Exhibitions as Research: Experimental Methods in Museums [1 ed.]

Table of contents :
Contents
List of figures
List of contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Exhibitions as research • Peter Bjerregaard
Part I: Cross- disciplinary collaboration
1 Sketches for a methodology on exhibition research • Henrik Treimo
2 Joining transdisciplinary forces to revive the past: Establishing a Viking Garden at the Natural History Museum, Oslo • Anneleen Kool and Axel Dalberg Poulsen
3 Ethnography, exhibition practices and undisciplined encounters: The generative work of amulets in London • Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup
Part II: Sensing knowledge
4 Exhibitions as philosophical carpentry: On object-oriented exhibition-making • Adam Bencard
5 Museum objects in the marketplace • Kari K. Aarrestad
6 Exhibition-making as aesthetic inquiry • Peter Bjerregaard
7 Object-spaces? Sensory engagements and museum experiments • Elizabeth Hallam
Part III: Collaborating with audiences
8 Exhibitions, engagement and provocation: From Future Animals to Guerilla Archaeology • Jacqui Mulville
9 Developing and promoting research in a museum thirdspace: Breaking barriers where people walk • Ellen T. Bøe, Hege I. Hollund, Grete Lillehammer, Bente Ruud and Paula U. Sandvik
10 Visitor dialogue and participation as knowledge generating practices in exhibition work: What can museum experts learn from it? • Guro Jørgensen
11 How the exhibition became co- produced: Attunement and participatory ontologies for museums • Helen Graham
Index

Citation preview

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EXHIBITIONS AS RESEARCH

Exhibitions as Research contends that museums would be more attractive to both researchers and audiences if we consider exhibitions as knowledge-​in-​the-​making rather than platforms for disseminating already-​established insights. Analysing the theoretical underpinnings and practical challenges of such an approach, the book questions whether it is possible to exhibit knowledge that is still in the making, whilst also considering which concepts of “knowledge” apply to such a format. The book also considers what the role of audience might be if research is extended into the exhibition itself. Providing concrete case studies of projects where museum professionals have approached exhibitionmaking as a knowledge-​generating process, the book considers tools of application and the challenges that might emerge from pursuing such an approach. Theoretically, the volume analyses the emergence of exhibitions as research as part of recent developments within materiality theories, object-​oriented ontology and participatory approaches to exhibition-making. Exhibitions as Research will be of interest to academics and students engaged in the study of museology, material culture, anthropology and archaeology. It will also appeal to museum professionals with an interest in current trends in exhibition-​making. Peter Bjerregaard holds a PhD in anthropology and works as program manager at Danish Museum for Science and Technology. Until recently he was senior adviser of exhibitions at Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. His recent interest has been on exhibitions as a particular mode of research and in developing experimental approaches to exhibition-making that allow research to materialize in non-​textual forms. He has been project leader and curator for a number of exhibitions, among them COLLAPSE –​human being in an unpredictable world and Letting go. Together with Anders Emil Rasmussen and Tim Flohr Sørensen he edited Materalities of Passing: Explorations in Transformation, Transition and Transience (2016).

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ROUTLEDGE RESEARCH IN MUSEUM STUDIES

23 The Private Collector’s Museum Public Good Versus Private Gain Georgina Walker 24 Museums as Cultures of Copies Edited by Brenna Brita 25 The Personalization of the Museum Visit Art Museums, Discourse, and Visitors Seph Rodney 26 Narratives of Vulnerability in Museums American Interpretations of the Great Depression Meighen Katz 27 Museum and Gallery Publishing From Theory to Case Study Sally Hughes 28 Museums and Centers of Contemporary Art in Central Europe after 1989 Katarzyna Jagodzińska 29 Exhibitions as Research Experimental Methods in Museums Edited by Peter Bjerregaard For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/​Routledge-​Research-​in-​ Museum-​Studies/​book-​series/​RRIMS

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EXHIBITIONS AS RESEARCH Experimental Methods in Museums

Edited by Peter Bjerregaard

iv

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Peter Bjerregaard; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Peter Bjerregaard to be identified as the author of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-​in-​Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-​in-​Publication Data Names: Bjerregaard, Peter. Title: Exhibitions as research : experimental methods in museums / edited by Peter Bjerregaard. Description: London ; New York : Routledge, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2019013690 (print) | LCCN 2019014428 (ebook) | ISBN 9781315627779 (master ebook) | ISBN 9781317239048 (pdf) | ISBN 9781317239024 (mobi) | ISBN 9781317239031 (epub3) | ISBN 9781138646063 (hardback : alk. paper) Subjects: LCSH: Museum exhibits–Planning. | Museum buildings–Designs and plans. Classification: LCC AM151 (ebook) | LCC AM151 .E9657 2020 (print) | DDC 069/.5–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019013690 ISBN: 978-​1-​138-​64606-​3  (hbk) ISBN: 978-​1-​315-​62777-​9  (ebk) Typeset in Bembo Std by Newgen Publishing UK Visit the eResources: www.routledge.com/​9781138646063

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CONTENTS

List of figures  List of contributors  Acknowledgements  Introduction: Exhibitions as research  Peter Bjerregaard

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PART I

Cross-​disciplinary collaboration 

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1 Sketches for a methodology on exhibition research  Henrik Treimo

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2 Joining transdisciplinary forces to revive the past: Establishing a Viking Garden at the Natural History Museum, Oslo  Anneleen Kool and Axel Dalberg Poulsen

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3 Ethnography, exhibition practices and undisciplined encounters: The generative work of amulets in London  Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup

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PART II

Sensing knowledge 

65

4 Exhibitions as philosophical carpentry: On object-​oriented exhibition-making  Adam Bencard

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5 Museum objects in the marketplace  Kari K. Aarrestad

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6 Exhibition-making as aesthetic inquiry  Peter Bjerregaard

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7 Object-​spaces? Sensory engagements and museum experiments  Elizabeth Hallam

109

PART III

Collaborating with audiences 

129

8 Exhibitions, engagement and provocation: From Future Animals to Guerilla Archaeology  Jacqui Mulville

131

9 Developing and promoting research in a museum thirdspace: Breaking barriers where people walk  Ellen T. Bøe, Hege I. Hollund, Grete Lillehammer, Bente Ruud and Paula U. Sandvik

148

10 Visitor dialogue and participation as knowledge generating practices in exhibition work: What can museum experts learn from it?  Guro Jørgensen

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11 How the exhibition became co-​produced: Attunement and participatory ontologies for museums  Helen Graham

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Index 

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FIGURES

1 .1 1.2 1.3 1.4 1.5 1.6 1.7 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7 3.1 3.2 4.1 5.1 5 .2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5 .6 5.7

The Thing exhibition  Layout of the LAB  Gathering at the Thing  Models in the zone of “space”, available for the museum visitors  Multi-​disciplinary collaboration around objects  Multi-​disciplinary collaboration on models  The curator giving a public talk on the “Hitler stone” in the LAB  Viking plant selection  Interdisciplinarity and the creative process  The ship-​shape  Viking Garden symbolism  Vikings around the world  Design inspirations  Research  Still from Charmed Life in Contemporary London  Still from Charmed Life in Contemporary London  Landscape Epithelia by Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt, 2017  The Post-​it note on our front door the day after we closed the museum for renovation in 2013  One of the three exhibition spots at the mall, The Lagoon  Discussing objects with the audience  Sales products were presented in a similar fashion as the museum objects were, with a small text plate  The costume used by a Norwegian slave and a collection of ethnographica from the exhibition “Imageries from the Colonies”  Outside the Wine Monopoly  Beads from West Africa displayed outside the jewellery store to the right, presented like sales products 

24 24 25 26 26 27 29 41 42 44 45 46 48 50 59 60 76 82 85 86 86 87 88 92

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viii  List of figures

6 .1 Constructing in order to avoid collapse  6.2 The three themes organised as a Venn diagram  6.3 The board game workshop  6.4 The lashing workshop  6.5 COLLAPSE: human being in an unpredictable world. Detail from the Stone Age part of the exhibition  7.1 “Designing Bodies”, exhibition, Qvist Gallery, Hunterian Museum, RCS, 2015–​16  7.2 Materials used in trials to develop MARTYN, display case  7.3 Models of the foot, display case and photographs  7.4 Installation in the “Rooms Experiment”, 2017: “Locked Rooms: walking through rooms two floors below the dissecting room including workshop and mortuary”  7.5 Installation in the “Rooms Experiment”, 2017: “Bird Staircase: walking through locked rooms, one floor below the dissecting room, including pipes”  8.1 Future Animals, created by the young people  8.2 Future Animals, created by the museum audience  8.3 Back to the Future at Einstein’s Garden  8.4 Shamanic Street Preachers 2012  8.5 Data gathered from consultation with the public at Wilderness Festival 2016, Oxfordshire  9.1 The expert group experimented with ideas, and improvised a variety of approaches to public involvement in the working process of the project “Where People Walk”  9.2 Pupils doing archaeology in a restoration excavation at the Hellvik elementary school grounds  9.3 Research partners in a palaeodiatory study: Sampling hair in the high school lab., Stavanger  9.4 A “story plate” event: Historic food tasting tests at the Research Days in Stavanger  9.5 The first “Meet the researcher” event in the museum in/​out box: Sean Dexter Denham explains the mysteries of ancient human bones  10.1 The Laboratory Room, with the Agdenes wolf in front and the board game “Survival of the fittest” at the back of the picture  10.2 Selfie with the black listed boar  10.3 Final exhibition: “Continuous Change –​From the Ice Age to the Future. 12,000 Years in Norway”  10.4 In the laboratory zone in the final exhibition, you can use dendrochronological method to find the age of old wood samples  11.1 The introductory panel for the In Our Own Words: Stories of Croydon’s Day Centres exhibition  11.2 People at work in the Waylands Day Centre laundry  11.3 The Garden Centre was another place people worked in the Day Centres  11.4 The History of Day Centres project and exhibition took place in the wake of quite radical change in people’s lives 

100 102 103 105 106 114 116 118 122 123 133 134 138 142 145 152 154 155 156 157 169 172 174 175 182 184 185 191

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CONTRIBUTORS

Kari K. Aarrestad is an archaeologist and works as head of the Department of Exhibitions, Learning and

Public Services at University Museum of Bergen. She is concerned with the role of the modern museum in modern society, specifically how the older museum institutions can adapt to modern expectations. Adam Bencard is Associate Professor in Medical Humanities at the Medical Museion, University of

Copenhagen, and also affiliated with The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Basic Metabolic Research. His research interest includes philosophies of materiality and presence, as well as the philosophical and cultural ramifications of contemporary microbiome research and what it means to be human in a post-​ genomic world. He has also curated several exhibitions at the Medical Museion, including the award-​ winning Mind the Gut (alongside Associate Professor Louise Whiteley) which opened in the fall of 2017. Peter Bjerregaard holds a PhD in anthropology and works as program manager at Danish Museum

for Science and Technology. Until recently he was senior adviser of exhibitions at Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo. His recent interest has been on exhibitions as a particular mode of research and in developing experimental approaches to exhibition-making that allow research to materialize in non-​textual forms. He has been project leader and curator for a number of exhibitions, among them COLLAPSE –​human being in an unpredictable world and Letting go. Together with Anders Emil Rasmussen and Tim Flohr Sørensen he edited Materalities of Passing: Explorations in Transformation, Transition and Transience (2016). Ellen T. Bøe is consultant and museum teacher at Museum of Archaeology, University of Stavanger.

She is responsible for the museum’s school service and the planning of school visits to archaeological excavations in close collaboration with project managers of fieldworks, schools and other regional actors. She is interested in the development of visitor standards where participation and involvement in archaeological fieldwork are a priority area. Nathalia Brichet, PhD, is a postdoc at the University of Aarhus where she is part of the collective

research group “Aarhus University Research on the Anthropocene”. She is also part of the research project “Natural Goods? Processing Raw Materials in Global Times”. Her research is focused on extractive

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industries in Greenland and Denmark. Brichet uses her fieldwork to collect and exhibit anthropological analyses in collaboration with the people she engages with, and curators and colleagues from museums in Denmark, Great Britain, the United States and Ghana. She has curated collaborative exhibitions at the National Museum of Denmark, National Museum of Ghana and at Moesgaard Museum in Denmark. Helen Graham teaches museum and heritage studies at the University of Leeds. Spending time in

Croydon’s Resource Bases and slowly developing the exhibition that ultimately emerged was formative in her current research approaches. Since then Helen has come to use collaborative and action research methods to experiment with participatory approaches to museums, heritage and local democracy. Elizabeth Hallam is a research associate in the School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography,

University of Oxford, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen. Her books include Making and Growing: Anthropological Studies of Organisms and Artefacts (edited with Tim Ingold), Designing Bodies: Models of Human Anatomy from 1945 to Now (edited volume) and Anatomy Museum: Death and the Body Displayed, which won the 2016 Wellcome Medal for Anthropology as Applied to Medical Problems. She is currently the editor of the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute. Frida Hastrup, PhD, is Associate Professor in Ethnology at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen.

She is the leader of a research project about natural resources by the name of Natural Goods? Processing Raw Materials in Global Times (funded by the Danish Council for Independent Research’s Sapere Aude programme), which has exhibition work as part of its output. This has resulted in co-​curated exhibitions at the National Museum of Denmark and at Moesgaard Museum. Hege I. Hollund is Associate Professor and Conservation Scientist at Museum of Archaeology, University

of Stavanger. She specializes in degradation processes and preservation issues concerning buried skeletal remains using microscopic and chemical analytical techniques. Her research interests also include bioarchaeology, particularly the information potential of archaeological skeletons. Guro Jørgensen has an MA in archaeology and is working on a PhD thesis in museology, on the social

and political role of the Norwegian University Museums. She has 13 years of experience from archaeological excavations, museum collections management and museum outreach projects as an employee at the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim. She is currently teaching archive and collections management as well as social studies at the NTNU’s Department of Teacher Education. Anneleen Kool is a botanist and senior lecturer at the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo. Her

research focuses on ethnobotany, plant systematics, and ancient DNA in Viking Age plants and animals. Anneleen is an award-​winning educator who engages her students, both at the university and in public seminars and events, and helps them to explore the connection between human culture and various plants species that have been used for food, medicine and other daily activities both recently and in the distant past. Grete Lillehammer is Emerita Professor and Archaeologist at the Museum of Archaeology, University

of Stavanger. She specializes in cultural heritage, landscape and museum archaeology studies. Research interests include social archaeology, in particular children and childhood studies, and gender and burial ritual studies.

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List of contributors  xi

Jacqui Mulville is Reader (Assistant Professor) in Bioarchaeology at Cardiff University. She has published

widely on animal:human relationships in the past, from prey to pets to pests, and has a particular interest in the insular archaeologies of Britain and beyond. She combines her interests in archaeology, science, art and music by taking archaeological research out to reach new audiences at festivals. Axel Dalberg Poulsen is a tropical forest botanist who has carried out research focusing on systematics,

ecology and evolutionary aspects in all the major equatorial regions of the world. When collecting plant material in the field, he documents ethnobotanical information whenever possible. He is a world authority on the ginger family (Zingiberaceae) and has contributed to several exhibitions and public events on plant diversity, conservation or ethnobotany. In 2010, he got the idea to establish a Viking Garden in the Botanical Garden in Oslo, where he was Director between 2011 and 2015. Bente Ruud is Exhibition Designer and Project Manager at Museum of Archaeology, University of

Stavanger. She is responsible for the planning, design and production of new exhibitions and dissemination facilities, and internal and external exhibition and dissemination projects. Bente specializes in developing new forms of presentations in exhibition technology, in particular sound and light design, and interactive design and visualization. Paula U. Sandvik is Emerita Associate Professor and Palaeoecologist at Museum of Archaeology,

University of Stavanger. She specializes in environmental studies and especially botanical macroscopic and microscopic sub fossil and preservation of information potential in these. Henrik Treimo holds a PhD in social anthropology and works as Senior Curator at The Norwegian

Museum of Science and Technology in Oslo. He is particularly interested in how the arts, humanities and sciences can meet, cooperate and generate knowledge, understanding and new insights through the making of museum exhibitions. He has been the curator of several exhibitions, such as Mind Gap (2011) and Thing –​Technology and Democracy (2014). Lately, he has been investigating practical museum methods aiming to bring together the understanding of museums as knowledge institutions with their societal role as inclusive and democratic arenas. He has led two related collaborative research projects: The Thing’s Method (2015–​2018) and Museums’ Knowledge Topography (2018–​2020).

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book is based on a collaboration between the six Norwegian university museums entitled “Exhibitions as knowledge generating activity” (RCN project no. 229176). The project was the last part of the larger project “Joint Research”, through which the Research Council of Norway aimed at strengthening research in and collaboration between the six university museums: The Arctic University Museum of Norway in Tromsø, the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim, the University Museum of Bergen, the Archaeological Museum at University of Stavanger, the Museum of Natural History at University of Oslo and the Museum of Cultural History at University of Oslo. We want to thank the Research Council of Norway, and in particular Solbjørg Rauset and Ian Gjertz, for their support throughout the project. We also want to thank Håkon Glørstad who, as project leader for “Joint Research”, was pivotal in making “Exhibitions as knowledge generating activity” happen. “Exhibitions as knowledge generating activity”, or “The Colonisation Project” as it ended up being called, gathered staff from all disciplines in the six university museums for four workshops where challenges in incorporating research in exhibition and outreach activities were not merely discussed but also faced head-​on through actually making installations and performances. We want to thank all the museum staff and the invited speakers at our workshops for playing along in what sometimes appeared to be ridiculous tasks. In particular, we want to thank Laura Bunse and Line Breian who decided not to contribute to this volume but did a great job as local project leaders at The Arctic University Museum of Norway in Tromsø. Five of the chapters in this book are based in cases from “The Colonisation Project”. Six other chapters are written by invited authors who shared our interest in exhibitions as research. We want to thank Henrik Treimo, Nathalia Brichet, Frida Hastrup, Adam Bencard, Elizabeth Hallam, Jacqui Mulville and Helen Graham for extending the scope of our Norwegian project. Finally, we want to thank the staff at Routledge, in particular Heidi Lowther and Marc Stratton, for their patience and constant support. The book was long underway, but Heidi and Marc kept an eye on the project all the way through.

1

INTRODUCTION Exhibitions as research Peter Bjerregaard

This volume argues that museum exhibitions can effectively work as a particular way of doing research, a way of exploring the world around us rather than mirroring it. More than that, while this may not at first glance seem to be a particularly revolutionary statement, we contend that, if taken seriously, it does shake a number of the basic pillars of museum practice. If the exhibition is research and not merely a way of communicating research, a number of questions arise: Can we exhibit something, which we do not know the end result of, which is still in the making? Which concepts of “knowledge” apply to such a format? How do we conceive of the roles between the partakers in an exhibition process if this is not a matter of giving shape to a given content? How do we conceive of the role of audiences in exhibitions if research is extended into the exhibition itself? Why, indeed, should we even think of exhibitions as research rather than a platform to communicate the results of research to a wider audience? These are all questions that we will touch upon in the volume.

The idea of exhibitions as research Museums and exhibitions have increasingly been referred to as “laboratories” (MOMA, 2014; Heller, Scholz and Wegner, 2015; Treimo, this volume; Jørgensen, this volume) or “experiments”, respectively (Healy and Witcomb, 2006; Macdonald and Basu, 2007). These terms point to a move away from understanding the museum as a site for representing the world to perceiving the museum, instead, as an agent that produces its own particular effects. The museum does not simply mirror the world, but constructs new perspectives and ideas that are generated through the particular mechanisms and qualities of the very institution (Bjerregaard and Willerslev, 2016, pp. 226–​235; Thomas, 2016, p. 9). One effect of this approach to museums has been a focus on the capacity of exhibitions to generate research in and through themselves (Macdonald and Basu, 2007; Lehman-​Brauns, Sichau and Trischler, 2010; Herle, 2013; O’Neill and Wilson, 2015). Working intensely with collections, testing ideas out in a physical environment, and relating more or less directly to a lay audience does not only tell us something new about how to make exhibitions, but may also provide us with more insight into the subject matter of the exhibition. That is, the exhibition has the potential to create a research surplus; through the making of exhibitions we are liable to learn more about the topic of the exhibition. But, as we will explore further

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2  Peter Bjerregaard

towards the end of the introduction, this research surplus does not only concern how much we know, but also involves different ways of knowing. It seems as if the making of exhibitions allows us to understand things in ways that are different to the usual textual production of research, and can therefore add perspectives to more conventional cycles of research (Rauff, 2010; Herle, 2013). The question remains, however, how museums in their daily work may take advantage of such observations. How can museums practically activate exhibitions as part of their research? This question begs not only considerations on what kind of methods may be put in play, but also how we deal with the institutional framework through which museums operate. This volume is based in a collaborative project between the six Norwegian university museums, entitled “Exhibitions as knowledge generating activity”, which will be referred to by its colloquial name, The Colonization Project, throughout the volume.1 As part of this project, all six museums have engaged in audience related activities that, each in their own way, have been designed to generate a research surplus. That is, they were all asked not only to base their projects in ongoing research, but to design the projects in such a way that we could expect to know more by allowing our knowledge to be processed through an audience-​related project. In order to achieve this, all six museums had to develop methods that went beyond their ordinary exhibition activities. The Colonization Project was the last part of a five year emphasis on developing the university museums in Norway, supported by the Research Council of Norway (RCN). Within the Joint Research framework the RCN invited the university museums to develop models to strengthen their research collaboration and to engage the public in what was actually going in the university museums. Joint Research started out with a relatively small grant, but as the university museums responded constructively to the invitation more funds were added over the coming years. Thus, it is fair to say that, while pushing the university museums to think in new directions, the RCN actually put a lot of trust in letting the university museums develop their own perspectives and practices rather than having them answer to strictly defined political thematics. This trust and openness on behalf of the RCN has been crucial in generating the engagement and willingness to go beyond established practices that The Colonization Project entailed. The volume presents five of the six cases from The Colonization Project. In addition, we have invited contributions from seven authors who have all been developing new practices and have theorised about how we may think of exhibitions as research. Some of these authors are people we knew well from our ongoing discussions on exhibitions as research and who have been invited in to take part in our discussions. Others are people who made themselves noted by engaging not only in a theoretical debate on the themes we were working on, but who have also realised their ideas in various kinds of audience-​ related projects. We hope that these invited authors will show that the question of how to engage exhibitions in research is far from a local Norwegian concern but a challenge that is taken up in various ways in museums and research institutions on an international scale. The volume has three overarching aims: First, we want to pause and reflect on the existing literature and consider more closely what exhibitions as research may entail; secondly, we want to place such efforts in concrete institutional settings, taking seriously not only the theoretical potentials but also the institutional challenges related to working deliberately with exhibitions as a kind of research; thirdly, we want to suggest some methods that may be of use for other museums, sharing our own successes and failures from The Colonization Project. It is our hope that such an approach will qualify in what sense we may think of exhibitions as research and what it requires from museums to implement and elaborate on the kind of experimental museology that seems to emerge from this approach. To concretise our approach somewhat we will approach the overarching theme through three sub-​ themes in which we find exhibitions and exhibition-​making have particular potentials for creating

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Introduction  3

a research surplus: the interdisciplinary collaboration involved in all exhibitions, the concrete physical engagement with objects and space, and the direct relation and access to a lay audience. Each of these sub-​themes will be presented in some detail below, but first I will try to trace where the idea of exhibitions as research comes from, and reflect on the literature that has appeared on the topic within recent years.

