with deeper political and ideological significances. Reaching little represented and seldom participating groups lie at the very heart of the museum’s pedagogical stance and activities. The creative, life-narrative workshops are explicitly conveying a wish for combining traditional exhibitions with more interactive engagement from the visitors to create their own meanings. A policy is to offer two to three hours day-time workshops in order to reach people who do not usually attend exhibitions, e.g. unemployed, retired, on disability pensions, etc. The workshops are even offered in cross connections with educational institutions, to school classes and courses for recently arrived migrants. The visitors are, in playful and respectful forms, given the task to use their own life experiences to tell stories, “real,” semi-fictional, or poetic, in interaction with an exhibition. They engage in a non-prestigious, exhibition-inspired narrating with a self-biographical basis and personal reflections. The aim is thus not only speaking “to” but also “with” the visitors, and to listen respectfully.