A critique of the critique The notion of the exhibition as research emerged after a couple of decades where the main academic interest in the museum institution came in the shape of critique (Haraway, 1984; Lumley, 1988; Karp and Lavine, 1991; Vergo, 1993). Towards the end of the 20th century it seemed as if the museum was facing the end of a particular museum paradigm (Hooper-​Greenhill 1992, pp. 197–​215). The role of the museum as an authoritative institution that would present the encyclopaedic ordering of the world to its audiences (ibid., pp. 2, 190) was challenged by a critique of the museum’s authority, of its alleged contribution to the maintenance of colonial world views, and a call for democratisation. The critical approach to the museum basically had two fronts. On the one hand was the question of political representation: How could museums represent other cultures –​past or distant –​and thereby take authorship of the way these very cultures were presented to contemporary Western audiences? This front effectuated a number of experiments in collaborations not only with what came to be termed “source communities” but also with local communities, the public the museums catered for (Clifford, 1997; Karp, Kreamer and Lavine, 1992). The other front dealt with forms. Based particularly in Foucauldian analyses of the museum (Hooper-​ Greenhill, 1992; Bennett, 1995) the purpose of the museum was revealed as not simply presenting knowledge, but shaping how to know something. Thus, the design of installations and organisation of objects were not merely a matter of making things available to an audience in an intelligible and attractive way, but active parts of how the museum presented what was “real”. Therefore, the critical approach to museums gave rise to numerous experiments in museum display that broke with more or less positivistic approaches taking inspiration from contemporary art, the surrealist movement of the 1920s and 1930s as well as indigenous ritual and folklore (Heinich and Pollack, 1996; Karp and Wilson, 1996; Shelton, 2001). The results of the changes going on in museums since the 1970s have by now, to some extent at least, become commonplace (Thomas, 2016, pp. 30–​35). Still, while acknowledging these contributions to museum practice, it is fair to say that the attention to exhibitions as research can be conceived as a critique of the critique of the museum. While the critical museology made clear how the institution of the museum was in many ways “out of sync” with (postcolonial, democratising) developments outside the museum, the solutions offered often ended up de-​constructing the truths of the past without offering new suggestions on how the museum could work productively as a knowledge institution. Or, in other words, while the outdated collection based research of most museums had left museum research harking behind university based research (Sturtevant, 1969; Bouquet, 2001), the critical approach to museums did not help defining a new approach to museum research but somehow left the museum in a politicised maelstrom that seemed hard to get out of. We believe that the orientation towards exhibitions as research is exactly an effort to formulate new constructive potentials for museum based research and thereby reclaim the museum as a research institution (Basu and Macdonald, 2007; Bjerregaard and Willerslev, 2016; Thomas, 2016). But what does this particular and somewhat strange institution have to offer if we go beyond encyclopaedic representations of the world or a deconstruction of the same?

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4  Peter Bjerregaard

The museum as experimental site One of the early volumes to spark the debate on exhibitions as research was Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu’s anthology, Exhibition Experiments. In the introduction to the volume Macdonald and Basu trace the history of the museum back to the scientific theatres where experiments were carried out in front of an audience (Basu and Macdonald, 2007, p.2). They suggest that the contemporary museum might profit from returning to a state where experiment and process, rather than finalised displays, are at the centre of our attention. Indeed, the chapters of the volume are based in exhibitions within art and social sciences that have been consciously designed and planned as experiments (see for instance Cummings and Lewandowska, 2007; Weibel and Latour, 2007). Most of the experiments presented in Exhibition Experiments are singular projects that to a certain degree work as exceptions to the regular practices at the museums involved. However, increasingly, we see the laboratory concept used to describe an ongoing practice within the museum institution (Porto, 2007; Heller, Scholz and Wegner, 2015; Treimo, this volume). The concept of the laboratory points both to a move towards intellectual experimentation as well as to a kind of social experimentation. Intellectually, the laboratory is, in its various guises, often conceived as a place for risk taking. As contemporary exhibition-making often involves large sums of money these processes tend to be highly regulated and developed according to specific goals. In such an institutional landscape the laboratory becomes a place with a liberty to follow more loosely defined goals, go for more radical themes and questions, and act on an ad hoc basis as ideas develop. Hence the laboratory is an activity that consciously “opens up to the possibility of failure” (von Bose et al., 2015, pp. 46, 51) and a more daring intellectual pursuit of problematics. The laboratory work mode will be strange to most of the museum staff involved in the processes (see for instance Jørgensen, this volume). Therefore, the laboratory also becomes a kind of social experiment in the sense that it challenges the usual division of expertise in the museum. Most often, laboratory processes are carried out in a close collaboration between participants from different disciplinary backgrounds, which can in itself be challenging. But more than that, the laboratory often involves groups outside the museum, and often the regular hierarchies are muddled so that non-​researchers are involved in pursuing research questions (Heller et al., 2015). As such, the laboratory experiments with how various groups outside the institution may be productively involved, not merely as representatives of this or that community or social group, but as active participants in the intellectual process (von Bose et al., 2015, pp. 46–​48). In sum, the idea of the laboratory points to an understanding of research and knowledge as dynamic entities. If the museum used to be the place we would go to know things “for sure” the idea of the museum as laboratory suggests that the museum should be a space where we (a true “we” including both museum staff and audiences) engage in knowledge-​in-​the-​making. As a knowledge-​producing technology, the laboratory negates the authority of the museum to suggest final truths for its objects. Instead, the laboratory suggests that the research produced in the museum and objects taken care of by the museum should continuously be challenged and be inserted within processes inspired from and affecting the world outside the museum (Heller, 2015, pp. 25–​26).

Art as a way of knowing As mentioned above, part of the critical museology was concerned with how knowledge and experiential forms are intricately entwined. Making a display is not merely about making established knowledge tangible and accessible. Any kind of materialisation is in itself a way of knowing, a particular way of relating to the world (Vogel, 1991; Hooper-​Greenhill, 1992, pp. 191–​197; Rogoff, 2003).

5

Introduction  5

A central tool to destabilise the taken-​for-​g ranted approach of most museums was the inclusion of art and artists in the making of exhibitions. Early on, anthropological and historical museums collaborated with artists who questioned the museum’s exclusive authority to truth claims and unearthed the untold parts of the histories of museums and collections.2 More recently, installations playing in a realm between cabinets of curiosity and conceptual art have emerged in museums of natural history creating displays that defy our usual expectations of the museum as a site for ordering.3 However, when thinking of exhibitions as research it is not only the critical potential of art making that is important. The material turn in both the humanities and social sciences spurred a renewed interest in the materiality of objects and the capacity of material things to affect the social world (Gell, 1998; Latour, 1999, 2005; Ingold, 2007). Suddenly art and research found a common ground for exploring non-​semiotic qualities of objects and materials. In the article from which this volume has borrowed its title, Anita Herle (2013) describes how collaborations with artists affected the results of the exhibition, Assembling Bodies, at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. Assembling Bodies became a common ground for researchers and artists to collaborate on the main theme of what makes up a body and what counts as a body. By engaging in ways of assembling and juxtaposing new art works and objects from the collections, artists and museum staff engaged in making new interpretations of both bodies of materials (ibid., 125–​129). Ken Arnold (2016) has suggested another role that art may play in “reviving museum research”. Arnold argues that art establishes a relation to objects that goes beyond mere recognition. The special way museums ask us to look at things (Alpers, 1991), turns everything on display into an art object, breaking the fixed and commonsensical approach through which we normally approach the world around us. Thus, the exhibition urges us to look for another kind of expressiveness in things (Arnold, 2016). What the collaboration with art and artists seems to bring into exhibition-making is a capacity to break our conventional understanding of objects (Bouquet, 2000) and search for new constellations offering new meanings. In this sense, “art” can be considered a strategy to activate what Benjamin has called a vertical relation to childhood (Andersson, 2014, p. 61); a state where we are able to view the world as open and still unsettled rather than fixed and ordered. This effect introduces a dynamic to the exhibition medium, which has often been lost. If the classical modernist display argued for a stable relation between knowledge and the object on display, the critical approach pointed to the constructed character of such alleged truths. What is suggested by the new kind of art-​science relations is that knowledge is constantly changing. This is not to say that expertise is trivial or that all truth claims are equal, but rather to point out that the task of research is not to protect established knowledge positions, but to constantly seek out new things to be known. Thus, a presentation of research also has to be an enactment of the dynamics of research.

A museum method? While exhibitions, as the public window of museums, have naturally been a major concern for analyses of the museum, another strand of analysis has been concerned with the way in which knowledge is created in the museum, that is, the methods at work in museum work. Nicholas Thomas (2016, pp. 65–​114) has argued that museum work, based in collections, constitutes a method of its own. Thomas focuses on the work leading up to a display; selecting objects and deciding which objects are deemed relevant and for what reason. He identifies three steps in curatorial work: discovery, searching for objects and relations in collections and archives; captioning, putting words to objects; and juxtaposition, displaying an object together with other objects (ibid., pp. 100–​114). While these

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6  Peter Bjerregaard

“moments” may seem like tedious tasks,Thomas argues that they urge the curator to explore some of the basic categories we understand our world from: The method is the use of the object in the exploration of what these categories and distinctions might mean, where they come from, where they mislead and where they remain useful or unavoidable. (ibid., p. 106) What is interesting about Thomas’s argument is that whereas most methodological approaches to research would stress structure and rigour, the museum as method seems to systematically let research drift into new directions. Working with and through collections, the researcher will continuously be distracted by the possibilities offered by the objects. Hence, the museum researcher is constantly led away from abstract theoretical frameworks and into the questions and possibilities imposed by the objects and the archival material related to them (Thomas, 2010, p. 8; Bjerregaard, 2019). This means that the museum as a method evokes a plethora of questions because it takes its departure in the limitations of the collection. It is exactly this limitation and the concrete quality of objects that allow the curator to develop new questions and insights that transgress the theoretical frameworks we often ask research questions from. While Thomas focuses on the curatorial work going on while making the exhibition, anthropologist Nikolai Ssorin-​Chaikov has described how the exhibition, Gifts to Soviet Leaders, presented at the Kremlin Museum in 2006, facilitated an unexpected body of data emerging from the public engagement evoked by the exhibition (Ssorin-​Chaikov, 2013). As the title indicates, the exhibition displayed gifts presented to various Soviet leaders, being both a portrait of the Soviet system and a commentary on gift-​g iving (which, with reference to the famous work of Marcel Mauss, is a central topic in anthropological theory). But what the curators could never have imagined was the attraction that the exhibition’s guest book had for the audience. Not only did the guest book attract a large number of entries, it also turned out to become a public discussion of the transition Russian society had gone through from the Soviet Union to contemporary Russia (ibid., pp. 167–​168). In this sense, the museum, as a social meeting place, generated an independent research field. While this field was obviously constructed, in the sense that it did not exist before the intervention of the researcher, it was none the less capable of generating a particular kind of data in a particular format that would not have been available had it not been for the exhibition. Thus, both Thomas and Ssorin-​Chaikov argue for the exhibition as a method to overcome our own preconceived framings as researchers; one may ask, then, how we may work more consciously with the museum as a scientific method. Another approach to exhibitions as method has been in terms of applying exhibitions to test theoretical validity. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel have argued along such lines with reference to their exhibition, Making Things Public (Latour, 2005; Weibel and Latour, 2007). The curators argue that it is “the un-​realistic nature of exhibitions” that makes the museum a good space for experimenting in a way that may potentially turn into a failure. Thus, the exhibition should ask questions that can ultimately be proven or falsified (Weibel and Latour, 2007, p. 96): Once this question is raised, the only way to experiment with it is by conducting a real experiment with real images brought into the imaginary space of the museum. (ibid., 104)

7

Introduction  7

Making Things Public was above all a rejection of modernist science. However, the final installation in this exhibition was conceived as a modernist art object. Thus, Weibel and Latour suggest, the overall argument could be validated by the audience’s attraction to this final installation. If the modernist art work still seemed more convincing to the audience than the other, more open-​ended and performative works presented in the exhibition, the show would have failed in its argumentation (ibid., p. 106). This way of challenging the way research expresses itself and may be valued by an audience of non-​ peers also seems to allow research to engage in other kinds of reasoning and to pose questions which may be lost to more conventional scientific practice. What is often thought of as the intrinsic problem of exhibitions –​that they are always interpreted differently by audiences from what was intended by the makers, and that they express themselves through less precise media than text –​can be turned into a creative element that allows exhibitions to let in new perspectives and ideas.

The organisation of the volume At the very first workshop in The Colonization Project, we identified three elements involved in exhibition-​ making that seemed to us to be particularly salient for our efforts to develop new methods to integrate exhibitions in the museums’ research: the cross-​disciplinary nature of exhibition work; the physical and sensate engagements with objects and space upon which exhibitions are built; and the access to a lay audience. While these three areas are obviously closely integrated in all the case studies presented in this volume we decided to try to focus on one theme at a time both in our three joint workshops during the project’s lifetime and in our writings for this book. So, while we present the three themes as individual sub-​ sections of the volume they should really be considered as integrated parts of a process.

Cross-​disciplinarity Cross-​disciplinarity4 has been one of the most central buzzwords in research and education over the recent 10–​15 years. The call for cross-​disciplinary research has been grounded in the assessment that most of the central applications of science and research –​as for instance the consequences of climate change –​are of such complexity that they cannot be solved within individual disciplines but need to be approached through a variety of methods and analytics. But cross-​disciplinarity has other kinds of connotations in the museum. If we look back, not that long ago, actually, the museum did not house the range of expertise we see today. The turn of the 20th-​century curator would not only make exhibitions, but also study the collections and take care of objects (Arnold, 2015). But within the last 30–​40 years the broad expertise of the museum curator has increasingly been split up into sub-​disciplines. Most remarkable, perhaps, has been the degree of specialisation taking place within museum communication (Alberti, 2009, pp. 153–​188) and within conservation, which has placed itself no longer as a craft, but as a science in and of itself (Alberti, 2009, pp. 123–​152; Arnold, 2015). While this increasing specialisation and professionalisation has undoubtedly developed a productive set of skills within the museum it has also, in many instances at least, caused a lack of clarity of the purpose of the museum as an institution that deals with research, collection management and public outreach at one and the same time. Indeed, one of the common experiences of the six museums involved in The Colonization Project was that it was quite difficult to organise collaboration across departmental divides within the museum. The challenge that cross-​disciplinarity poses to contemporary museums may therefore be stated as how do we utilise the potential of the many branches of disciplinary expertise working in the museum in such a way

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8  Peter Bjerregaard

that we produce something that transgresses each of the disciplines, but without losing the expertise? The answer to this question is obviously not a nostalgic retreat to the old curator-​function. Rather it seems to be a matter of organisation. The aim could, however, very well be measured by the ideal of the old kind of museum curator. In that sense the museum could represent a vibrant, un-​disciplined way of doing research, which focuses on the question to be explored, rather than on the question’s disciplinary belonging, and applies the specific means made available by the museum (Bjerregaard, 2014; Brichet and Hastrup, this volume). In Henrik Treimo’s opening article in this volume we are presented with a concrete suggestion for how to reinvigorate the cross-​disciplinary potential of the museum. The LAB at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology consists of three separate zones; one for conservators, one for designers and one for researchers. In the middle of this space a large table makes up the physical meeting space between the zones. This permanent spatial construct allows museum staff from different departments to meet and exchange ideas related to ongoing projects. The cross-​disciplinary collaboration in the LAB includes a number of actors from outside the museum (basically, all interested parties showing interest during the progression of a project), and it ultimately aims for the LAB to become the museum’s favoured work mode rather than an exceptional experiment. Thus, the LAB works as a laboratory for developing particular museum-​perspectives across disciplinary divides. Anneleen Kool and Axel Dalberg Poulsen’s case of the Viking Garden at the Botanical Garden of the Museum of Natural History in Oslo (Chapter 2) shows how cross-​disciplinary collaboration can lead to new approaches within one scientific discipline. The Viking Garden started out as informal exchanges between archaeologists and biologists on the spread of plant and animal species through Viking travels and ended up as a new installation in the Botanical Garden. This case shows that we should not limit our understanding of exhibitions as research to the individual exhibition as product. From the original collaboration with archaeologists and the making of the garden as such, an idea emerged for a new research project on genetic material from the archaeological collections, a project that was eventually granted a generous sum of approximately €800,000 from the Research Council of Norway. This shows how the cross-​disciplinary collaboration involved in exhibition-making should not necessarily be seen as the end result in itself, but can work effectively as a way to generate original ideas for more conventional monodisciplinary projects. One notorious challenge in cross-​disciplinary collaborations is that even while, on the surface, we may seem to talk about the same theme, it often turns out that established disciplinary frameworks and perspectives hinder any true dialogue. In their chapter on the making of a film for an exhibition on amulets, Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup argue that exhibition work can, in effect, create a kind of “un-​disciplined” research where multiple parties are engaged in an extended discussion on the meaning and value of specific concepts (Chapter 3). Following the interviews with people whom Brichet would meet during her making of a film in London, the chapter investigates what an “amulet” actually is and what it may mean to a diverse group of people. Thus “the amulet” does not exist as a defined category from the beginning, but emerges through an extended conversation, not only between museum professionals, but also with people Brichet would meet more or less coincidentally. What is interesting here is that this dialogue between various interlocutors is made possible by avoiding an interpretation and definition of what an amulet is beforehand, turning, instead, the making of the film (and the exhibition) into a truly explorative process. These cases show us that cross-​disciplinarity is not merely a matter of distributing labour, but a particular kind of enquiry that challenges the concepts we construct knowledge on and through.

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Introduction  9

Sensing knowledge The return of academic interest in museums in recent years reflects the huge interest in objects and materials that has appeared across a wide range of disciplines (Gell 1998; Latour and Weibel, 2005; Classen and Howes, 2006; Macdonald and Basu, 2007; Herle, Elliott and Empson, 2009; Dudley, 2010, 2012). Constance Classen and David Howes (2006) have argued for a more extended use of sensate means in order to better grasp the worlds we represent in museums. According to this approach smells, sounds and tactile experiences can be applied to generate a comprehension of life in a certain time period or a particular place in the world. Several of the cases in the present volume have a similar interest in the capacity of what we may call material and sensate experiences. However, the focus is not so much on the representational qualities of such material experiences, but on engagements with objects and materials as a productive way of discovering new perspectives. If Thomas’ approach to the museum as method focussed on the way in which antiquarian work will lead the researcher astray, searching for information beyond established categories, several of the cases here consider what happens when we focus on objects not for their capacity to carry information but for their material qualities and potentials as such. Focussing on objects from such a perspective obviously begs the question of what kind of knowledge we are actually dealing with. Can we talk about knowledge which cannot be expressed through language and text? And if so, what status will such knowledge have, not only within academia, but also in the museums’ interaction with audiences? Ulrich Rauff has argued that it is exactly the non-​textual quality of objects that makes them accessible to interrogation: [Exhibitions] bring up problems. They ask questions. […] The simple reason for this is that the objects on display are material objects put together in juxtaposition or in any other spatial order […] they haven’t been reduced to mere descriptions. They haven’t been flattened down to print lines. They still possess their full expressiveness, their aesthetic power. (2010, p. 70) Adam Bencard (Chapter 4) draws on Ian Bogost’s notion of “alien objects” in arguing that engaging with (and creating new) objects can work as a mode to transgress our everyday view of things. Objects and relations between objects have a capacity to sustain a degree of complexity that affords a holistic perspective on things, where parts can be present at the same time without being causally related. Based in the presentation of an art work made for Mind the Gut, an exhibition on current research on mind-​gut relations, Bencard argues that interrogating into things allow us to make leaps and connections we would not have achieved through a kind of research aimed for establishing semiotic “meaning”. In Chapter 5, Kari K. Aarrestad reflects on the changing status of objects moving between museum and market. As the University Museum in Bergen was shut down for renovation the staff decided to experiment with alternative display venues. As a result an exhibition was organised in a local shopping mall. This spatial displacement turned out to have effects akin to the ones described by Bencard. Being exposed to objects that were alien to the setting in the mall made people in the mall pause in their everyday flow of life and engage in discussions with the museum staff present in the mall. In this way both audiences’ and the museum staff ’s conceptions of the objects on display were explored through these encounters. In Chapter 6, I return to the traditional setting of the museum. Reflecting on the making of a cross-​disciplinary exhibition entitled COLLAPSE –​human being in an unpredictable world, I argue that exhibition-making enacts a kind of knowledge-​making process which we may term “collapsology”. The

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10  Peter Bjerregaard

participants in COLLAPSE were challenge to look beyond their expert knowledge and engage in a number of workshops focussed on solving challenges through working with objects and materials. In this sense the making of the exhibition generated a process of de-​construction and re-​constructing, whereby new orders in the collections were suggested. Elizabeth Hallam (Chapter 7) traces recent experiments in anthropological and museological research where the status of objects and spaces has been challenged. Based in two cases (“Designing bodies” and “Room experiments”) she points to the “conceptually emergent” character of objects and space in these projects. Thus, she suggests the term “object-​spaces” as a concept that points our attention to how objects and space constitute each other in the development of exhibitions. In this sense, the exhibition is never fixed as visitors are also enrolled in these ongoing transformative processes.

Collaborating with audiences If there is one major trend that has struck museums in recent years it must be collaboration with audiences. Coined as “inclusion” or “outreach”, as “co-​design” or “userdriven development”, the turn towards engaging with people outside the museum not only as audiences but as creative agents in the making of exhibitions has evolved into an integrated practice in many museums. Nina Simon’s The Participatory Museum (2010) has become a landmark in the debate on participation. Simon’s central contribution was probably that she did not simply celebrate participation, but critically engaged with when and how participation makes sense to both the museum and its audiences and that she did not simply consider the effects of participation in abstract, politico-​theoretical terms but grounded it in concrete experiences and requirements. However, in museums the focus has primarily been on the political, democratising effects of engaging with audiences, while only little has been written on the merits of participation in terms of developing new research (see Ssorin-​Chaikov, 2013 for an exception). We have a considerable body of literature that will verify the value of such participatory projects to the audience and to the popularity of the museum. But how may they enhance the museum’s research? Graham (Chapter 11) engaged with people with learning disabilities who attended two Day Centres in Croydon, London, prior to their closing due to changes in the political environment. The aim of the collaboration was to stage an exhibition on life in the Day Centres. As Graham rejects a simple “representation” of how life was in the Day Centres she ends up in what resembles an ethnographic fieldwork, where the worlds of the people she engages with slowly open to her. In this way, the collaborative task of identifying objects to be displayed and identifying narratives to be told generates not only a deep knowledge of the history of the Day Centres but also what Graham calls a “participatory ontology”, an understanding of what it means to live with a learning disability, by taking part in the material, social and political relations through which this worldview emerges. Jørgensen (Chapter 10) traces how the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim tried to establish a laboratory where various audience groups could engage in developing a new cross-​disciplinary exhibition on colonisation processes in mid-​Norway. Jørgensen demonstrates how new ideas came about through this engagement, but she also shows how the museum’s researchers felt little inclination to take part in the laboratory phase of the project. It was only as the project reached the exhibition phase, with a given deadline and “natural” responsibilities distributed, that the researchers engaged fully in the process. As a result, the potential spin-​offs from the engagements in the laboratory were not fully integrated in the exhibition and the museum’s ongoing research. The experiences from this project reveal some of the difficulties involved in exhibitions as research as new, and perhaps less predictable, work models are required.

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Introduction  11

But the focus on engagement with audiences also forces the museum to act as an active agent beyond the confines of the museum building. Hege Hollund and her colleagues from AMS, the Museum of Archaeology at the University of Stavanger (Chapter 9), describe a number of engagements between the museum and different groups of children and youths in the Stavanger area. In contrast to the other museums in The Colonization Project, AMS did not focus on one single exhibition. Starting out simply trying to identify relevant collaborators, a network soon expanded, engaging the museum with high schools and other educational institutions in town. Eventually, the project generated new data as school children were asked to keep a dietary diary and analyse hair samples, which were compared to genetic data from excavations from a medieval churchyard in the centre of town. Jacqui Mulville’s case of the “Guerilla archaeology” group at University of Cardiff (Chapter 8) describes how interaction with young people at music festivals has created a somewhat anarchistic approach to involving the public in questions of science. Mulville demonstrates how thinking of ways to approach and engage non-​archaeologists in archaeological questions forces the guerrilla archaeologist to come up with projects that transgress established archaeological reasoning. Hence, engaging with audiences at music festivals brings to the fore questions that would never have been raised with archaeological peers.

Exhibitions as research –​but not that kind of research It may be noticed that none of the chapters in this volume talk about research in the conventional sense of the term: systematic data gathering and careful observation and analysis in order to test a hypothesis. One may certainly imagine ways of carrying out research on these terms through exhibitions, but the exhibition does not promise to be neither particularly efficient nor particularly attractive to an audience if its main aim is to copy the way research is undertaken outside the museum. In fact, all the cases presented in this volume call for research to do “otherwise” (Bouquet, 2000); to work in different ways than usual, to engage with other groups than usual, to think and discuss in other ways than usual. So, one may ask –​does it really make sense to talk about exhibitions as research if what they do is to negate most of the procedures we would normally think of as characteristic to research? We would argue that it does make sense, and further that –​given the way in which contemporary frameworks for research increasingly focus on the production of “results” in terms of peer reviewed ­articles, research funding, and so on –​we think that the processes presented in this volume actually help us to focus on what research is about. The focus on the products of research has a tendency to undermine the less tangible effects of research to constantly challenge the limits of our thinking and ask new questions about the constitution of the world. It is exactly through the request to “do otherwise” that the process of making exhibitions (and other kinds of audience related activities) adds to research. By bringing researchers and non-​researchers together, by asking people to think through objects and space, and by asking research to transgress its internal jargon and formulate questions that can be shared by a general audience, the exhibition inserts a layer of playful imagination to the research process that has the potential to guide research in new directions. Therefore, while exhibitions may not produce research results as such they may be productively introduced as part of the larger cycles of research that the museum undertakes. In order to be fulfilled, these potentials need to be ingrained in an institutional framework that is open to this way of working. And as this volume shows us, turning exhibitions into research does not always go as smoothly as intended. Several of the cases in the book demonstrate how such ways of “doing otherwise” breaks with the museum’s sense of normality. In fact, it goes against most of the central pillars of modern organisational models in museums.

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12  Peter Bjerregaard

If we allow ourselves to paint a somewhat simplified picture, most modern museums adhere to an organisational model, adapted from private enterprise, that stresses efficiency. In order to create a rational and efficient organisation, staffs are divided according to professional expertise and their responsibilities distributed accordingly. Projects, like exhibitions, are organised with clear-​cut aims, exact progression plans and milestones and, as far as possible, a plan for the involvement of the various participants that allows for predictability so that the engagement in exhibition-making can go along with all the other various tasks that the staff are dealing with (see for instance Hein, 1990, pp. 142–​145; Lord and Lord, 2002; Matassa, 2014). There is nothing wrong with this as such. Careful planning of activities is a necessity for any organisation and as most museums rely on public funding they should not close in on themselves, but be truly engaged in making themselves relevant –​although what is deemed relevant is obviously something to be discussed (see for instance Nielsen, 2015; Simon, 2016). However, if we want to turn exhibitions into research, the exhibition will not progress according to the most efficient plan, but according to the curiosity and serendipity involved in finding out. If we consider an exhibition as research we cannot plan how it will develop before we engage in searching out –​in selecting, discovering and captioning, as Nick Thomas (2016, pp. 100–​114) would say. Moreover, we cannot rely on the routine division of labour involved in exhibition work. Most of the laboratory projects emerging nowadays are based in bringing participants out of their regular work mode to engage in processes that they will consider beyond his or her core competency. In a sense, we may say that in the laboratory, expertise is floating. This does not mean that the researcher should be turned into a designer, the conservator into an interpreter or the interpreter into a researcher. It does mean, however, that expertise consists in facilitating a productive collaboration between these different experts with a common question in mind, which will often bring staff out of their routines and into more uncertain ground. Finally, approaching exhibitions as research also means that we cannot decide beforehand what is relevant in each of our projects. As Thomas (2010, p. 7) points out, relevance can “happen upon” us, which means that you have to be open and alert to what may actually happen and to change direction accordingly: What comes out of the collections, what comes out of the collaborations across disciplines, what comes out of engaging with various audience groups in the process? Therefore, practising exhibitions as research is not merely one mode of exhibition-making. It is, in practice, a re-​modelling of the museum as an institution. This is also what the cases presented in this volume show us. Probably, looking back today, some of the institutions that took part in The Colonization Project would declare that they would never go down that alley once again, while others continue to work out models that will accommodate these unpredictable processes within the larger museum machinery.

Conclusion In a review of an exhibition, Walter Benjamin once observed that “the visitor is not expected to leave the exhibition feeling learned, but smarter …”, and, he continued, “[t]‌he task of a genuine, effective presentation is exactly to detach knowledge from the limitations of specialism and make it practical” (Benjamin in Korff, 1999, p. 6, my emphasis). On the basis of the contributions to this volume we may argue that one modality of this detachment comes from the way the exhibition requires us to (at least partly) detach ourselves from “knowledge” as based in text and turn knowledge into something that works independent from text in its material and spatial configuration. As such, the exhibition works as a creative imposition that demands that research

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Introduction  13

releases itself from its “specialism” (or, exclusivity, one might say) and engage in an associative play of possibilities. As Ulrich Rauff (2010) has argued, being based in objects the exhibition defies in a forceful way any attempt to make strong claims on the world. Released from the text, research is thrown back into the world, having to find practical solutions to materialise itself as spatial situations audiences will be willing to engage in. Therefore, we suggest that the status of the exhibition as research needs to be considered not as an end product, but as part of a larger process. It is imperative to understand this playful, challenging and associative approach to research if one wants to embrace exhibitions as research. If we used to think of the role of the exhibition as conveying, in the most accessible and attractive way, what had already been found out, this new approach urges us to see the exhibition as a bridgehead (Runia, 2006, pp. 21–​22), a means for identifying new questions, new ways of interrogation. As a consequence, working with exhibitions as research is not just a matter of including researchers in the organisation of a singular exhibition project. Exhibition as research must be understood as a moment in a longer impregnation of research that entails working consciously with how ideas emerging through exhibition work may be integrated in larger cycles of research within the institution and beyond. For some, this may mark the final loss of scientific authority, a kind of post-​modern final killing off of the virtues of modern science. However, we believe that the chapters of the present volume show that this is in fact not the case. Approaching exhibitions as research in and of themselves does not reflect a loss of faith in research, but it asks for research to go even further and turn its problems into material, experiential consequences.

Notes 1 The six Norwegian university museums are: The Arctic University Museum of Norway in Tromsø, The Science Museum at University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, the University Museum in Bergen, the Archaeological Museum at University of Stavanger, Natural History Museum at University of Oslo, and Museum of Cultural History at University of Oslo. As part of the project all six museums were challenged to make an audience related activity that: (1) defined a research topic that the project should develop more insight on; (2) included collaboration with groups outside the museum; (3) took up colonisation as its theme. 2 See for instance Fred Wilson’s exhibitions in the Maryland Historical Society in Baltimore (Karp and Wilson, 1996) and Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Anthony Shelton’s work at the Horniman Museum in London (Shelton, 2001) or the exhibitions at Musée d’Ethnographie Neuchâtel. 3 See for instance the ongoing work at Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris, and the installations of Mark Dion in various museums. 4 I am aware of the various definitions of «cross-​disciplinarity», «inter-​disciplinarity», «multi-​disciplinarity” etc. (see for instance Stember, 1991). However, as the cases presented in this volume did not clearly define the nature of their collaboration across disciplinary divides, I have decided to use “cross-​disciplinarity” as a general term here.

References Alberti, Samuel J.M.M. (2009). Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Alpers, Svetlana. (1991). The museum as a way of seeing. In: Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 25–​32. Andersson, Dag T. (2014). Salvaging images. Scandinavian Psychoanalytic Review 37(1), pp. 61–​68. Arnold, Ken. (2015). From caring to creating. In C. MacCarty, ed., Museum Practice. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 317–​339.

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—​—​—​. (2016). Thinking things through: Reviving museum research. Science Museums and Research, Spring 2016. Available at: http://​dx.doi.org/​10.15180/​160505. [Accessed 13 July 2018]. Basu, Paul, and Sharon Macdonald. (2007). Introduction: Experiments in exhibition, ethnography, art and science. In: Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu, eds., Exhibition Experiments. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 1–​24. Bennett, Tony. (1995). The Birth of the Museum: History,Theory, Politics. London: Routledge. Bjerregaard, Peter. (2013). Assembling potentials, mounting effects: Ethnographic exhibitions beyond correspondence. In: Christian Suhr and Rane Willerslev, eds., Transcultural Montage. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 243–​261. —​—​—​. (2014). A house for untamed thinking: Re-​connecting research and display at the Museum of Cultural History. In: Francesca Lanz and Elena Montanari, eds., Advancing Museum Practices. Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C., pp. 115–​123. —​—​—​. (2015). Dissolving objects: Museums, atmosphere and the creation of presence. Emotion, Space and Society, 15 (May 2015), pp. 74–​81. —​—​—​. (2019). Exhibitions as research, curator as distraction. In: Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen and Anne Gregersen, eds., Curatorial Challenges: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Contemporary Curating. London: Routledge, pp. 109-​119. Bjerregaard, Peter, and Rane Willerslev. (2016). Assembling “The Spark of Life”. In: Peter Bjerregaard, Anders Emil Rasmussen and Tim Flohr Sørensen, eds., Materialities of Passing: Explorations in Transformation, Transition and Transience. London: Routledge, pp. 221–​237. von Bose, Friedrich, Harald Katzmair, Juri Steiner and Agnes Wegner. (2015). Productive energy through differences: The laboratory principle as a space for opportunities. In: Martin Heller, Andrea Scholz and Agnes Wegner, eds., The Laboratory Concept: Museum Experiments in the Humboldt Lab Dahlem. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, pp.  44–​52. Bouquet, Mary. (2000). Thinking and doing otherwise: Anthropological theory in exhibitionary practice. Ethnos, 65(2), pp. 217–​236. —​—​—​. (2001). Streetwise in Museumland. Folk, Journal of the Danish Ethnographic Society, 43, pp. 77–​102. Classen, Constance, and David Howes. (2006). The museum as scenescape: Western sensibilities and indigenous artefacts. In: Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden and Ruth B. Phillips, eds., Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture. Oxford: Berg, pp. 199–​222. Clifford, James. (1997). Four North West Coast museums: Travel reflections. In: Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 107–​146. Cummings, Neil, and Marysia Lewandowska. (2007). From capital to enthusiasm: An exhibitionary practice. In: Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu, eds., Exhibition Experiments. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 132–​153. Dudley, Sandra H., ed. (2010). Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations. London: Routledge. —​—​—​. (2012). Encountering a Chinese horse: Engaging with the thingness of things. In: Sandra H. Dudley, ed., Museum Objects: Experiencing the Properties of Things. London: Routledge, pp. 1–​15. Gell, Alfred. (1998). Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Haraway, Donna. (1984). Teddy bear patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–​36. Social Text, 11 (Winter 1984–​85), pp. 20–​64. Healy, Chris, and Andrea Witcomb, eds. (2006). South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture. Clayton,VIC: Monash University e-​Press. Hein, Hilde (1990). The Exploratorium: The Museum as Laboratory. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Heinich, Nathalie and Michael Pollack. (1996). From museum curator to exhibition auteur: Inventing a singular position. In: Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking About Exhibitions. London: Routledge, pp. 231–​250. Heller, Martin. (2015). Looking for missed opportunities. In: Martin Heller, Andrea Scholz and Agnes Wegner, eds., The Laboratory Concept: Museum Experiments in the Humboldt Lab Dahlem. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, pp.  23–​31. Heller, Martin, Stefan Kaegi, Tim Ventimiglia, Detlef Weitz and Nina Wiedemeyer. (2015). Shaping perception: On the potential of scenography. In: Martin Heller, Andrea Scholz and Agnes Wegner, eds., The Laboratory Concept: Museum Experiments in the Humboldt Lab Dahlem. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung, pp. 55–​63. Heller, Martin, Andrea Scholz and Agnes Wegner, eds. (2015). The Laboratory Concept: Museum Experiments in the Humboldt Lab Dahlem. Berlin: Nicolaische Verlagsbuchhandlung.

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Herle, Anita. (2013). Exhibitions as research: Displaying the technologies that make bodies visible. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, 1, pp. 113–​135. Herle, Anita, Mark Elliott and Rebecca Empson. (2009). Assembling Bodies: Art, Science and Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Hooper-​Greenhill, Eilean. (1992). Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge. London: Routledge. Ingold, Timothy. (2007). Materials against materiality. Archaeological Dialogues, 14 (1), pp. 1–​16. Karp, Ivan, Christine Mullen Kreamer and Steven D. Lavine, eds. (1992). Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Karp, Ivan, and Steven D. Lavine, eds. (1991). Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Karp, Ivan, and Fred Wilson. (1996). Constructing the spectacle of culture in museums. In: Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson and Sandy Nairne, eds., Thinking About Exhibitions. London: Routledge, pp. 251–​268. Korff, Gottfried. (1999). Exhibitions as constructed mnemonic worlds. In: Frank R. Wehrner, ed., Hans-​Dieter Werner: In-​Between. Exhibition Architecture. Stuttgart: Edition Axel Menges, pp. 6–​11. Latour, Bruno. (1999). Pandora’s Hope: Essays on the Reality of Science Studies. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. —​—​—​. (2005). From Realpolitik to Dingpolitik, or how to make things public. In: Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 14–​43. Lehman-​Brauns, Susanne, Christian Sichau and Helmuth Trischler, eds. (2010). The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science. Available at: www.mpiwg-​berlin.mpg.de/​sites/​ default/​files/​Preprints/​P399.pdf [Accessed on 11 July 2018]. Lord, Barry, and Gail Dexter Lord, eds. (2002). The Manual of Museum Exhibitions. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Lumley, Robert, ed. (1988). The Museum Time-​Machine: Putting Cultures on Display. London: Routledge. Macdonald, Sharon, and Paul Basu, eds. (2007). Exhibition Experiments. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Matassa, Freda. (2014). Organizing Exhibitions: A Handbook for Museums, Libraries and Archives. London: facet publishing. MOMA. (2014). Museum as Laboratory: Artists Experiments. Available at: www.moma.org/​learn/​moma_​learning/​ blog/​museum-​as-​laboratory-​artists-​experiment. [Accessed on 17 July 2018]. Nielsen, Jane K. (2015). The relevant museum: Defining relevance in museological practices. Museum Management and Curatorship, 30(5), pp. 364–​378. O’Neill, Paul, and Mick Wilson, eds. (2015). Curating Research. London: Open Editions/​de Appel. Porto, Nuno. (2007). From exhibiting to installing ethnography: Experiments at the Museum of Anthropology of the University of Coimbra, Portugal, 1999–​2006. In: Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu, eds., Exhibition Experiments. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 175–​196. Rauff, Ulrich. (2010). Old answers, new questions –​What do exhibitions really generate? In: Susanne Lehman-​ Brauns, Christian Sichau and Helmuth Trischler, eds., The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship. Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, pp. 69–​77. Available at: www.mpiwg-​berlin.mpg.de/​sites/​default/​ files/​Preprints/​P399.pdf. [Accessed on 11 July 2018]. Rogoff, Irit. (2003). Was ist ein Theoretiker? In: Martin Hellmold, Sabine Kampmann, Ralph Lindner and Katharina Sykora, eds., Was ist ein Künstler: Das Subjekt der modernen Kunst. Berlin: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, pp. 273–​283. Runia, Eelco. (2006). Presence. History and Theory 45(1): 1–​29. Shelton, Anthony. (2001). Unsettling the meaning: Critical museology, art and anthropological discourses. In: Mary Bouquet and Nuno Porto, eds., Academic Anthropology and the Museum: Back to the Future. New York: Berghahn Books, pp. 142–​161. Simon, Nina. (2010). The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0. —​—​—​. (2016). The Art of Relevance. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0. Ssorin-​Chaikov, Nikolai. (2013). Gift/​knowledge relations at the Exhibition of Gifts to Soviet Leaders. Laboratorium, 5(2), pp. 5–​18. Stember, Marilyn. (1991). Advancing the social sciences through the interdisciplinary enterprise. Social Science Journal, 28(1), pp. 1–​14. Sturtevant, William (1969). Does anthropology need museums? Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, 82, pp. 619–​650. Thomas, Nicholas. (2010). The museum as method. Museum Anthropology, 33(1), pp. 6–​10. —​—​—​. (2016). The Return of Curiosity:What Museums Are Good for in the 21st Century. London: Reaktion Books.

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Vergo, Peter, ed. (1993) [1989]. The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books. Vogel, Susan. (1991). Always true to the object, in our fashion. In: Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, pp. 191–​204. Weibel, Peter, and Bruno Latour. (2007). Experimenting with representation: Iconoclasm and making things public. In: Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu, eds., Exhibition Experiments. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 94–​108.

17

PART I

Cross-​disciplinary collaboration

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1 SKETCHES FOR A METHODOLOGY ON EXHIBITION RESEARCH1 Henrik Treimo

Historically, museums have been sites of research, teaching and repositories, alongside their mandates to preserve and display material culture. The development of academic disciplines and scholarly knowledge has in many ways been the outcome of intense efforts to collect, describe, map, classify, store, exchange and exhibit objects (Brenna, 2016). This status has clearly changed over time, as museums have undergone an evolution from their former authoritative role as institutions of enlightenment and education of the public (Bennet, 1996), to increasingly interdisciplinary places where the tradition of keeping of objects and the values associated with connoisseurship and expertise have slowly lost ground to a focus on exhibitions and interpretation (Arnold, 2015). Societal expectations and demands as well as political priorities have also urged the museums to be socially relevant and inclusive (Anderson, 2008). In this process, research has lost ground. Facing a sort of evolutionary crisis, museums are then called upon to respond to the challenge of how to serve their audiences and conduct their public role, while at the same time being able to collect, preserve and research collections and objects. Especially during the last decade, the question of how to re-​invigorate research in the museum has been widely addressed in the literature. It seems beyond question that museums are different from and carry other potentials than universities and research institutes. Due to their organisational structure and multiple mandates and obligations, highly specialised research aimed for scholarly publications is often seen as incompatible with museum work (Cavalli-​Björkman and Lindqvist, 2008; Eriksen, 2010). However, museums have the advantage of having objects and collections, as well as expressing new knowledge by engaging with materiality and space. As Steven Conn suggests, museums are “places for ideas –​places where knowledge is given shape through the use of objects and exhibitions … uniquely situated at the intersection of objects, ideas, and the public space” (Conn, 2010, pp. 5–​6). Still, the question about what research in museums is or should be or what knowledge means in this context has no straightforward answer. This chapter presents sketches for a methodology on museum specific research through exhibition-​ making that combines academic and artistic research and means. The proposed research method resembles academic research within the humanities in many ways, particularly with regard to themes, research questions, theoretical perspectives and interpretative methods. On the other hand, it is nourished by the artistic process of unifying ideas with materials into a whole for an aesthetic experience. However, what this method aims for is a third position of collaborative research that unifies the academic approach (that

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is, reliance on texts) of the museum curator and the more experimental practice involving conceptual art and scenography (spatial thinking) in a practical and inclusive manner that is based on the museum’s own premises or assumptions. The method is object-​focused, and the process is organised to integrate the main parts of museum work. As will be demonstrated, the suggested research method, henceforth the LAB-​method, is a multi-​disciplinary method of gathering, by simultaneously mobilising objects, texts and space and utilising the fact that museums are public arenas with a unique possibility to engage with their audiences.2 The common goal of creating an experience of the researched knowledge, insights and perspectives in space –​which is obviously different from writing a text –​is the glue that holds everything together. The resulting exhibition should ultimately be an amalgam of researched knowledge and aesthetic experience. The research can, thus, be understood as a process of amalgamation –​the unifying of ideas, perspectives, insights and facts that evolves through the multi-​disciplinary engagement with objects, texts, space and people –​resulting in an exhibition for visitors to experience both intellectually and through their bodily senses. A pertinent question then is, what kind of knowledge is this? As this chapter is mainly concerned with the need for a museum specific research method and demonstration of a potential practice, a full epistemological discussion will not be pursued here. However, the chapter starts with a brief discussion on exhibition research and knowledge within the museum context, to substantiate the need to think through what knowledge is or can be in museum exhibitions. A promising way ahead could be to side with the view that exhibitions, instead of being focused on research knowledge and information, should be concerned with giving their audiences a chance to explore, wonder and reflect in order to reach understanding (Arnold, 2016). Following this, the LAB-​method will be thoroughly demonstrated and explained by taking the reader through the concrete case of the making of the exhibition “Grossraum − Organization Todt and forced labour in Norway 1940−45” (which opened in February 2017 at The Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology). Multi-​disciplinary collaborative practices do not come without challenges, as will be discussed at the end.3

Rethinking research and knowledge in times of an evolutionary crisis The former director of the British Museum, Robert Anderson, seems to be right in that the pressure from the world around museums reduces their capacity to carry out their independent research (2008).4 In times when visitor numbers are increasing, the traditional mandates of the museum –​collecting, researching and displaying material culture –​seem to disintegrate. Research, once interconnected with all museum tasks, has now emerged as a “standalone function” (Poulot, 2013, p. 20). For many museums there remain hardly any time and resources to carry out research. The question of how to re-​install research in museums has for many years been of concern to museum professionals and cultural politicians, as well as historians, philosophers and museologists. The 2007 symposium at the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm was promoted with the motto, “Research generates exhibitions which in turn generate research” (Arrhenius, Cavalli-​Björkman and Lindqvist, 2008, p. 9). Contributors to the volume published after the symposium argued for and exemplified the museum’s potential for scholarly research through exhibition work, by utilising the material sources in museums, and through processes that combine academic scholars and museum curators. These and other studies have given us ample insights into the potentials of museum research, in particular as they relate to the epistemic value of objects and exhibitions as generators of knowledge (see, e.g., Macdonald and Basu, 2007; Lehmann-​Brauns, Sichau and Trischler, 2010; Thomas, 2010; Dudley et al., 2012; Herle, 2013; Ulrich et al., 2015). Why then, are we still stuck with the question of how to do research in museums?

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Methodology on exhibition research  21

We still seem not to have a substantial answer to the main question on the agenda in Stockholm: “How can the research of the museum be combined with their public mission?” (Brummer, 2008, p. 215). From a managerial perspective, the problem can be related to the decrease in public funding and the reorganisation of museum policies from collection work towards serving our audiences, followed by a changing role for the curator, as well as a dramatic decline in curator positions (see Anderson, 2008). However, what might be an even bigger problem is that this perspective is based on a certain view on knowledge production in museums that relates research to a standard that may not be compatible with the multiple museum tasks, the epistemic value of collaborative work with objects or the museum’s societal role. Although it has been argued convincingly that collaborative work with objects leads to new knowledge and thus thematic exhibitions could stand as true scientific publications (see, e.g., Fleming, 2010; Schnalke, 2010), an issue emerges when academic evaluation criteria infiltrate the discussion. Compared with academic standards, museum work and exhibitions have not been assigned the status of researched knowledge (see, e.g., Lehmann-​Brauns, Sichau and Trischler, 2010). Within academia, research requires to be peer-​reviewed and mainly published as a text (Trischler, 2008, p. 64). The problem with having exhibitions accepted as research relates to the general conceptualisation that research knowledge should be “transferable and communicated unambiguously” (Niedderer, Biggs and Ferris, 2006, p. 4).5 Yet, exhibitions cannot communicate knowledge unambiguously without, at the same time, compromising what has been argued to be their most valuable contribution as places for the public to experience, explore, wonder and reach life enhancing insights (Arnold, 2016). Following up on the influential anthologies by the Max Planck Society (Lehmann-​Brauns, Sichau and Trischler, 2010) and the Stockholm symposium (Arrhenius, Cavalli-​Björkman and Lindqvist, 2008), museums should indeed keep working on bridging the gap with the universities, but they should not do this by pushing their exhibition practice in the direction of texts. As Macdonald and Basu argue, exhibitions can generate and display knowledge that is more open to different readings and interpretations in a wider frame of representations by involving and assembling various “actants”, such as “visitors, curators, objects, technologies, institutional and architectural spaces” (2007, p. 2). Rather than trying to mimic academia, museums should explore ways of tapping their own research potential. Anita Herle’s reflection on the exhibition “Assembling bodies: Art, Science and Imagination”6 is among the very few attempts to explicate the potential of exhibition research as a combination of curatorial, academic and artistic insights and practices “that actively engage with objects and theoretical ideas to generate new understandings” (Herle, 2013, p. 113). Herle demonstrates how research takes place through various encounters between disciplines in collaborative multisensory engagement with objects and space. She shows how it is grounded in theories on the relations between humans and things and a method for working with objects, which builds on the prospect of “discovery” (see also Thomas, 2010, 2016), and the potency of assembling. This technique generates knowledge by fostering new and unexpected relations. The exhibition facilitated the emergence of new understandings and the results were expressed in the gallery through objects, texts and contemporary art in a non-​linear and non-​didactic way. Knowledge was not communicated unambiguously. The visitors were challenged through bodily, intellectual and emotional experiences to question preconceived ideas. In other words, they took active part in the generation of new insights and understandings. Assembling various actors in collaborative encounters with objects and spaces is indeed a method that may produce novel outcomes. More specifically, it has been argued that such exhibition experiments may produce visible insights and knowledge, which would otherwise remain invisible: they make tangible something intangible (Macdonald and Basu, 2007, p. 9). Exhibitions thus generate specific knowledge that could not be delivered differently as it is embodied in the exhibition product and constantly

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negotiated in the encounters with various audiences. Knowledge produced through exhibitions could be compared to artworks. As pointed out by Julian Klein (2010), artworks often result from an extensive investigative process. However, unlike scholarly publications, they rarely express an authorial interpretation. Instead, they offer what John Dewey has described as aesthetic experience (1980[1934]). Such experiences, which are not exclusively linked to art works, result from the immediate sensory and intellectual experience of things, that links past experiences with the present (ibid.). Hence, one can say that such things and artworks carry “embodied knowledge” that has to be acquired through sensory and emotional perception, resulting from artistic experience, from which they cannot be separated (Klein, 2010). At the same time, if the experimental exhibitions we are talking about here can be read in multiple ways, how do they then differ from just about anything people come across? What kind of knowledge is extracted in these meetings with the audiences? In arguing for the need of a new museum epistemology, Mark O’Neill makes an interesting note on the difference between subjective and individual experiences, which relates to “people’s complex capacity to generate knowledge in order to make meaning of the world” (2006, p. 107). The subjective is deeply experienced within a person, it is the kind of experience that touches upon shared values and cultural beliefs, in opposition to the individual, which denotes experience unique to one person (ibid., p. 109). “One of the capacities of art is to articulate these deep internal experiences to other individuals” (ibid.). The openness towards multiple individual readings along with the subjective experiences that we as visitors can share and talk about might be considered the strength of exhibitions that has incorporated a view on people as profoundly different, and not as passive onlookers, but partners in the process of creating knowledge (ibid.). What follows from this is that the knowledge exhibitions may generate is not just different, it is of another kind. However, although making museum exhibitions shares many similarities with the artistic process, they are not art exhibitions (although they may as well be). What we should be looking for is a third position, somewhere in between open knowledge (art) and contextualised knowledge (science). In a recently published article, Ken Arnold, inspired by John Dewey, suggests that the investigations taking place within (most) museums and the thinking they enable has more to do with understanding than scientific knowledge, and that museums have an untapped research potential in producing and staging aesthetic experiences for reflection (Arnold, 2016, pp. 3–​4). His argument is based on two epistemological formulae by Stefan Collini, one saying that knowledge equals skill and information, the other saying that understanding equals experience and reflection. While the former has worked well in the sciences, the latter is more illuminating to the humanities, where understanding is recognised as a “human activity that depends in part upon the qualities of the understander” (ibid., p. 4). These insights from Arnold, based on his thorough experience at the Wellcome Collection, are fruitful thoughts that may help us in our effort to make space for a qualitatively different museum research. The museum experience should be relevant for people’s lives today and in a future perspective. Research, then, should not be treated as an end but rather a means to achieve this museum mission. The challenge is to carve out a methodology for research that embraces this complexity and expectations. As this chapter suggests, such a methodology should be based on the museums’ premises and built on their distinctiveness. Objects and collections make a natural point of departure for a museum specific research method. A wide literature discusses what we can learn from showing sensitivity to objects (see, e.g., Daston, 2004; Costall and Dreier, 2006; Cavalli-​Björkman and Lindqvist, 2008; Conn, 2010; Fleming, 2010; Olsen, 2010; Schnalke, 2010; Thomas, 2010; Arnold and Söderqvist, 2011; Dudley et al., 2012; Ulrich et al., 2015). Objects have been assigned epistemic value as entry points for research, due to their relational character

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Methodology on exhibition research  23

and embeddedness in social life, as well as their factual materiality (see Dudley, 2010). This means that we can discover and gain insight by researching both the materiality of objects and the extended networks of relations an object assembles (see Latour, 2004;Thomas, 2016). The concept thing, in the double meaning of assembly (of relations) and object (Latour, 2004), is thus a theoretical and methodological concept that invigorates the focus on the double sidedness to extract the full potential of museum objects.

The LAB Background and layout The Ding or Thing has for many centuries meant the issue that brings people together because it divides them. (Latour, 2005, p. 13) In 2014, the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology (NMST) decided to set up a permanent laboratory to try to rethink what research at the museum could be. In the preceding decade, the museum had produced several successful exhibitions, which included new knowledge and insights generated in the process. As such, these exhibitions were collaborative and truly research based. Yet, it was an open question how exactly this research was done, or what status this knowledge had. One initial motivation for the LAB, thus, was to describe methodically how research happens through exhibition-making. The most basic idea, and a working metaphor for the LAB, is that of the museum as a “thing”. The ancient “thing” referred to a place and an assembly where people met to discuss, judge and make decisions on societal issues (Latour, 2005). The LAB-​method is grounded on the experiences with the exhibition “Thing –​Technology and Democracy” (2014).7 This exhibition literally turned the museum itself into a “thing”. Inspired by a way of perceiving objects as gatherings, and technology as embedded in society and culture, both objects and technologies were presented as always contested (Latour, 2005). In the show, then, the museum’s objects, its matters of fact, were staged for participatory and deliberate discussions with our visitors on the complex entanglements of technology and democracy, on the exhibition floor (see figure 1.1). The transformation of the museum’s matters of fact into matters of concern inspired us to explore the potential of using the concept thing for developing a method for museum research. As mentioned, thing carries the double meaning of object and assembly (Latour, 2004, 2005; see also Ingold, 2010; Olwig, 2013). Any object, whether a space shuttle or a can of coke, is an assembly of a multitude of other parts, actors and ideas. To investigate an object, Latour suggests, we should approach it as a thing held together by a network of relations. This becomes obvious, for example, when accidents happen, like when the space shuttle, Columbia, exploded on its way back to earth (Latour, 2004). All the different actors and institutions that became involved in assembling the parts and investigating the accident not only demonstrated the thing-​character of the object, but also the etymological correspondence between an assembly and a matter of concern. The driving force and our working hypothesis for the LAB is that methodological rigour of the multi-​disciplinary involvement and engagement with objects, texts, space and people in the exhibitionmaking process may pave the way to a new museum research methodology. The hypothesis rests upon three premises. First, objects may serve as gathering points of enquiry. Objects and collections are conceptualised as relational things. Second, museum research is concrete and conceptual work with unifying objects, academic research (texts), and artistic investigation (space) in the exhibition-​making practice. Third, the exhibition is the goal in itself, and an experimental product.

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24  Henrik Treimo

FIGURE 1.1 The Thing

FIGURE 1.2  Layout

exhibition. Photo: Manfred Vogel

of the LAB

To link the aims and the premises of this methodological experiment, the LAB is set up with a particular layout. The physical space comprises of three zones to spatially and conceptually arrange the collaborative work of researchers, conservators and designers/​exhibition builders. In addition, there is a roundtable space for discussions (see figure 1.2). The LAB includes a zone for objects and hence the museum conservators to work and for participants to engage with the objects: a zone for the researchers/​curators to arrange books, archival material, drawings

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Methodology on exhibition research  25

FIGURE 1.3  Gathering

at the Thing. Photo: Henrik Treimo

and ideas; and finally, a third zone for the artists and exhibition builders to construct mock-​ups and models. We think of them as interacting zones for objects, texts and space. The zone for space has been placed in the exhibition area of the museum for visitors to have access and, hopefully, engage with ongoing projects. From this zone, they are able to look into the zone for objects through a glass wall, and also enter the LAB when work is under way. At the far end of the LAB, the zone for scholarly research (texts) is equipped with huge working tables to display materials and findings. In the middle of the LAB there is a 1,000 kg solid round table of concrete and wood for the participant core group, as well as for various visiting partners, to gather for discussions. We refer to this zone as the “thing” to underline that the collaborative exhibition generation rests on connecting ideas, perspectives, and different kinds of knowledge (see figures 1.3 and 1.4). When work is going on, the participants should be able to walk around the area to see and interact with each other’s material and ideas. Participants are thus urged to get things out of their heads and onto display as early as possible. This is particularly important and productive when external partners, stakeholders and audiences are visiting the LAB, and it is a most effective way of communicating and involving people in the projects. Projects that have been processed in the LAB are of various sizes, ambitions and resources. The whole process is based on series of workshops. We always strive to include a core group of minimum five persons; a researcher (who could also be the curator), a project manager, a conservator, an artist and an exhibition builder.Yet, since we aim for a method that is truly interdisciplinary, every project should invest effort in engaging even more people from the diverse museum disciplines as far as resources allow. Exhibition work in the LAB starts as most such museum projects do, with the formulation of an initial idea. It can be formulated as an exploration of a concept, an object, a collection or a research theme. The process from that preliminary idea and forward is as non-​linear and messy as every other exhibition development project (see, e.g., Macdonald, 2002). Where the LAB-​method departs is in its insistence upon objects as entry points. Objects need to be on site from the very start of any workshop, together with all the participants of the core group (see figure 1.5). Starting to explore a theme through objects is one way of obtaining a museum specific research outcome of the process. Nicholas Thomas has suggested an object-​focused “museum method”. He states that

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FIGURE 1.4  Models

in the zone of “space”, available for the museum visitors. Photo: Håkon Bergseth

FIGURE 1.5  Multi-​disciplinary

collaboration around objects. Photo: Henrik Treimo

If the museum is not only an institution or a collection but also a method –​and a kind of activity –​then that activity has its moments. The moments we might reflect on are those of the discovery, the captioning and the juxtaposition [of objects]. (Thomas, 2010, p. 7)

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His point, which is further developed in a recent publication, is that curatorial work as a method of knowing in museums is at its best, driven by curiosity (Thomas, 2016). By searching collections, and also letting objects “happen upon us”, investigating what they relate to and experimenting with captions and juxtaposition of objects, new insights and knowledge might appear. This method of curatorial techniques is played out in the LAB. Still, although this method can justify an exhibition, the LAB aims at even more, thorough investigations. To gain the full potential of penetrating studies of objects, extensive interdisciplinary work is needed. To achieve this aim, collaboration with academic researchers around specific objects allows for cross-​fertilisation through theoretical investigations, formulation of other research questions and diverse interpretations (see Brummer, 2008; Roth, 2008). This important aspect of any project is conducted by academically trained curators, or academic collaborators, or both. Also, used as analytical tools, objects may engage conservators in researching the materiality. The physical aspects of any object might also be a source to insights and knowledge about relations and stories of an artefact. Here lies the potential of bringing in the museum conservator’s expertise to further research on the material entanglements of objects, that might shed new light on a theme (see, e.g., Svensson, 2008). Finally, objects easily connect with artistic investigations and scenographic thinking with space (see Treimo, 2013; Bjerregaard, 2015). Exhibition scenography as artistic practice can be defined as architecture and theatre in a balance, created so as to elicit a dialogue between the audiences and space. What happens between the objects might be just as interesting as the objects themselves, and the point is not say what it is but to stir imagination (von Arx, 2015). The artistic contributions that blend in with the academic research and the curatorial techniques, carry the potential of bringing in new perspectives as well as organising shared ideas in space (see figure 1.6). Another prerequisite is that the method integrates in practice the role of museums as inclusive and dialogue oriented arenas. To ensure that this important mandate is part of our methodological practice, we have found it even more useful to think with the concept of thing also, as a methodological strategy to include the public in the generation of exhibitions. I will now turn to a case study of the making of the exhibition “Grossraum”, focusing on one particular object, a carved stone.

FIGURE 1.6  Multi-​disciplinary

collaboration on models. Photo: Henrik Treimo

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The “Hitler stone” and Grossraum The first large-​scale LAB experiment was launched in 2015. An ongoing extensive research project on the political economy of forced labour and Organization Todt in Norway during the Second World War was introduced into the LAB by one of the museum’s curators.8 By the time this project was brought in, the curator had already been researching the theme for several years and had also started to conceptualise it as an exhibition. Still, the aim was not to display and represent already researched knowledge from the ongoing project; he believed that the exhibition should be a unique and complementary research product. During the first workshop, he presented core concepts and topics for the exhibition. Five scenography Master’s students and their professor, an additional architect and a scenographer, two in-​house exhibition builders, one conservator, the museum photographer, two museum educators, one exhibition technician, the exhibition coordinator, the project manager, the leading curator and the leader of the LAB were included in the workshop. All together there were twenty participants, which made a truly interdisciplinary assembly. Objects, photos and archival material were placed in the LAB to initiate discussions and the collaborative development of an exhibition concept. Among several objects, a 240 kg, carved granite stone was brought in. In the archives of Organization Todt, the curator/​researcher had found references to correspondence between Adolf Hitler and chief architect Albert Speer on Norwegian granite stones for the new triumph arch of Germania (as part of the plan for the grand reconstruction of Berlin). This had caught the interest of the curator, because he was looking at the archives with a gaze tuned in on material things that could be relevant in a spatial narrative. It turned out that the remnants of this project were still to be found.9 The particular stone that came into the Museum’s possession was found in a private garden, where it had served its purpose as a sculpture and sitting place. A relative of the recent owner had been involved in carving out the so-​called “Hitler stones” at a nearby location, employed by a local company. These few facts about the stone convinced the group of its potential to become part of the exhibition and to be further explored as a relational thing. The stone indicated that Hitler’s megalomaniac visions for Germania were not just materialised as architectural models in the New Reich Chancellery in Berlin, but that the process of building it in full scale was actually initiated. This understanding facilitated the process and assured the curator of the ideas that could develop into the conceptual framework for the exhibition. The relations between the locality of the carving sites and Germania, the little stone in an enormous building and the relations between local carvers and the Nazi regime, confirmed the curator’s initial core concepts of scale and dimension as an approach to focus the research and presentation of this material and history in space. The stone evoked discussions, questions and further investigations along with its multiple relations. Research into the curving of the stone to possibly define its exact position in the arc, was one suggestion. Also, artistic exploration by placing the stone at various sites in the museum, and conceptually in the model, generated fresh ideas and more thorough understanding of how this object could enhance understanding of the theme in the final exhibition. The stone similarly gathered several other objects, archives and collaborators. During a photo excursion, the scenography students visited the place where the stones were carved out. Several participants, among them the museum photographer, travelled to see and experience the so-​called “Schwerbelastungskörper” in Berlin –​an enormous concrete column that was installed by Speer to assess if the ground could carry the weight of the arch. In the process, several new associations emerged. The relation to the archive was put into play through enrolling the National Archives of Norway as an institution that could be included in the further development of the exhibition. The role that this particular “Todt archive”, as well as the archival material in general could have in the project was discussed. Another relation was that between the stone and the still existing stone-​carving

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company which had produced it. Their immediate response was that they would take the Museum to court if we mentioned their company in relation to this topic. In short, the curator got into dialogue with them, which in turn resulted in them providing access to their private archive. Their role during the occupation years was not unfamiliar. Several companies had collaborated with the Nazi Occupation machinery, more or less voluntarily, without being part of the regime themselves. The stone was furthermore used as an assembly point to stir discussions and engagement with visiting groups and invited partners. These events nourished the process with feedback and new interest in the project. Furthermore, these collaborative encounters with objects enriched the academic research in a constant feedback loop (see figure 1.7). The knowledge and understanding generated from working with some of the objects, such as letters and photos (and other archival material), rail tracks, shovels, remnants from the prisoner camps, the Atlantic Wall (the belt of bunkers stretching from the Bay of Biscay to northern Norway), and the stone in example, enriched our understanding and allowed for new perspectives and research questions for archival (academic) research. Following the relations to the stone generated a gathering of places, people, logistics, drawings, models, and other stuff across time and space. All these became novel resources for further artistic research and spatial investigations. Regarding the question of research and knowledge generation in the traditional sense, working with this stone and other objects made the curator aware of certain aspects of the Nazi regime’s planning practices. The political perspectives became detectable and visible through, for example, Hitler’s enthusiasm for models and how these in turn actually became enormous construction projects as part of the grand plan to control space. The planning, production at local sites, and the logistics demanded to realise these projects, came to the fore in the research. In the archives, it was now interesting to look for documents that confirmed plans, drawings, execution orders and logistics concerning material and human resources such as equipment, concrete, steel bars, stones, stone carvers and materials for camps, as well as local contractors, payment, food rations, and so on. This research generated new knowledge in terms of facts and also ideas about how we can understand the Organization Todt in the Third Reich as

FIGURE 1.7 The

curator giving a public talk on the “Hitler stone” in the LAB. Photo: Henrik Treimo

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an important tool for what the curator calls the Nazi’s “politics of space” (Andersen, 2018). In this sense the material and spatial approach in the exhibition work altered the academic approach and led to new insights, which might not have happened otherwise. What all this shows is how the object in focus, along with the aim of presenting this history in space, creates a particular gaze that leads the research in certain directions, raises other questions and ultimately stages a novel view on this part of our history, in the exhibition. The exhibition was to open in several stages, as work progressed, with the aim to invite external actors into its subsequent development. After four months of intensive LAB-​work, we called for an official opening of Grossraum Part I –​Technology as Propaganda. The content was mainly focused on the pre-​war Nazi period. In this period during the 1930s, the plans and their terrible consequences were still partly wrapped up and concealed in the most forceful and disquieting propaganda practices.Visitors were invited to learn, experience and explore how engineering practices and technology as well as architecture functioned as vehicles of propaganda for the Nazi ideology. There was no telling by then, and not in the Part 1 exhibition either, that when these plans would be brought to life, they would involve millions of forced labourers. In many ways, the exhibit was based on the ideas of scale and dimension. Yet, the resulting content, objects and thematic focus had been significantly reworked, reshaped and changed in the collaborative engagement with materialities and spatial thinking, and also in interaction with external people and projects. In particular, the joint effort between the curator and the scenographers –​the five Master’s students and their supervisors –​had played a major role in the development of the exhibition. The contributions from the museum conservators and their input on the display of objects and archival material, light conditions and security affected the final outcome, as did the voices of the Museum’s educational staff, and the feedback from visiting groups, meetings and seminars with academics and public dialogue. The curator retrospectively highlights that the meeting with materialities as relational things in collaboration with scenographers and other museum disciplines, and particularly the fact that he had to think through his research questions with a spatial dimension, enriched and qualified his research material and widened the scope of the exhibition theme even more. If the aim had been to write a book, he would have done it otherwise and come to see other parts of the history as relevant. The engagement with the artists is worth stressing here. As James Putnam has observed in his analyses of the use of artists in museums exhibitions, “As free agents, artists can offer fresh insights beyond academic interpretations and take initiatives with groupings and juxtapositions that no museum curator would normally be allowed to consider” (Putnam, 2009, p. 136). The scenographers, as other artists we have previously worked with, are, certainly, less familiar with museological precepts and academic research standards, and they bring into the process alternatives to traditional museum practice and display. However, while Putnam focuses on the autonomous artist-​curator, the LAB-​method stressed the joint effort of melding together the perspective of the museum curator and the academic approach with the “artist’s eye”. This work was conducted through a number of workshops for discussing content, materials, objects and models, and also included a full scale mock-​up (a so-​called bauprobe). The bauprobe assembles all objects, materials, ideas and professions in space. Adjustments take place, externals are invited in to give their response, and content and scenography merge into one expression. As the visitors’ bodily presence in exhibitions is vital, this testing out of arguments and ideas in actual space is highly important. The opening of the first part gave the project a prosperous showroom for further engagement, enrolment of partners, and visitor feedback. At the exhibition entrance a poster urged, “Get in touch if you want to join us with your view and perspectives on the further development of the exhibition”. An additional reason for the preliminary opening was to contact financial sponsors. Several companies and political bodies were invited to a “sponsor vernissage” early on the opening day. Despite the fact that just a

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few showed up, and no further funding came out of that first meeting, the occasion generated important dialogues with actors related to the exhibition theme. The LAB and this method aim for openness and cooperation across disciplines and the walls of the museum. The experiences and feedback so far have proven very promising, although there are obvious challenges and obstacles. Before discussing them in more detail, the following four examples demonstrate how the reassembling of objects, interests and actors can dramatise relationships that extend far beyond the particular exhibition (see Ssorin-​Chaikov, 2013a, 2013b). At an early stage in the project the curator was contacted by a documentary filmmaker about a film on the involvement of Norwegian companies in the exploitation of forced labour during World War II. The LAB became the site for meetings and discussions about objects and concepts for the next few months. The film developed alongside the finalising of the first part of the exhibition and the two processes nurtured each other. The documentary “Hakekorsets profitører” (Swastika profiteers) by Erling Borgen, was launched on national television as one of the project’s first outreach activities. As a direct result of the film –​already watched by more than 0.5 million people –​the project has, so far, been contacted by four descendants of forced labourers. Interviews have been conducted and their stories are now becoming part of the final exhibition along with personal objects some of them brought to the museum. A few months after the documentary was broadcast, the director of NMST was contacted by the Norwegian Ministry of Transport and Communication. Borgen’s film, as well as two recently published books on railroad construction and road construction in Norway during the occupation years (Nygaard, 2015; Westlie, 2015) verified that two state-​owned companies had been profiting from extensive use of forced labour during the Occupation years. The historians behind these books had both been in contact with the exhibition and the academic research project, and had discussed their findings in a public meeting arranged by NMST. In several ways, this new ethnographic situation presented the Ministry with a possibility to consider their role and responsibilities for the mistreatment of war prisoners during 1940–​45. The curator was invited to present the project and plans as part of a discussion on whether the opening of the exhibition could serve as a moment for addressing this issue on behalf of the Norwegian state. Indeed, this method demonstrates how research and outreach activities can merge into a joint process (see Brenna, 2016). The artist, Eirik Audunson Skaar, made contact with the museum, and suggested an installation based on shovels used by Soviet prisoners of war who had been involved in the construction of a railway in northern Norway. The museum and the artist partnered in an application that was funded by Arts Council Norway. The art installation is set up in juxtaposition with the exhibition and will later travel on to other places and engage with future audiences. When the exhibition opened, the local newspaper in the city from where we got the stone published a feature article on the history of the “Hitler stones”, including an interview with the former owner. The heading was, “My stone has become evil!” This exemplifies how the relations to objects can be evoked and energised through this method, and how the process and the exhibition then creates effects outside the premises of the museum. Hence, the method is also a performative strategy with a potential to manufacture the social reality that it studies. The final Grossraum exhibition opened in February 2017. Alexandra Mendez, one of the MA students, was responsible for the scenography. The exhibition focused on propaganda, deportation of forced labour and the construction plans and Organization Todt’s projects in Norway. The core element of the scenography is bodily movement through space, allowing the experiencing of history with all senses. This invites multiple interpretations and interactions with history, and histories expressed through the research facts. The earlier mentioned “Hitler stone” is placed in the exhibition to tell and

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evoke several stories of the regime and its ideology. A label describes its origin and its intended use. The object is juxtaposed with Hitler’s drawing and a tiny model of the triumph arch, together with photos of the Schwerbelastungskörper and the excavation site. At the same time, the visitors may also perceive how the stone assembles stories about the Nazi ideology and spatial thinking involving models, as well as planning and logistics. Although this installation does not literally tell the viewer, the stone embraces the overall theme and topics of the exhibition. It relates huge construction works with propaganda, movement and control of resources, and Organization Todt in the Third Reich as an important tool for the Nazi Regime’s “politics of space”. The framing of the stone between two glass walls makes a narrow space for visitors to enter and physically touch and experience the stone. At the same time, it is endlessly multiplied by the mirroring effect. The scenographer’s aim has been to create a potential to engage through the senses and to stir the imagination and make people ask questions. At the same time the exhibition contains information and facts generated through the curator’s and the whole team’s research. For the layout the curator and the scenographer had been cooperating closely to present the visitors with this amalgam of research facts and information (knowledge) as well as a room for discovery and reflection (understanding).

Challenges –​multi-​disciplinary exhibition research Experimental exhibition processes “with the intention of producing differences that make a difference” generate challenges (Macdonald and Basu, 2007, pp. 17–​22). Open-​ended and radical experiments rest on the premise that all actors involved are prepared to negotiate their autonomy and enter a process of authority levelling (ibid., p. 95). An even bigger challenge concerns the tension between an open and experimental practice and the institutional context with its constraints of space, funding, personnel and managerial demands (ibid., p. 17). Finally, there are challenges related to the efforts required in putting collaborative and interdisciplinary projects together in terms of strong leadership and internal organisation, flexibility in content but clarity on objectives, trust and accountability, and dealing with diverse power dynamics (see Scripps et al., 2013). As anticipated, the LAB-​method is faced with all of these challenges. Based on our experiences, I will discuss some of the most critical challenges this experimental method has met. These relate to the seemingly contradictory fact of the method’s insistence upon being open and inclusive to objects, people and ideas, and at the same time aiming for methodological rigour. Moving from talking about object-​based research as an ideal to putting this into practice is an exacting endeavour. How should we select the initial objects? Who should have the authority to do it, and on what grounds? For sure, we will avoid choosing objects that only represent existing and pre-​formulated research. Instead, we should aim to represent multiple voices in society, not to simply stand for the museum and its collection qua being its collection. Objects can come into the process in different ways. Whether they are chosen based on a preliminary idea for an exhibition, or they “happen upon us” (Thomas, 2010), or if we invite external stakeholders to come up with suggestions, or one object leads to the detection of another through the relational network they perform, in the end, it all comes down to a question of how the selection informs and guides the process. Certain object choices will include some people and ideas, while others are left out. This is a risk and a test, but herein rests the potential of this process. A main task for such a strategy, then, relates to the balancing of the multi-​disciplinary voices in the team. Ideally, all participants should be involved and have an opinion at this critical and important moment in the process. Another challenge is associated with the premise of bringing the objects into the physical space of the LAB from the start of the project and in every workshop. This would have all been simple, if getting

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the objects from the storages, sometimes located off the museum premises, and preparing them for display, and even making sure they are properly protected and taken care of, did not require so much effort on the part of museum conservators. Since the process is not linear, the work is difficult to plan for the various disciplines within the museum, such as for example the conservators, who are often entangled in other projects and tasks. When objects have to be installed, reinstalled even installed again, then this becomes a matter of time, money and patience. It is obvious that the focus on the use of objects as assemblies must come with care for resources and possible tensions within the group. To balance the needs of the process with disciplinary work and time schedules has proven taxing. This object-​based method is without doubt open and work-​intensive and in need of careful planning. Indeed, it is critical that all participating disciplines commit to the process and take responsibility. The experiments conducted in the LAB so far have been aiming for an “open door” policy. Although we have not yet found the best way to include museum visitors, a lot of other external people and groups have been interested and have enrolled in the projects. People can get involved by invitation or by simply knocking on the door. For example, the experiments have been open for internships, as was recently the case with a Dutch scientist and an MA student of communication. Keeping the doors open has also attracted the interest of people who want to know more about the topic and our work such as university students, museum professionals and different media. Yet others may join the process by bringing in their particular knowledge on the topics in question, either as researchers or experts, or by being related to specific objects. For example, a consultant from the Ministry of Cultural Heritage was hired for a certain period to contribute his perspectives and expertise on site-​specific objects and locations that cannot easily be moved into an exhibition, as was the case with the thematically linked Atlantic Wall. The method is in a way endlessly expanding as we follow up on objects and their various networks, which invite more and more people to engage with the process. As we have embraced all this, and never said, “No, we don’t have the time”, our “open door” policy becomes work-​intensive and demands careful and proactive management. The nature of museum work is, as been pointed out by others, inevitably collaborative (Coombes and Phillips, 2015, p. xx). Most museum organisations are accustomed to this. What the LAB method adds is extensive collaborative work with a lot of partners, who may have little or no previous experience or engagements with museums. It is a challenge to ensure real inclusion of all these voices. This relates to both schedules and resources, as well as to a more delicate management of power structures and relations, and the fact that expertise is unevenly distributed. Thus, an exhibition team leader with a broad repertoire of skills such as ensuring information flow, enforcing deadlines and liaising with all team members (see Dean, 2015), in addition to embracing the crucial openness of the method, is required for managing the whole process. A particularly exigent task is to ensure that all participants from different disciplines are committed to a shared vision and agree upon a unified approach to exhibition research as a collective practice. At the same time, success, as in every interdisciplinary exhibition project, rests upon trust and flexibility among all participants (see Scripps et al., 2013). Exhibition projects may start with a vague idea or with a more restricted theme and concept, as was the case with the “Todt project”. Either way, we develop exhibition themes and concepts as a group effort in concert with objects and with openness towards the public. As the LAB method aims for generation of new knowledge and understanding, a major challenge concerns the management of ideas and making sense of all information, knowledge, curiosities and loose threads that emerge over time, and bringing them into a fruitful conversation with conceptual art. This is a point of vital importance, as the essence of this museum research method very much resides with the project’s capacity to join and connect fruitful elements to bring new insights and knowledge to the theme for the exhibition, and create an amalgam of researched knowledge and aesthetic experiences for the visitors.

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While we still insist upon all actors involved being prepared to negotiate their authority, we are fully aware of the impracticalities and impossibilities of developing an exhibition project without plans and steering. Indeed, the need for solid leadership extends to managing core concepts and ideas. The person in this role should have both experience in exhibition-making and a thorough understanding of the museum and its different disciplinary practices and organisation, as well as experience in academic research. They should have the capacity to act as a mediator between all participants, and be able to summarise and lead this process towards a concrete exhibition result. For the method to produce and gain some sort of consistent and relevant knowledge, and not turn into a mere claim for open-​endedness, there has to be a firm focus on the situatedness and performative effects of knowledge (see Ssorin-​ Chaikov, 2013a). With all this in mind, the role described here should belong to the person who is carrying the overarching idea for the exhibition. This function corresponds to the traditional lead curator of an exhibition. At the same time, our method requires that the curator is willing to give up some of the long-​established authority of this role (see Macdonald and Basu, 2007). Our experience tells us that the curator needs the skills of a researcher, as well as knowledge about other disciplines and perspectives, the particularities of which may be unfamiliar. Most importantly, it is imperative that the curator is capable of thinking with space in order to meet the artistic dimension and merge content and form. Finally, since the experimental method is nurtured by its potential to continuously assemble objects, people, and ideas, and simultaneously jeopardises work-​plans and raises unforeseen demands for space, time and money, such projects need to be well anchored in and coordinated with all relevant departments of the museum. This is an unpredictable method with the power to incorporate all main mandates of the museum in a practice that creates tension and challenges its organisation. For this reason, and to achieve the full potential of such a research method, it needs to be conducted in close dialogue with the leadership and in line with the overall aims and visions for the museum.

Concluding remarks The past decades have witnessed an intense museum reformation including their structures and priorities. In the process, research that used to be interconnected with collecting, caring for and displaying objects has lost ground. The chapter addresses this dilemma by way of a proposed practice to reintegrate and/​or rethink the role of research in the museum. A promising way out, suggested by a wide range of scholars from the museum and the academic world, points to practices of exhibition-making as research, which embrace the epistemological value of engaging with objects and collections. Still, what remains to be answered is how this research should be carried out, and what kind of knowledge it generates. It is widely acknowledged that museums are different from other knowledge generating institutions. Based on this premise, the chapter has sought to highlight some of the obstacles and possibilities for museum research. A major challenge is related to the concepts of research and knowledge that reside within an academic standard. As the chapter has proposed, these concepts are not necessarily compatible with the interrelated mandates of the museum institution and its unique public role, nor with its potential as a knowledge institution. The challenge is to carve out a methodology for research that embraces this complexity and these expectations. The methodology proposed in this chapter aims to strengthen museum work through a practice that reunites research with exhibition as an integrative force within the museum by arranging the process around the concept of the ancient “thing”. By emphasising objects as relational and always contested (Latour, 2005) and the museum as an assembly to sort out things through a multi-​disciplinary and

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inclusive practice, the proposed method for research through exhibition-making may then unite the museum’s strengths and potential to deliver unique research outcomes. As the outline of the LAB and the method has demonstrated through the described Grossraum case, the research happens through exhibition-making arranged as a multi-​disciplinary collaboration that assembles people, objects, textual knowledge and research, and artistic insights and research on the spatial dimension in the exploration of a theme. The result of this process is a unique amalgam of ideas and materials for visitors to engage with intellectually and through their bodily senses. Due to the particular process and the shared aim of making a product in space, the research outcome of such an endeavour will ultimately be different from a traditional historical research project on the same theme. As underlined by the curator for this project, the encounters with the objects and materiality and their multiple relations, and not at least the fact that he had to translate his research into a three dimensional argument in collaboration with the scenographers, forced upon him other perspectives and insights and opened the theme up in unexpected ways. The value and status of knowledge generated through exhibition-making has been much debated in terms of academic standards (Lehmann-​Brauns, Sichau and Trischler, 2010). This chapter has argued that museums should aim for their own research, and possibly find other ways of talking about the results. Researched knowledge that goes into an exhibition, as demonstrated here with the curator’s historical research on archives, will not be accepted according to academic evaluation criteria. Still, it is undeniably knowledge, in the sense of new and untold stories, facts and novel perspectives on the Nazi regime’s ideas and the construction of their Grossraum. Furthermore, by the unique combination of these findings with spatial thinking, it adds up to something that is qualitatively different from published knowledge. Analytical perspectives such as scale and dimension developed to grasp this part of our history evolved and matured as the academic research was confronted with spatial exhibition thinking and objects. As the curator will also publish on this research in the years to come, the insights and perspectives from the exhibition, in particular those arising from these two concepts, will feed back into and enrich the academic discourse on Nazis ideology and practice as a “politics of space”. However, the main value of the results from this exhibition research is that the museum visitors will get access to this history in a way that could not be delivered differently. Through aesthetic experience of the theme, visitors might not only learn but also achieve life-​enhancing understanding. The chapter suggests that the epistemological issue concerning knowledge is also a question of museum strategy. And if we are aiming for a vital and inclusive museum for the public, the proposed concept of understanding that resides with the humanities and also embraces the aesthetic products of an artistic process might be a good way to proceed in developing strategies for museum research. The LAB method suggests a third position, between art and academia that unifies the academic approach of the museum curator and the more experimental practice involving conceptual art in a practical and inclusive manner that is based on the museum’s own premises. During these experiments, we have faced several practical and conceptual matters of importance in embarking on museum based research. Bringing together multiple actors to generate new knowledge by engaging with objects and art demands openness as well as rigour in practice. Contradictory as this may seem, the potential of the method lies in this tension. The challenges we encounter concern coordination of various disciplinary tasks, managing the work process, and the workload that comes with our “open-​door” policy; these challenges carry prospects to reinvigorate museum work just as much as they are obstacles. An object-​oriented approach brings the disciplines of the museum closer together and research feeds upon the diverse, and often dispersed, knowledge located within the museum. Knowledge generation does not have to be a task solely for one academically trained curator, but a more inclusive endeavour, which blends together instead of separating museum practices. This counts for conservation

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and collection work, as well as outreach activities. As a consequence of interacting with diverse actors, places and issues over a long time span, the LAB method also transforms the relationship between research and outreach activities. The emerging connections stretch far beyond the particular project and the museum, and participate in the manufacturing of reality. Such entanglement, or linking, is both a premise and consequence of our project and as such the method relates outreach and research in time. As the title of this chapter suggests, our approach should be regarded as a work in progress. Based on extensive experimentation and practice with smaller and bigger projects, we have come to see the contours of a method of exhibition research that brings together the museum (objects), academic research (texts), art (space), and the public in a “thing”. Further elaboration and development of this methodology could be inspired by the flexibility of the idealised museum proposed by the artist-​curator Eduardo Paolozzi who sees “… all parts movable –​an endless set of combinations, a new culture in which problems give way to possibilities” (cited in Putnam, 2009, p. 136). This is an idea which, as Putnam notes, “has parallels to the Wunderkammer, where multiple associations stimulate both thought and wonder” (Putnam, 2009, p. 136). To renew the museum through an amalgamation of collection work, research, display and communication in connection with its social role, our plan(t) should be nourished by thoughtful knowledge and wondrous exhibitions.

Notes 1 This chapter is a result of several years of discussions related to the question of research in museums at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology. Some preliminary ideas emerged at the conference “Museale og arkivale praksiser”, University of Oslo, 29–​30 November 2012. My thanks are due to all of my colleagues with whom I have discussed and been inspired by, and encouraged to continue this, indeed, collaborative endeavour. The research for this chapter is partially supported by the Arts Council Norway under the programme on the societal role of museums (“Museenes samfunnsrolle”). Regarding the present text, I am immensely grateful to the museum librarian, Relsen Larsen, for her support, Olav Hamran for reading and commenting on the text, and Ketil Gjølme Andersen and Ageliki Lefkaditou for their involvement in the whole experiment, insightful comments and perspectives, and compassionate help with the English language. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewer, for their insightful comments and engagement with the text. 2 LAB is our short term for laboratory. Capital letters are used to underline that it is a particular practice and method at the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology. 3 Organization Todt (1938–​1945) was a semi-​state-​owned civil and military engineering organisation answering to Hitler only. It was a tool for the expansion plans of the Third Reich, to establish a large space under German control, referred to as “das Grossraum”. OT controlled a workforce of 1.5 million people. The vast majority were forcibly recruited (Andersen, 2017). 4 Other inquiries into issues of academic research in museums show that research that has been going on since the early 1980s takes different forms and is experienced differently by museums. For example, the situation for many natural history museums is quite different (see Anderson, 2008). 5 Attempts have been made to construct “research exhibitions” (meaning exhibition that present and record research outcomes) with a thorough contextual framing to secure an authorial interpretation (as in, ideas communicated unambiguously) and even peer-​reviewing of these shows. The result did not turn out to be very successful (see Rust and Robertson, 2003; Niedderer, Biggs and Ferris, 2006). 6 The exhibition was set up at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, in 2009. 7 “Thing –​Technology and Democracy” was a celebration of the foundation of the Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology –​NMST –​in 1914 and the 200th Anniversary of the Norwegian Constitution. The exhibition was on from April 2014 to December 2015, and it was awarded for its experimental inclusion of visitors with the ASTC, Leading Edge Award 2015 and the Mariano Gago ECSITE creativity award 2015. A presentation of the exhibition is available here: www.youtube.com/​watch?v=Usj7VOTcYRg.

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8 The research project “The Political Economy of Forced Labor: Organization Todt in Norway during World War II” is financed by the Research Council of Norway (2010–​2017). It was initially developed by the NMST research curator, Ketil Gjølme Andersen. In 2011 the Museum decided to produce an exhibition alongside the research project. From then on, Andersen played the double role of a researcher and curator. The project involves a total of 22 researchers and its academic home is at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. 9 The site where the stone is taken from has just recently, in 2009, been protected by the Ministry of Cultural Heritage. It happened all of a sudden, due to an incident where a load of carved stones were “stolen”, as it said in the local newspapers and media, and shipped to Cambridge, England, to build a war memorial (www.nrk.no/​ ostfold/​sjokkert-​over-​inngrep-​i-​kulturminne-​1.6830786, accessed 28 Mar 2016).

References Andersen, K.G. (2017). Grossraum: Organization Todt and Forced Labour in Norway 1940–​1945. Oslo: Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology. —​ —​ —​ . (2018). Et teknisk æresoppdrag av høyeste orden: Organisasjon Todt, NSB og byggingen av Hitlers polarjernbane. Historisk tidsskrift 3/​2018. KGA. Anderson, R. (2008). Research in and out of museums: Do minds meet? In: G. Cavalli-​Björkman and S. Lindqvist, eds., Research and Museums. Stockholm: Archives of the Nobel Museum, pp. 11–​26. Arnold, K. (2015). From caring to creating. In: C. MacCarty, ed., Museum Practice. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 317–​339. —​—​—​. (2016) Thinking things through: Reviving museum research. Science Museum Group Journal. Available at: http://​dx.doi.org/​10.15180/​160505 [Accessed 8 June 2017]. Arnold, K., and T. Söderqvist. (2011). Medical instruments in museums: Immediate impressions and historical meanings. Isis, 102(4), pp. 718–​729. Arrhenius, B., G. Cavalli-​Björkman and S. Lindqvist. (2008). Preface. In: G. Cavalli-​Björkman and S. Lindqvist, eds., Research and Museums. Stockholm: Archives of the Nobel Museum, pp. 7–​9. Arx, S. von, (2015). On scenography. In: C. Eeg-​Tverrbakk and K. Ely, eds., Responsive Listening: Theater Training for Contemporary Spaces. New York: Brooklyn Arts Press, pp. 34–​38. Bennet, T. (1996). The exhibitionary complex. In: R. Greenberg, B.W. Ferguson and N. Sandy, eds., Thinking about Exhibitions. London: Routledge, pp. 58–​81. Bjerregaard, P. (2015). Dissolving objects: Museum, atmosphere and the creation of presence. Emotion, Space and Society, 15, pp. 74–​81. Brenna, B. (2009). Hva gjør museologi? Nordisk Museologi, 1, pp. 63–​75. —​—​—​. (2016). Museumsmaterialiteter: Ingenting, mange ting og ting som skaper historie. Arr –​idéhistorisk tidsskrift, 1, pp. 63–​71. Brummer, H.H. (2008). Concluding comments. In: G. Cavalli-​Björkman and S. Lindqvist, eds., Research and Museums. Stockholm: Archives of the Nobel Museum, pp. 211–​228. Conn, S. (2010). Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Coombes, A.E., and R.B. Phillips. (2015). Museum Transformations. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Costall, A., and O. Dreier. (2006). Doing Things with Things: The Design and Use of Everyday Objects. Aldershot: Ashgate. Daston, L., ed. (2004). Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science. New York: Zone Books. Dean, D.K. (2015). Planning for success: Project management for museum exhibitions. In: C. MacCarty, ed., Museum Practice. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, pp. 357–​378. Dewey, J. (1980[1934]). Art as Experience. New York: Berkley Publishing Group. Dudley, S. (2010). Museum materialities: Objects, sense and feeling. In: S. Dudley, ed., Museum Materialities: Objects, Engagements, Interpretations. London: Routledge, pp. 1–​18. Dudley, S., A.J. Barnes, J. Binnie, J. Petrov and J. Walklate. (2012). The Thing about Museums: Objects and Experience, Representation and Contestation. London: Routledge. Eriksen, A. (2010). Museum: En Kulturhistorie. Oslo: Pax Forlag.

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Fleming, M. (2010). Thinking through objects. In: S. Lehmann-​Brauns, C. Sichau and H. Trischler, eds., The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship. Preprint 399. Available at: www.mpiwg-​berlin.mpg.de/​ Preprints/​P399.PDF [Accessed 22 Aug 2017], pp. 33–​47. Herle, A. (2013). Exhibitions as research: Displaying the technologies that make bodies visible. Museum Worlds: Advances in Research, 1, pp. 113–​135. Ingold, T. (2010). Bringing Things to Life: Creative Entanglements in a World of Materials. Working paper #15. ESRC National Centre for Research Methods. Available at: http://​eprints.ncrm.ac.uk/​1306/​1/​0510_​creative_​ entanglements.pdf [Accessed 6 Sept 2017]. Klein, J. (2010). What Is Artistic Research? Originally published in Gegenworte 23, Berlin-​Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften 2010. Available at: www.researchcatalogue.net/​view/​15292/​15293 [Accessed 20 Aug 2017]. Latour, B. (2004). Why has critique run out of steam? From matters of fact to matters of concern. Critical Inquiry, 30, pp. 225–​248. —​—​—​. (2005). From realpolitik to dingpolitik or how to make things public. In: B. Latour and P. Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 14–​43. Lehmann-​Brauns, S., C. Sichau and H. Trischler, eds. (2010). The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship. Max-​ Planck-​ Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte. Preprint 399. Available at: www.mpiwg-​berlin.mpg.de/​ Preprints/​P399.PDF [Accessed 22 Aug 2017]. Macdonald, S. (2002). Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum. Oxford: Berg. Macdonald, S., and P. Basu. (2007). Introduction: Experiments in exhibition, ethnography, art and science. In: S. Macdonald and P. Basu, eds., Exhibition Experiments. Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 1–​24. Niedderer, K., M.A.R. Biggs and M. Ferris. (2006). The research exhibition: Context, interpretation, and knowledge creation. In: K. Friedman, T. Love, E. Côrte-​Real and C. Rust, eds., Design Research Society International Conference Proceedings, vol. 0120. Hatfield: IADE, pp. 1–​ 15. Available at: http://​researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/​portal/​en/​ publications/​the-​research-​exhibition-​context-​interpretation-​and-​knowledge-​creation(b8382b73-​42e6-​4157-​ 9afb-​7a914e732ca8).html [Accessed 25 Oct 2018]. Nygaard, P. (2015) Store drømmer og harde realiteter:Veghistorie 1912–​1960. Oslo: Pax Forlag. Olsen, B. (2010). In the Defence of Things: Archaeology and the Ontology of Objects. New York: AltaMira Press. Olwig, K.R. (2013). Heidegger, Latour, and the reification of things; the Inversion and the spatial enclosure of the substantive landscape of things –​The Lake District case. Geografiska Annaler: Series B, Human Geography, 95(3), pp. 251–​273. O’Neill, M. (2006). Essentialism, adaptation and justice: Towards a new epistemology of museums. Museum Management and Curatorship, 21(2), pp. 95–​116. Poulot, D. (2013). Museums and research: A few thoughts. Musèes, 31, pp. 4–​11. Originally published as: Musèes et recherché: quelques perspectives. Available at: www.academia.edu/​4937973/​Museums_​and_​research_​a_​few_​ thoughts. [Accessed 26 Feb 2016]. Putnam, J. (2009). Art and Artifact: The Museum as Medium. London: Thames & Hudson. Roth, M. (2008). The future of museums lies in research. In: G. Cavalli-​Björkman and S. Lindqvist, eds., Research and Museums. Stockholm: Archives of the Nobel Museum, pp. 39–​50. Rust, C., and A. Robertson. (2003). Show or tell? Opportunities, problems and methods of the exhibition as a form of research dissemination. In: Proceedings of 5th European Academy of Design Conference, Barcelona, April 2003. Schnalke, T. (2010). Arguing with objects –​The exhibition as a scientific format of publication. In: S. Lehmann-​ Brauns, C. Sichau and H. Trischler, eds., The Exhibition as Product and Generator of Scholarship. Berlin: Max-​ Planck Institut für Wissenschaftsgeschichte, pp. 103–​110. Preprint 399. Available at: www.mpiwg-​berlin.mpg.de/​ Preprints/​P399.PDF [Accessed 22 Aug 2017]. Scripps, S., S. Ghoshroy, L. Burgess and A. Marsh. (2013). Sharing credit: Public historians and scientists reflecting on collaboration. Public Historian, 35(2), pp. 46–​71. Ssorin-​Chaikov, N. (2013a). Ethnographic conceptualism: An introduction. Laboratorium, 5(2), pp. 5–​18. —​—​—​. (2013b). Gift/​knowledge relations at the exhibition of gifts to Soviet leaders. Laboratorium, 5(2), pp. 166–​192. Svensson, B. (2008). Facts and artefacts in cultural history museums: The material turn in research. In: G. Cavalli-​ Björkman and S. Lindqvist, eds., Research and Museums. Stockholm: Archives of the Nobel Museum, pp. 175–​192. Thomas, N. (2010). The museum as method. Museum Anthropology, 33(1), pp. 6–​10. —​—​—​. (2016). The Return of Curiosity:What Museums Are Good for in the 21st Century. London: Reaktion Books.

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Treimo, H. (2013). Mind gap. Interdisciplinary Science Reviews, 38(3), pp. 259–​274. Trischler, H. (2008). Modes, constraints and perspectives of research. The place of scholarship at museums of science and technology in a knowledge-​based society. In: G. Cavalli-​Björkman and S. Lindqvist, eds., Research and Museums. Stockholm: Archives of the Nobel Museum, pp. 51–​67. Ulrich, L.T., I. Gaskell, S.J. Schechner and A.S. Carter. (2015). Tangible Things: Making History through Objects. New York: Oxford University Press. Weibel, P., and B. Latour. (2007). Experimenting with representation: Iconoclash and making things public. In: S. Macdonald and P. Basu, eds., Exhibition Experiments. Malden: Blackwell, pp. 94–​108. Westlie, B. (2015). Fangene som Forsvant: NSB og Slavearbeiderne på Nordlandsbanen. Oslo: Spartacus Forlag.

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2 JOINING TRANSDISCIPLINARY FORCES TO REVIVE THE PAST Establishing a Viking Garden at the Natural History Museum, Oslo Anneleen Kool and Axel Dalberg Poulsen

Background –​The idea In 2014, the Botanical Garden of the University of Oslo (UiO) celebrated its bicentenary. The garden is also the natural perimeter of the Natural History Museum (NHM), one of the two museums of UiO, the other being the Museum of Cultural History (KHM), which harbours, amongst other items, the famous Oseberg ship. When Axel was interviewed for the position as head of the Botanical Garden in 2010, it was preparing the celebration of the bicentenary (Poulsen, 2015). One of his ideas was to build upon Scandinavian cultural heritage and establish a permanent outdoor feature in the Botanical Garden emphasising the natural history aspects of the Viking Age. This would fulfil one of the foremost missions of a botanical garden, namely to explain the importance of plants to the visitor. Placing this in the context of cultural identity had the potential of making this outreach statement more relevant and appealing to visitors of the Garden. The Viking Age is an immensely popular topic in Nordic museums and has received increasing attention especially in the last ten years. Between c. 800 and 1050 ad, the people of the relatively isolated geographic area of Scandinavia commenced extensive colonisation and settlement of overseas territories. Until now the main focus of Viking exhibitions has been on the cultural aspects of that time, including warfare and trade, but the mobility and lifestyle of people during the Viking Age also had a profound influence on the use and distribution of plants and animals. Thus it seemed that a Botanical Garden and Natural History Museum in Oslo could potentially play a more active role in the little explored niche of the use of natural resources of the Viking Age. Since the Botanical Garden is the most popular component of NHM, the foremost aspect would be botanical in nature. The first step to test if the idea was viable was to make sure that that the basic evidence existed. After an extensive literature research during 2011, it soon became apparent that there is indeed ample documentation of botanical records. The literature survey of the evidence from archaeological excavations revealed that many plant species are documented from the Viking Age (Figure 2.1). It is, however, difficult to prove the actual uses of these plants. Many of the species recovered in these studies are not found in their known natural range, suggesting that their distribution may have been affected by humans. These unexpected species include

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FIGURE 2.1 Viking

plant selection. Most of the plants that are grown in the Viking Garden are species that represent finds of seeds or other macrofossils from Viking Age excavations. For example, (C) henbane seeds (Hyoscyamus sp.) were found in a grave at Fyrkat –​a Viking ring castle site in modern Denmark –​ that is assumed to contain the body of a vølve (female shaman). It was most likely used for its hallucinogenic properties (Helbæk, 1977). (A) Cannabis seeds were found close to the deceased in the Oseberg grave, situated in modern Norway, but whether cannabis was used for its psychotropic effects is still unknown. Plants without archaeological evidence are placed in a bed displaying “unsolved mysteries”. (B) The outfits of those working with public outreach in the exhibition are handmade, of plant-​dyed wool, linen and hemp, and illustrate the importance of plants for Viking Age fashion. Many visitors are surprised by their colourfulness. (D) Many plants were obtained from the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre including, for example, hops (Humulus lupulus). In contrast to popular belief, hops was already used for brewing during the Viking Age (Behre, 1983; Aalto, 1997)

the common garden herb coriander (Coriandrum sativum), which was likely to have been used by the Vikings. The abundance of linseed and hemp in excavations indicates their importance during the Viking Age as well (Figure 2.1). The ancient sagas give another line of evidence, pointing to the use of onions (Allium spp.) and angelica (Angelica archangelica) during this period. When Anneleen joined the project in 2012, she realised the research potential in the topic and conducted a pilot study on ancient DNA in Viking deposits from the Oseberg and Gokstad sites. The collaborators on this part of the project partly consisted of people from KHM who were already advisors on the exhibition, but also included some of Oslo´s main players in the field of ancient DNA, who were originally not involved in the exhibition process. After completion, the pilot study was developed into a full research proposal in parallel with the exhibition process.

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FIGURE 2.2  Interdisciplinarity

and the creative process. (A) During the early stages of the project we organised an interdisciplinary hands-​on workshop with public outreach professionals, archaeologists, zoologists, botanists, geologists, horticulturalists and a landscape architect. (C) The idea of a ship-​shaped garden feature was developed during this workshop, and further developed using spray paint on the snow in the Botanical Garden. (B, D) The shape of the ship and the different angles of the boxes that are placed along the side of the ship shape made the construction of the Viking Garden a landscaping challenge

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Garden on a ship in a garden: A multi-​disciplinary process Professor Holmboe at NHM was an important researcher on macrofossils early in the 20th century but the current staff of the museum no longer has expertise in identifying macrofossils or doing research in this area. Therefore a network of collaborators was established early in the development of the idea and one of the most obvious sources of input was, of course, the KHM, the director of which signed a supporting letter to facilitate collaboration between the two museums. Inspired by the interactive workshops conducted at the KHM, several meetings or workshops were planned involving participants of different backgrounds: botanists, horticulturists, archaeologists, zoologists, geologists, from both museums as well as landscape architects, designers and people involved in re-​enacting the Viking Age. Several of the participants had experience in interpretation, especially with primary school classes, and their inputs on the situation arising when trying to address a whole school class was very much relevant to and influenced developing the design. We learned, for instance, that it is important to have ample space to move around the objects of interest. At an early stage in the process, we realised that it was crucial to refrain from trying to give an impression that we were reconstructing a garden of the Viking Age. That is rather the role a museum of cultural history should take on. After inspirational trips to various museums in Norway, Denmark, Sweden, England and Ireland our team landed on a weathering (corten) steel ship design, which nobody would perceive as a reconstruction. At the same time corten steel was already used throughout the NHM and gardens for signs, flower pots and borders of plant beds and would thus fit in with the overall preferred use of material. One of the major challenges in developing the idea was where to place the new feature on Viking natural resources inside the botanical garden so as not to make it what some staff perceived as coming in conflict with existing features. For example, an Asian bamboo garden adjacent to the Viking feature would somehow appear disturbing to the feeling of being in a Viking setting. Instead it was agreed that a Viking feature would work much better if placed inside a larger area developed to focus on Nordic trees and the lowermost, south-​western corner of the garden seemed an ideal location. This area was also quite distant from any other existing features. Early in the process it became clear that the use of a Viking ship-​like design would be a persuasive signal to make the visitor immediately recognise the exhibition as Viking-​related but in the early stage, the scale or degree of details were not at all clear, the suggestions ranging from many small ship-​shaped raised beds to one large feature. The idea of using a ship, however, seemed very appropriate because the Vikings had great ships, the transport of natural resources was to a large extend done by ship, and most visitors to the botanical garden in Oslo would recognise the characteristic crozier-​like bow and stern of the Oseberg Ship. Interpreting the Viking Age would indeed have been much easier if a time machine existed; thus the concept of establishing an exhibition that allowed the visitor to travel back to the Viking Age is a stimulating concept both to the interpreter as well as to the visitor. The big breakthrough in reaching a more concrete input to the design was at the end of a workshop on a cold winter’s day in 2013, when a huge ship-​shape was spray painted in the snow of the botanical garden (Figure 2.2). The day started indoors with hands-​on model building and moved to the area that was intended to become the Viking Garden afterwards. This workshop-​based approach created consensus early on in the project and in retrospect it would perhaps have been wise to organise additional workshops throughout the development of the project. The ship was then made and remade several times in 1:50 paper models and an experienced designer converted the final model to computer-​recognisable files to be produced in corten steel.

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44  Anneleen Kool and Axel Dalberg Poulsen

FIGURE 2.3  The

ship-​shape. (B) The Viking Garden’s main feature is a ship-​shaped “time machine” that brings the visitors back to the Viking Age and allows them to explore a diverse cargo of plants, animals and stones that were important to people in Scandinavia at that time. (A) The dimensions of the exhibition were tested using a paper model. This also helped during the creative process during discussions on where in the garden the different themes could best be exhibited. (C) This bench by Betty Newman (photo: William Murphy) in central Dublin provided inspiration, as did many meetings with colleagues at Viking-​themed museums. (D) In wintertime, the garden mainly offers a sensory experience, although the geological aspects are still visible

The solution: The Viking time machine We constructed an overall shape of a ship of 33 m × 8 m (Figure 2.3) with a central pine mast as well as a “stern” and “bow”. These components make the exhibition instantly recognisable, attractive to children (Figure 2.4) and further remind the visitors of the Vikings and their voyages. Rather than making the sides of the ship solid, the themes of natural resources were broken up into boxes allowing visitors to move easily among them, or to gather in groups around a specific box during a guided tour (Figure 2.4). The boxes contain items of botanical, zoological and geological interest. The material used for these boxes is corten steel; they were shaped either as raised beds for living plants or display cases for other objects. The former are always lower than the latter. The outside face of each box has “oar holes” to further emphasise the idea of a Viking ship. The content of the boxes includes live plants, rocks and objects made from animals, which are displayed permanently outdoors. The plant exhibitions currently include nearly 200 species but sorted in themes, such as those used as dye, food, medicine and fibre. Some of these species still remain unconfirmed as members of the Viking cornucopia, and are thus exhibited in a box representing “unsolved mysteries”.

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FIGURE 2.4 Viking

Garden symbolism. (A) A corten or weathering steel bow and stern give the visitor a clear idea of what the exhibition is about, while avoiding any confusion on whether the Viking Garden is a reconstruction of a Viking Age garden or not. (B) Also, oar holes like those on Viking ships, are a recurring pattern on the weathering steel boxes, as well as on the signs. (C) The weathering steel boxes have no ridges, railings or other barriers between them in order to make it easy to walk through the display, to prevent congestion, and to allow larger groups of visitors to gather around one box at a time

The main trail leading to the exhibition has a section covered with oak planks resembling a jetty. The surroundings feature small hills and in the future it will be developed into a Nordic arboretum. Another plan is to make an interpretive nature trail displaying native Scandinavian plants, minerals and animals that could already be found during the Viking Age. On the other side of the jetty there is an area used for special events where activities such as plant dyeing, storytelling, soapstone work and quern stone milling take place.

Why a Viking Garden? Like Scandinavians today, the Vikings also exported useful household items. For instance, soapstone used for making pots was one of the valuable export commodities known from the period. Intercultural exchange of such material was not a new phenomenon, but it did increase rapidly during the Viking Age. During this time, Scandinavian people became exceedingly mobile and as a result they came into contact with many new areas and hence, alternative natural resources (Figure 2.5). Some of the newly discovered plants were imported with a purpose; others came along unintentionally, with ballast, as seeds. An additional purpose of the Viking Garden is to display some of the original cultivars of crops, which we know that the Vikings grew. This is a challenge, as we do not know at this point what these early cultivars actually looked like. We do, however, strive to display old cultivars. These are obtained from

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newgenrtpdf

Brattahlid Borg L’Anse aux Meadows Newfoundland

Iceland

Faroe Islands

Trondheim

Bergen Uppsala Orkney Oslo Birka Gotland Fyrkat Lindisfarne Lejre Ribe York Hedeby

Shetland

Dublin London

Paris

Staraya Ladoga Novgorod Gnezdovo

Kiev

Krakow

Bordeaux Istanbul Sevilla

FIGURE 2.5 Vikings

Bagdad

around the world. Scandinavian people were exceedingly mobile during the Viking Age and came into contact with many new cultural and natural environments. Red areas: Viking settlements; white line: travel and trading routes; dotted line: Silk Road; dashed line: spice routes at sea

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centres of genetic resources, such as the Norwegian Genetic Resource Centre and the Nordic Genetic Resource Centre (Figure 2.1). The collaboration with these centres made it possible for us to show old cultivars and provided the genetic resource centres with an additional opportunity to inform the general public about their collections, while simultaneously entrusting some of their living collections to another institute. A common motto among botanical gardens is “sharing is keeping”; so if a plant dies in a collection it is often possible to get it back from those you have shared it with. The Viking Garden is used as a platform to discuss numerous contemporary issues with school children and other members of the public. The Viking Age was a relatively warm period, enabling people to grow barley, an important Viking staple, as far north as Greenland and the Lofoten Islands (Hansson, 2003; Henriksen, 2014). It has been hypothesized that the eventual demise of the Viking settlements on Greenland was due to a change in climate. More positively, the old crops and edible plants in the Viking Garden now provide a source of inspiration and a discussion platform for new Nordic cooking and the revival of the use of wild plants in contemporary recipes, which has been given increasingly more attention in recent years. The impact of human activity on nature, the importance of crop diversity, the consequences of people bringing along biological souvenirs from their travels, and human migration patterns are other themes that regularly come up during outreach activities in the Viking Garden.

Challenges relating to the exhibit The aim of the Viking Garden was to make it interactive and low technology, allowing the visitors to the Botanical Garden in Oslo to touch all the exhibited items thus facilitating exploring and explanations of the importance of natural resources that were important during the Viking Age. More delicate items, such as stuffed birds protected only by Plexiglas are thus at risk, particularly as the feature is not constantly monitored by guards or security cameras. Another challenge is that the exhibition contains a lot of annuals that have to be sown in the spring. In winter, when the beds and signs may be covered in snow, there are not many plants for visitors to see, and so the ship provides a sensory experience of a large sculpture (Figure 2.3). Even in the lowermost corner of the botanical garden there is no water surface. Thus to further add to the maritime feeling of the exhibition, a section of the gravel footpath that follows the perimeter of the Botanical Garden was transformed into a 26 metre long oak boardwalk resembling a jetty (Figure 2.6). An additional challenge of the Viking Garden is that it is close to a busy road and the sound of traffic often is disturbing, especially during guided tours. The solution was to enlarge the soil mounds bordering the road. To fit with the overall aim to develop a surrounding of Nordic trees, the mounds have been planted with Nordic shrubs, such as elder, hazel and rowan to further reduce the noise.

Institutional challenges The Botanical Garden in Oslo is one of five departments at the Natural History Museum at the University of Oslo. The other four departments are the Department of Research and Collections, the Department of Technical and Scientific Conservation, the Department of Exhibitions and Public Services and the Administration. While the Botanical Garden is involved in presenting the interpretation of its substantial plant collection to the public and does research on the collections, the Viking Garden project required substantial engagement from most of the other departments as well, due to its interdisciplinary nature. However, within the other departments, outdoor exhibitions, research and collections in the Garden do, perhaps understandably, not always get the highest priority. This made freeing enough staff time to contribute towards the Viking Garden project within the Natural History Museum a challenge at times.

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48  Anneleen Kool and Axel Dalberg Poulsen

FIGURE 2.6  Design inspirations. The path next to the ship-​shaped garden feature is made to resemble a wooden

jetty (A) Walking from a gravel path onto the wooden planks emphasizes the sensory experience of entering a different realm. (B) Bork Vikingehavn in Denmark was the inspiration for the jetty

Within the Garden itself the project was initially met with scepticism, not least because of its interdisciplinary nature, which made it “not botanical enough”, along with a fear that there would be too much overlap with the Herb Garden, another special feature of the Botanical Garden. The attitude towards the project gradually improved by the time the Viking Garden was nearing completion. Collaboration with the other departments within the University of Oslo became increasingly positive as it became clear that the idea was not to make a cultural history exhibition with reconstructed

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elements. The Museum of Cultural History at the University of Oslo contributed with advice on the archaeological side of the project. The project also sparked ideas for new research directions, resulting in cross-​departmental funding for Viking-​related projects. This is discussed further below.

Viking garden spin-​offs Outside the University of Oslo, the Viking Garden project brought us into contact with various Scandinavian Viking museums, re-​enactment groups and individuals. During the early stages of the project, several visits and meetings with other Viking related museums, institutions and attractions helped to identify the natural history related Viking themes we could highlight in the exhibition. Several of the museums we collaborated with feature gardens (or at least raised beds) or were in the process of establishing them. These include, for example, the Ribe Vikinge Center, and Lindholm Høje Museum in Denmark and Midgard vikingsenter and Vikinggarden (the Viking Farm) in Avaldsnes, Norway. Discussing the plants in these gardens and their potential uses led to mutual inspiration. The only other botanical garden that has an area dedicated to Viking Age plants is the National Botanic Gardens of Ireland in Dublin, where a reconstructed Viking house along with examples of the plants that were excavated from Dublin’s Fishamble Street are on exhibit to commemorate the Battle of Clontarf in 1014. The exhibit on medicinal plants was largely designed after discussing the topic with colleagues at the NaturMedicinsk Museum in Copenhagen, which featured an exhibition on Viking Age medicine. The plant-​dyed Viking outfits, as well as the mast, decks, benches and jetty in the Viking Garden were produced by craftspeople who are deeply involved in Viking re-​enactment (Figure 2.1). Experimental archaeology and re-​enactment require that aspects that are unknown due to an incomplete archaeological record are filled in along the way with “best guesses”, given the context and resources at hand. This is sometimes frowned upon by archaeologists, but since the natural resources themselves, and not the details on how they were used, are the main focus in the Viking Garden, our collaboration with re-​ enactment environments has been integral to the exhibit. The Viking Age has given rise to numerous enthusiastic re-​enactment groups. Until now, little attention has been paid to the natural history aspects of this era, as most exhibits centre round the Vikings themselves and not the natural world around them. However, the story of the plants and animals that hitchhiked along with the Vikings –​and hence colonised new areas –​during this era of cultural expansion, is critical to our understanding of the age. Not only were the Vikings, as modern humans still are, dependent on plants, animals and certain types of rocks for their survival and culture, the mobility of Viking Age Scandinavians and their agricultural practices changed the landscape significantly and redistributed species within their territories (e.g., Grabowski, 2011; Jørgensen, 2012). The importance of plants for food, housing, clothing and medicine (collectively making up major aspects of ethnobotany) is a prevalent theme in many botanical gardens. Linking this to a particularly popular and important historical period for the area where the garden is located is perhaps a logical combination of natural and cultural history. The Viking Garden also created an immediate interest in school classes wishing to join tours and the interpreters of the Department of Exhibitions and Public Services had to quickly develop activity packages to satisfy these needs.

A platform for new research The extensive literature search conducted to evaluate whether establishing a Viking Garden was a viable plan resulted in a long list of macrofossils from various Viking sites. It struck us that many records were of plant species well outside their native ranges. This in turn made us curious about what the impact

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FIGURE 2.7  Research.

(A) Ancient DNA studies on Viking Age plants, animals and sediments provide new insights into Viking natural resources, where they came from and how they were used. (B) Plants and animals that are the subject of the research project are on display in the Viking Garden, either living or in representative form. This enables us to continuously inform the general public of the results of our research

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of Viking migration may have been on the genetic composition of the plants and animals they carried around. This research question was not on our mind from the beginning but formed in the process of preparing the exhibition. To explore this question –​on the biological impact of Viking Age mobility –​a collaborative research grant proposal on Viking Age natural resources was written together with researchers at the Department of Biological Sciences and the Museum of Cultural History. This originated from a pilot project that was initiated when Anneleen joined the project and it was further developed in parallel with the Viking Garden. The project was granted funding by the Research Council of Norway, and aims to test what impact Viking Age human migration has had on plant and animals at a genetic level. It resulted in several projects using horse skeletons as well as Cannabis seeds from Norwegian Viking ships and it funded several new research positions. The project addresses questions about the ranges and distributions of Viking Age plants and animals using ancient DNA from plant macrofossils and animal bones (Figure 2.7). The decision regarding which groups to focus on was influenced by discussions with the public during Viking Age related events in the Botanical Garden and elsewhere. Also, some of the people who had an advisory role in the exhibition project became full collaborators on the research project. Thus, instead of the more common process of research resulting in an exhibition that interprets the results of that research to the general public, the Viking Garden project turned this around and started off with an exhibition process that eventually resulted in a research project. As new results from the research project are coming in, the exhibition and the outreach activities in the Viking Garden are used to communicate them to and discuss them with the visitors. The benefit of the low technology of the Viking Garden is that it will be easy to modify the exhibition in the future to incorporate the latest research findings. This combined research and exhibition project has created awareness amongst scientists at NHM that communicating research ideas at an early stage with the general public can have a positive influence on the research itself. It also helped the scientific staff understand that pitching a research idea to the general public is rather similar to convincing an external funding body on the merits of an idea. It is perhaps not a paradigm shift, but at the very least the project has led to a more positive perception among museum scientists of having a relatively large outreach responsibility.

Conclusions A case is presented here in which an idea to establish a permanent feature interpreting the natural resources of the Viking Age is developed using a multi-​disciplinary approach. The resulting solution, in the time machine concept of a Viking Garden, not only provided a low technology platform for an exhibition available to the public but also provided an avenue towards new research. This has only been possible because the exhibition was based on solid scientific evidence even if no formal research was done before establishing the exhibition. A wider implication of the project is that this process where an exhibition concept is developed and discussed before any formal research is being done the process and eventually the exhibition itself form such a tangible platform for discussion and reflection in collaboration with a wider audience that the research ideas follow suit. The process also demonstrates the importance of cross-​museum interaction and how fruitful this may be. The difficulties were caused by scepticism within the institution and fear of activities that are conceived as being too far from the traditional mission of the institution as well as by concerns around competition between institutions; these did, however, fall away as the project progressed.

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Glossary Ancient DNA  DNA that is isolated from old specimens, often material from archaeological excavations. Annuals  Plants that live only one year, during which they flower and produce seeds. Arboretum  A collection of trees. Ballast  Material to provide stability to a ship. In Viking ships the ballast usually consisted of rocks. Cultivars  A variety of plant that has been cultivated for such a long time that it can be distinguished from its wild predecessors. Ethnobotany  The study of people’s uses of plants for food, medicine, material culture and other purposes. Experimental archaeology  The method of testing archaeological hypotheses by trying to perform a putative ancient task using replicas. Introduced/​invasive species  A species that establishes in an area that is not part of its natural range as a result of a non-​natural (usually anthropogenic) introduction. Introduced and invasive species often lack predators in their new habitat and can spread rapidly, becoming “weedy”. Macrofossils  Preserved organic remains that can be seen without a microscope Natural history  The study of organisms in their environment, including their classification into closely related groups. Natural range  The geographical area in which a species can be found naturally (i.e., not the area to which it was introduced). Saga  Ancient Nordic and Germanic stories, written down after the Viking Age but believed to have existed in oral tradition much earlier. Systematics  The study of the evolutionary history of organisms, including their classification and nomenclature. Viking  A term often used for Scandinavians who raided and traded in the Northern Hemisphere approximately 1,000 years ago, although it officially refers to going on a raiding trip and not to a people. Viking Age  793–​1066 ad, the time between the Viking’s first attack on the monastery of Lindisfarne and their defeat during the Battle of Stamford Bridge.

References Aalto, M., & Heinäjoki-​Majander, H. (1997). Archaeobotany and palaeoenvironment of the Viking Age town of Staraja Ladoga, Russia. In: U. Miller and H. Clarke, eds., Environment and Vikings. Scientific Methods and Techniques. Stockholm: Birka Project, pp. 13–​30. Behre, K.-​E. (1983). Ernährung und Umwelt der wikingerzeitlichen Siedlung Haithabu. Kiel: Wachholtz Verlag. Grabowski, R. (2011). Changes in cereal cultivation during the Iron Age in Southern Sweden: A compilation and interpretation of the archaeobotanical material. Vegetation History and Archaeobotany, 20(5), pp. 479–​494. Available at: http://​doi.org/​10.1007/​s00334-​011-​0283-​5. Hansson, A.-​M. (2003). Borg in Lofoten. In: G. Stamsø Munch, O. Sverre Johansen and E. Roesdahl, eds., A Chieftain’s Farm in North Norway. Lofotr:Vikingmuseet på Borg, p. 309. Helbæk, H. (1977). The Fyrkat grain: A geographical and chronological study of rye. In: O. Olsen and H.W. Schmidt, eds., Fyrkat. En jysk vikingeborg I. Borgen og bebyggelsen. Nordiske Fortidsminder (B), vol. 3. Copenhagen: Det Kgl. Nordiske Oldskriftselskab, pp. 1–​41. Henriksen, P.S. (2014). Norse agriculture in Greenland –​Farming at the northern frontier. In: H.C. Gulløv, ed., Northern Worlds –​Landscapes, Interactions and Dynamics, Research at the National Museum of Denmark. Proceedings of the Northern Worlds Conference, Copenhagen, 28–​30 November 2012, pp. 424–​432. Jørgensen, L.B. (2012). The introduction of sails to Scandinavia: Raw materials, labour and land. In: R. Berge, M.E. Jasinski and K. Sognnes, eds., Proceedings of the 10th Nordic TAG Conference at Stiklestad, Norway 2009, pp. 1–​11. Poulsen, A.D. (2015). Botanic garden profile: Botanical Garden of the University of Oslo, Norway. Sibbaldia, 13,  15–​32.

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3 ETHNOGRAPHY, EXHIBITION PRACTICES AND UNDISCIPLINED ENCOUNTERS The generative work of amulets in London Nathalia Brichet and Frida Hastrup

Introduction: Ethnographic fieldwork and exhibition practices In this chapter, we argue that exhibition work is a mode of conducting inventive and collaborative analysis across difference. We suggest that seeing exhibitions –​like ethnographic fields –​as sites of encounters that provisionally produce subjects and objects to be publicly curated shows a way out of the representational traps long haunting exhibition work, particularly in ethnographic and cultural historical museums. In other words, thinking generative ethnographic fieldwork and exhibition work through one another helps developing exhibitions as modes of research, driven by situated and collaborative curatorial interests and on the basis of open-​ended inquiries. This approach makes exhibition work inherently interdisciplinary, given that shared questions and concerns drive the curatorial process, thus releasing it from being a display of knowledge already formed within any particular scientific discipline. When exhibitions are seen as research processes modelled on ethnographic fieldwork (and vice versa), one might say that disciplinary expertise, however much in combination with that of other disciplines, never exhausts the object. Luckily, we would add, hence the need for research and/​or fieldwork to begin with. To explore exhibitions as research in this key implies a rather radical notion of cross-​disciplinarity, different from what it is usually taken to mean in museum practices. We are not making a case for a fruitful relationship between different disciplined professions and positions involved in making exhibitions in the museum, though such collaboration is obviously often both a practical necessity and an interesting process. Rather, we are making a much more fundamental claim about research objects (and, by implication, exhibited artefacts) as always provisional and formed through intersecting concerns that are thus beyond the exclusive domain of museum professionals of whatever disciplines –​who of course must curate (i.e. choose and produce) the exhibition in any event. To curate cross-​disciplinarily along the lines we suggest here, then, is to let go of disciplinary control, and it is not primarily about translating the insights from one profession, position or genre to the other –​for example, from anthropologist to communication officer, from scientist to artist, from field observation to caption, or from indigenous spokesperson to ethnographer. Neither does it imply a guarantee that all possible perspectives are taken into account. To sum up so far, rather than working from given disciplinary points of view each providing a fixed professional perspective on already defined objects, we want to think about cross-​disciplinarity in exhibition work as

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an ‘undisciplined’ series of encounters that co-​create the artefacts and themes to be displayed –​during fieldwork and in the subsequent exhibition. This continuous co-​creation of artefacts and topics, we propose, is one way of qualifying exhibitions as research. One implication of envisioning exhibition work through such undisciplined encounters and thus explore the potential of exhibitions as modes of research is that we need to open up or even dismantle settled categories such as source communities, ethnographers, scientists, artists, field assistants, audiences, user groups and curators. Our overall point, then, is to argue that exhibitions which work from such an undisciplined point of departure, modelled on an equally unorthodox version of ethnographic practice that generates subjects and objects along the way, have great potential for producing novel ideas and perspectives. Our aim is to arrive at a kind of de-​colonial and lateral exhibition work and/​or ethnographic work, based on ongoing inquiries in which no particular discipline or position is privileged in advance. Fieldwork in the streets of London conducted in 2011 informs our contribution.

Ethnography, representation and new museology revisited First, we want to situate the article’s claim within anthropological discussions of representation and new museology and to consider ideas about reciprocal ethnography and how these relate to our specific notion of ethnographic work –​whether practiced in exhibitions or scientific journals –​as undisciplined. Revisiting discussions about representation in ethnography may appear either as a slightly outdated anthropological debate or as a strictly internal matter for anthropologists of little relevance outside this particular discipline. However, for one thing these discussions within anthropology have probably pushed theorizing about exhibitions more generally, drawing attention to politics of representation within the museum sphere. And more importantly, our point with this revisit is to argue that for all the calls for inclusive museum practices and all the notes of caution that have challenged (Western) museums’ authority to represent the others, too much ethnographic exhibition work is still steeped in representational categories which we think are unhelpful. Let us explain –​both the thrust of the debate about representation, its relation to present trends within exhibition work, and why we think something more radical is needed to realize the potential of exhibitions as research crafted through undisciplined encounters. Anthropologists James Clifford and George Marcus’ canonical collection ‘Writing Culture’ (1986) and Marcus and Fischer’s ‘Anthropology as Cultural Critique’ (1986) have pointed to the vital awareness of the politics of ethnography and the power of representation. In this tradition, anthropologist Vincent Crapanzano has further stressed the potential asymmetry between ethnographer and ‘natives’ and problematized the knowledge produced in these analyses –​such as in anthropologist Clifford Geertz’ classic article on the Balinese cock fight in which he proposes that cultural expressions are a form of texts that the ethnographer reads and interprets –​ over the shoulder of the natives: [T]‌here is in fact in [Geertz’] “Deep Play” no understanding of the native from the native’s point of view. There is only the constructed understanding of the constructed native’s constructed point of view. […] Finally, as if to give his, or any anthropologist’s, constructions a certain, if you will, substantialized authority, Geertz refers in ‘Deep Play’ to culture “as an ensemble of texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulder of those to whom they properly belong”. […] The image is striking: sharing and not sharing a text. It represents a sort of asymmetrical we-​relationship with the anthropologist behind and above the native, hidden but at the top of the hierarchy of understanding. (Crapanzano, 1986, 74)

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Crapanzano poses this critique of Geertz in an article entitled ‘Hermes’ Dilemma: The Masking of Subversion in Ethnographic Description’ (1986), in which he discusses the anthropologist’s double role of being both a messenger and a narrator –​that is, someone who simultaneously neutrally transmits and creates the worldview of the other. There have of course been many attempts at solving this dilemma (including, we would think, Geertz’ hermeneutical suggestion). As for ethnographic museum exhibits, a trend to invite so-​called source communities to take part in designing the displays have emerged in big museum institutions with numerous artefacts from colonial and precolonial times as a reply to representational qualms much like the ones pertaining to ethnographic writing (cf. Peers & Brown, 2003; Gabriel, 2015). Such movements towards letting the previously exhibited peoples select and explain about artefacts on display thereby working as co-​curators; of digitalizing collections to make them more widely accessible; and of inviting a public to take part in citizen science projects all seek to break the Western museums’ professionalized monopoly of display –​indeed, to show the native’s point of view and let people write their own cultural texts, to go back to Geertz’ vocabulary (see Vermeylen & Pilcher, 2009). If the museum is by now a contact zone and not an authoritative and aloof institution, as studies in new museology have taught us, there is ample reason to include diverse actors in the project of exhibition work, be they visitors, community members, first nations and so forth, all of whom can contribute –​ symmetrically –​to making a participatory museum (see e.g. Simon, 2010; Boast, 2011; Schorch, 2013; Munro, 2014; Ronan, 2014). An inclusive and non-​colonial museum practice, it seems, is dependent on allowing other people than professional curators to design and take part in the making of stories and exhibitions. Accordingly, within new museology as well as anthropology it is by now a well-​established fact that exhibitions and ethnographic work are not results of epistemologically neutral or universal analyses. They are formed on the basis of certain perspectives, often vested with power. The challenge for ethnographers and curators struggling to overcome this neutral hegemonic epistemology that their own institutions are built on then becomes how we to engage and share texts, interpretations, representations with interlocutors. The issue has been summed up as a question of ‘who has the right to represent whom and for what purposes, and […] whose discourse will be privileged in the ethnographic text’ (Lassiter, 2005, p. 4). Along these lines, founder and editor of the journal ‘Collaborative Anthropology’, Luke Lassiter suggests a methodology in a chapter with the long title ‘From “reading over the shoulders of natives” to “reading alongside natives,” Literally: Toward a Collaborative and Reciprocal Ethnography’ (2005). Seeking explicitly to bridge the gap between academia and communities, Lassiter proposes a so-​ called ‘collaborative methodology’ of joint writing and explains further by quoting ethnographer Elaine Lawless: ‘The scholar presents her interpretations (…), the native responds to that interpretation; the scholar, then, has to adjust her lens and determine why the interpretations are so different and in what ways they are and are not compatible’ (Lawless in Lassiter, 2005, p. 8). What Lassiter seems to envision is a sort of processual dialogue where misunderstandings are faced and possibly erased by adjustments, in order to finally and jointly get closer to the right understanding and proper representation. Perhaps this might accommodate Crapanzano’s critique of Geertz as the aloof reader, hovering over the natives. Is this not the kind of cross-​disciplinary lateral encounter that we argued for in the opening of this paper? In the following we will explain our reservations and suggest alternative collaborative and generative analyses.

The tragedy of representational ambitions We certainly acknowledge the value of practicing a continuous dialogue with our interlocutors. At first glance, the collaborative methodology suggested by Lassiter may indeed look like our notion of generative field-​and curatorial work mentioned above. However, in terms of exploring exhibitions as research through undisciplined encounters, we have problems with some fundamental premises inherent

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in the earlier quote –​premises that risk pushing exhibition-making in a cul-​de-​sac. First and foremost, the idea of symmetrically editing an ethnographic text until people feel satisfactorily represented points to the existence of a cultural object (or a truth, even?) prior to fieldwork or exhibition work. In our view, attempts at representation within such an overall scheme of fixed positions and given objects to be represented through careful editing will lead to a sense of failure, simply because we will always have to conclude that ‘this was as close as we could get’. Thus, this kind of reciprocal ethnography seems tragic from the very outset because it has an inbuilt impossibility. It both feeds on a positivistic epistemology (the final goal is to make a true representation, even if just as an ideal goal and sought on the basis of collective editing of the ‘cultural text’) and criticizes the very same epistemology for being insufficient and reductionist when it comes to human action (as if we could ever make true representations of movable subjects). Further, for all its collaborative and, one might add, cultural relativist ambition to work across positions and disciplines, it seems to us to reinstall a too clear dichotomy between ethnographer and native, each seen as ‘having’ their particular point of view ‘on’ something or other. To put it shortly, the problem is that the issue often still seems to be a matter of precision or fairness of representation –​ a discussion of degree rather than kind. Now we can go back to our initial discussion about cross-​ disciplinarity. In so far as this ideal is invoked to ensure a kind of ‘adding up’ that hears out all relevant disciplines, including the ‘native’s point of view’, to reach a practical consensus about a settled entity that must be illuminated from (or represented by) as many carefully calibrated perspectives as possible, we are hesitant to adopt this as a goal. The problem is that the knowledge object in the middle of these different perspectives is seen as already settled and there to begin with, even if difficult to communicate and thus requiring the knowledge and practices of many. While there are always good reasons to discuss with others, to us this is not a means to ensure that we take ‘more’ features of an object into account, with the aim of a cumulative understanding or interpretation. Fieldwork and exhibitions are more unruly modes of analysis than that. So what if, instead, we tried to rid ourselves altogether of the idea that ethnographic work –​in exhibitions or written texts –​is even about representation at all, whether seen as more or less accurate, biased, collaborative, politically charged or other? This is our aim here: to replace a representational vocabulary (and, by implication, the fixed entities that come with it) with that of continuous and creative analytical work performed jointly in the field, extending into the exhibition, and as the a priori privilege of no particular discipline or position. We seem to live much too well with contradictions, unfinished business, paradoxes and complex webs of significance to reach a shared understanding of things social –​ even if emerging out of careful collaborative editing. Why, then, would we expect exhibited objects and fieldwork experiences to be settled enough to represent meaning ‘retrospectively’? To put it differently, grappling with the inconsistencies that any field is ripe with is not a matter of compromise between two (or more) given parties, positions or disciplines to arrive at a consensus, but of plunging into an undisciplined shared analytical work that creates its object –​for a little while –​along the way and through the very process of fieldwork and exhibiting. The work of amulets on the streets of London conducted in connection with an exhibition at the Wellcome Collection helps us suggest this.

Making amulets: Materiality and collaboration In the summer 2011, one of us (Nathalia –​the ‘I’ in the following) did a video project for the Wellcome Collection, a museum located in London (Brichet, 2011). Inspired by a rather big and until then almost forgotten collection of amulets collected in London in the beginning of the 20th century a small group of people worked on an exhibition called ‘Miracles and Charms’, consisting of two shows exploring faith, hope and chance, as the poster stated. The part of the exhibition on the old amulets was curated by

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artist Felicity Powell with whom I also shared thoughts and ideas for my contribution –​an online video project. Initially I wanted to explore how people in London today think about amulets, and whether amulets only belong to a distant past or to so-​called ‘exotic’ peoples living far away (Brichet, 2011). Are amulets, a century after numerous Londoners’ amulets were collected, today foreign to a London context? In order to qualify this interest I went to the streets of the city and made two handfuls of video recorded interviews. On the basis of this material I made a small documentary called ‘Charmed Life in Contemporary London’, shown at the museum’s website and on YouTube as an addition to the exhibition at the Wellcome Collection. Before we look closer at these interviews, we need a little section on materiality to situate our approach to the London amulets. Since Descartes experimented with dipping his hands into two bowls of hot and cold water respectively to see his mind’s reaction, it has been suggested that the material world surrounding us and the sensuous system we are equipped with can be seen as separated from thought, spirituality and mental processes. Building on this Cartesian tradition, Hegel argued, for instance, that the ‘African character’ lacks ‘the principle which naturally accompanies all our ideas –​the category of Universality’ (Hegel in Pietz, 1985, p. 7). Bound to the concrete material world, Hegel continues, the Africans worship ‘the first thing that comes their way. This, taken quite indiscriminately, they exalt to the dignity of a “Genius”; it may be an animal, a tree, a stone, or a wooden figure …’ (ibid.). In the same spirit, one of the founding fathers of anthropology, J.G. Frazer, hierarchizes and subordinates so-​called primitive peoples’ religion due to what he terms ‘sympathetic magic’ and their reliance on a particular worship of material objects (Frazer, 1998 [1890]). Even though the triumphant evolutionistic reasoning has slowly been dismissed from ethnographic practice during the 20th century, ideas about the radical divide between materiality and spirituality have persisted, as discussed and criticized perhaps most vividly by Bruno Latour (2002 [1993]). Others, too, though have reacted to the ‘modern’ divide between mind and matter. In the introduction to the volume ‘Thinking Through Things. Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically’ (Henare, Holbraad and Wastell, 2007), the editors suggest: Rather than dismiss informants’ accounts as imaginative “interpretations” –​elaborate metaphorical accounts of a “reality” that is already given –​anthropologists might instead seize on these engagements as opportunities from which novel theoretical understandings can emerge. (2007, p. 1) Instead of using the vocabulary of a representational logic where, say, signifier is separated from signified, the volume quoted above suggests to profit from the analyses that can arise when thinking through things rather than thinking about things. And indeed the contributors have travelled to all corners of the world and thought through all kinds of things, and quite humbly they do so not by ‘trying to determine how other people think about the world’ but ‘how we must think in order to conceive a world the way they do’ (Henare et al., 2007, p. 15). Although inspired by the volume, we are hesitant to adopt the potentially essentialist line of reasoning that posits ‘we’ and ‘they’ as separate forms of knowledge –​much the same kind of hesitation that we have towards Lassiter’s idea of collaborative editing. Material objects, too, can be thought of as emerging out of encounters, making it impossible to determine whether a thing or idea is theirs or ours. Such a slightly different perspective on materiality than the editors’ last quote suggests met us in a fascinating trilogy of articles by William Pietz (1985, 1987, 1988). In exploring the history of the fetish, Pietz stresses again and again that rather than being either an indigenous African term bound to a self-​contained African culture or a universalist term ignoring the specificity of the fetish history, the concept of the fetish emerged in cross-cultural spaces along the West African coast in the beginning of the 15th century (Pietz, 1985, p. 6). It emerged as a novel word resulting from a new type of situation

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where Christian feudal, African lineage and merchant capitalist social systems dominated the space (ibid.). In stressing the productivity of these particular encounters the fetish is to be understood neither as ‘their thing’ nor ‘our thing’ –​it is something that was created continuously and commonly, across difference. Such an analysis inspired our take on amulets. Instead of a priori delineating and limiting the field by already having a fixed idea of what an amulet is, or ignoring our own contribution to the usage of the word, we have, like Pietz, tried to let the field be: defined first of all by the usage of the word itself […], this is the only approach that preserves the specificity of the problem, since it does not reduce the notion of the fetish to one or another (particular or universalist) metacode. This historicolinguistic approach makes it impossible to say whether a given object is or is not a fetish in any simple, ahistorical sense. (ibid., p. 15) In a similar way the amulets in London were being defined in the course of the conversation, initiated by my (Nathalia’s) initial questions of peoples’ amulets. This is to say that in order to construct a field and an exhibition in which Londoners’ amulets appear these must be seen not as self-​contained representations of pre-​possessed categories on our part or that of their owners. From the outset, the amulets are unclaimed common products, figured out by anthropologist and interlocutors who for a moment take and share an interest. Importantly, this is not the kind of reciprocal ethnography that Lassiter suggests and which we discussed above; we do not mean to collect and calibrate different pre-​existing notions of amulets in order to reach agreement, nor do we aim to adjust ‘our’ ideas to ‘theirs’ –​we mean instead to see the fieldwork as a kind of public analytical work that creates amulets through the joint efforts of all involved. When interviewing people in London, I (Nathalia) was struck by the laughter and disruption that my opening questions seemed to cause. The simple question ‘do you have an amulet?’ was always immediately answered with a ‘no’. If I had stayed entirely faithful to Pietz’ historico linguistic approach I might have had to end my project here; the term amulet did indeed seem to be too distant from people’s lives. But I was not out to make a narrow analysis of an already established term, I was interested in a present-​day take on a phenomenon that a 100 years ago had been collected under the label amulets –​ so I went to some of the typical characteristics of an amulet and its synonyms. I continued and opened up the conversation by asking whether people had a charm or a lucky piece? A small thing that might somehow protect them or that is so very dear to them, so that it is carefully guarded. With my added suggestive qualifications people started thinking and revisiting their material world, and small weird objects swarmed out of their bags, pockets and memories; accompanied by smiles and laughter amulets suddenly began to spill out on to the streets of London. Since this written media does not allow us to actually visually show parts of our conversations generating some of these amulets, in the following sections we recount in writing some of the dialogues that took place. The first person I talked to was a woman, Alexy (see Figure 3.1). She happened to sit next to me under the sunblind of a café, also enjoying a drink in the shade on a Sunday morning in July. I had been sitting there for a while wondering how I could halt people and not only initiate a personal conversation about amulets, but also video record our dialogue. Our eyes met, we smiled, and I worked up my courage and inquired if I could ask her some questions. She welcomed me to her table. Within a few seconds it felt as if I had colonized her small table with my video camera, microphone, notebook and cup of tea. I told her briefly about the old collection of amulets and the exhibition that was in preparation at the Wellcome Collection. I said that I would like to talk to her about amulets and asked if I could film our conversation to which she agreed. I turned on the camera and repeated my question ‘do you have an amulet?’The question made her smile, answering, that no, she did not really have an amulet; but soon we

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FIGURE 3.1  Still

from Charmed Life in Contemporary London, Alexy with her amulet

found ourselves absorbed in a story about a small necklace with a cross that she had meticulously guarded as a child. At first it sounded as if she had grown out of doing these sorts of ‘religious things’, but then suddenly something happened. Her eyes sparkled, she reached out for her bag; it struck her, she told me, that she actually carefully carried a folded piece of paper in her bag on which a text was written. Quite overwhelmed she said: Alexy:  and I just realize that actually, that it is not the words, the words that are on that piece of paper are very important to me, but actually I now realize the paper, that piece of paper has become really important –​that’s so interesting, I hadn’t thought about it, yes I have an amulet [laughter], yes I’m guilty… Nathalia:  guilty of what? Alexy:  guilty of what? Buying in to superstition [we laugh]’…’And that’s so interesting, I didn’t realize I’ve got my very own amulet [lots of laughter]. During the next weeks I continued talking to people about amulets. Most of them like Alexy were surprised to think of themselves as amulet-​carriers. Hannah, whom I had the opportunity to talk to several times, responded to my question in the following way: I was thinking maybe like a lucky charm, and I don’t really have any, what I thought was lucky charms, I don’t think I was that superstitious, but then I started thinking, that actually I do keep lots of little things [laughter]. In her hands Hannah held a small porcelain box carrying the French text ‘Dents de lait’ –​inside the box were half a dozen of Hannah’s milk teeth carefully guarded. The fact that she kept these slightly eroded ‘little things’ made her laugh. And the fact that these small things held significance surprised her: I realized, after talking to you, that it’s like an amulet for me, and I’ve been thinking about why I kept them and just why I have this, [laughter] it’s really strange, maybe it’s just because it’s kind of weird I like it [laughter].

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FIGURE 3.2  Still

from Charmed Life in Contemporary London, Jane with her amulet

Apart from the strangeness and undefined character of her milk teeth, a point we will return to later, Hannah, like Alexy, associated amulets with ideas of being superstitious –​a characteristic she normally did not relate to herself. But then, during our initial conversation, she realized she had an amulet, and might not after all be as dismissive towards superstition as she first thought. These spontaneous insights surprised her –​just like it surprised Alexy and later also Jane (see Figure 3.2): I never think of myself as a superstitious person, I never carry anything for luck, and I never carry anything to ward off evil spirits, and that’s how I sort of think, you know, I don’t do these things, but when I brought this in today to show you [Jane touches and looks down on her ‘holiday souvenir’ –​a small golden painted wooden icon portraying a Christian religious figure], I thought, actually I do, because this isn’t just about, you know, sort of faith, I carry it with me on my travels because it makes me feel secure. For Jane superstition gets further verbalized and (dis?)connected to faith. The Christian icon is not just about faith; Jane indicates that there is more to it, or maybe something else going on with her Christian icon. Something that by its presence and proximity to Jane makes her comfortable and relaxed; a material agency she had not thought she relied on. Somehow these small things seem to be paradoxical by being talked about as deeply personal things that people actually make an effort to protect and often also carry around with them, but at the same time they are also talked about as insignificant and humble –​ rather than being costly and ostentatious they seem to be of an importance (and size) so that one easily forgets about them. But then again, how can these small (in)significant things span such different even paradoxical characteristics that taken together also surprised their owners? How were these amulets that were conjured up in the streets of London further characterized? Hannah talked about her teeth’s weirdness, that she cared about them because ‘they are kind of weird’. Navina, another woman whom I had the pleasure to meet, further developed this weird character: Navina:  ‘it intrigues me [a necklace that her former boyfriend had found on the street and given to her], there’s something about it that’s got an x-​factor on it.

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And after talking about her little intriguing thing that in the past, even for Navina, had been lost and found several times, I asked her: Nathalia:  so you can’t get rid of this little thing? Navina:  no because I have made a concerted effort with it now, you know, because I’ve had a history with it now. This x-​factor, the intriguing aspect, points towards a very important issue that we will call the under-​ defined character of the amulet. Two points have to be made. The x-​factor suggested by Navina indicates a particular characteristic of her amulet that is echoed in the other dialogues as well, namely that it escapes a total and comprehensive understanding; there is always something more to it, an x-​factor, which might be pointed at and expressed in the laughter, weirdness and surprise that our conversation about amulets generated. And maybe this under-​defined character is exactly what makes the amulets such good motors for dialogue; we did not have a settled idea to begin with about what amulets are, and when we began to discuss it the amulets appeared as objects with a paradoxical nature, as we saw above. The amulets were not that easily claimed, neither by combined disciplinary perspectives, nor by trying to conceive them as ‘they’ (the owners) do; even through the conversation about them, the amulets retained an x-​factor and an undisciplined nature. Being so humble, insignificant and deeply personal at the same time the amulets actually remained quite under-​defined –​they became what they were as we talked and analzsed them to life, in their historical context of usage, as Pietz suggested for the fetish. Up until our conversation the objects had not even been characterized with a freezed definition such as a name –​they were just a piece of paper, some milk teeth, and a cheap souvenir that all happened to be very important to their carriers for a variety of reasons. But when interpellated as amulets, as my initial questioning implied, something happened –​something that made some of their carriers see themselves and their things in a new perspective by for instance characterizing themselves as superstitious. The objects turned into amulets. For a moment at least, these small things became a bit more defined due to the relations and analytical work we engaged in when talking about the objects. What happened during our conversation could be understood as small instances of creating subjects and objects anew (from being secular to being superstitious and from carrying a piece of paper to having an amulet) –​in common, creatively and with much laughter –​rather than interpreting (even if jointly and on the basis of editing) an object already defined and named. The shared sense that amulets have an x-​factor and are under-​defined made the creative collaboration possible and interesting to all. Momentarily, in the very process of fieldwork novel ideas were produced; ideas that turned the fragile paper in the bag, the insignificant necklace found in the streets of London, the milk teeth saved in a porcelain box at some parents’ house and the cheap souvenir icon into precious amulets. What we suggest here is that the very joint investment in a series of conversations across differences about things that people in London carried with them remade these things. The amulets did not work as material representations of an already given religious cosmology or personal story, nor was the very concept of amulets dismissed as belonging to some other logic to be represented accurately in exhibition work. Rather, a shared creative work was invoked to probe the elastic and under-defined qualities both of the particular things and of the category of amulets; fieldwork for the exhibition (i.e. the documentary) thus became a common locus of analysis, shared by ethnographer and interlocutors to the surprise and amusement of all.

Undisciplined amulets: Setting free exhibition research Arguing that both ethnographic fieldwork and exhibition practices can benefit from decommissioning any claim to representation –​whether to be accomplished through cross-​disciplinarity, combining a

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number of pre-​g iven sets of expertise, or by careful editing of cultural texts together with local communities –​we have explored practices of carrying amulets in London as a means to fulfil the research potential of exhibitions. The joint and public work of exploring amulets is what produces them and shows us what these even are. As the dialogue with the people in the streets of London showed, amulets appeared contradictory and hardly added up to one smooth category. For one person the amulet was like a partner in crime, for another it was a treasured object that gave her security, for others again it was a gem that kept alive memories, and yet for another the amulet was treasured because of its weirdness, and finally for one person gave it rise to questioning and criticizing our attachment to materiality. This incommensurability is not a problem that creates an inconsistent analysis of what an amulet is; it was and is not important for us to identify criteria as to what could and could not be defined as an amulet (cf. Pietz’ strategy in exploring the fetish). Instead, what was vital was to embark on the exhibition project as a mode of research by collaboratively exploring the initial and rather loose question. The point of this ethnographic work was thus never to approximate any natives’ points of view, or represent any source communities, but rather to engage in ongoing, shared and surprising knowledge work –​or indeed, research projects –​across differences, disciplinary ones among others. One might simply say that people in the streets of London in 2011 helped us qualify what an amulet (also) is. Importantly, we see this continuous knowledge work on amulets as a process that extends well beyond the face to face encounters in the city streets, that is, the immediate fieldwork situation. Amulets also (potentially) get made anew when future viewers watch the film. In fact, we argue, even the hundred year old collection of amulets displayed at Wellcome Collection is a site for an unfinished research process that continuously qualifies what amulets can even be seen to be. This leaves us with a highly unruly subject matter the meaning of which no scientific discipline can claim. The charm of conducting ethnographic fieldwork to explore this wayward terrain, we suggest, is not that it better captures the real meaning of amulets than, say, biology, but that it is open to a kind of inherently interdisciplinary and collaborative work with unsettled subjects and objects. And this is what we would like to mirror in exhibition work –​whereby that, too, becomes a research process. The field of amulets in London thus provided a possibility for what philosopher of science Helen Verran calls a postcolonial moment (Verran, 2001, 2002). A moment where sameness and difference are not already charted out along given lines, but can be thought and made anew; a moment where differences become realizable. A postcolonial moment, in Verran’s version, thus yields the possibility of an ongoing co-​creation of worlds and of emancipating thought and action from conforming to already given domains (2002, p. 729ff). Thinking about the postcolonial in this manner is a way of exploring exhibition work as undertaken in a shared domain with under-​defined content –​and where settled positions and disciplines do not contribute each their (collectively edited) part to a full picture in ever higher resolution. By this approach we get an opportunity to let go of assumptions that we already know what amulets, superstition, materiality, rationality –​or any other knowledge object for exhibitions –​are, and instead engage in creative work about things that matter and make that research process the very point of the exhibition. Such an exploration demands an effort and a willingness to enter a conversation with an always preliminary end goal, which of course requires collaboration between museum professionals of various qualifications to display. What is central here is that our interlocutors and exhibition object become more than data (or indeed consultants) to be filled into an already given structure. Anthropologists and curators further get the opportunity to engage laterally with our interlocutors in a continuous world-​making project (Hastrup, 2011). This is cross-​disciplinary exhibition work unfolding as an undisciplined research process. If indeed we want to escape the trap of representation we need to do away with a notion of translation between their worldview and ours –​or in Lassiter’s version the practice of editing a text carefully enough for it to become

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a sophisticated representation. The relativist move of comparing A to B as if from outside of both too easily slips into regressing to folklore, where reified and ‘classic’ practices such as a culture’s costumes, myths, songs and dances are central. In consequence, and this is why we make the analogy between amulets in London, ethnography and exhibition work, we argue that in any case we need to recognize the rich potential of ‘staying with the trouble’, as Donna Haraway has framed it (Haraway, 2010). Staying with the trouble of a particular here-​and-​now where amulets appear in various and often contradictory ways as they are brought to life in collective action is a way to go beyond any representational claims. To stay with the trouble thus offers a way for ethnographic work to stay in the world –​where amulets are many kinds of things. This is where we differ both from Lassiter’s reciprocal ethnography and from the idea that we must find out ‘how we must think in order to conceive a world the way they do’ (Henare, Holbraad and Wastel, 2007, p. 15). From this material, such ‘we’ and ‘they’ were not relevant for the joint effort of finding out what amulets are. Readers might object, saying that this approach is only possible because the fieldwork took place among people who were not organized in particular communities. Well, in a postcolonial anthropology we would not like to start out with a settled community in any event, any more than with an a priori disciplinarily accepted definition of an amulet. In the kind of lateral exhibition and ethnographic work that we engage in here, the native’s point of view is illusory, as both exhibited objects and the persons who care about them, including professional exhibition makers and antique collections, are produced in the process of research. When exploring ethnographic fieldwork and exhibition practices as modelled on one another neither emerge as self-​sufficient; as such exhibitions become cross-​disciplinary research projects –​made up of undisciplined and engaged artefacts and curators.

Acknowledgements We would like to thank all the people who engaged in this project in the streets of London, as well as at the Wellcome Collection. We are grateful in particular to Head of Communication Ken Arnold and curator James Peto for letting one of us participate in exhibition-making. We are grateful also to Peter Bjerregaard and Brita Brenna for very helpful comments and suggestions.

References Boast, Robin. (2011). Neocolonial collaboration: Museum as contact zone revisited. Museum Anthropology 34(1), pp.  56–​70. Brichet, Nathalia. (2011). Charmed life in contemporary London. Last modified September 10, 2011. Available at: www.wellcomecollection.org/​charmed-​life-​contemporary-​london. [Accessed 6 October 2014]. —​—​—​. (2018). An Anthropology of Common Ground. Awkward Encounters in Heritage Work. Manchester: Mattering Press. Brichet, Nathalia, and Frida Hastrup. (2011). Figurer uden grund. Tidsskrift for Antropologi 64, pp. 119–​135. Clifford, James, and George Marcus, eds. (1986). Writing culture. The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press. Crapanzano, Vincent. (1986). Hermes’ dilemma: The masking of subversion in ethnographic description. In: James Clifford and George Marcus, eds., Writing culture. The poetics and politics of ethnography. Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 51–​76. Frazer, James George. (1998 [1890]). The golden bough. A study in magic and religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gabriel, Mille. (2015). Fortiden, fremtiden og det etnografiske museum. Samtidsindsamling, videndeling og medkuratering. In: Ulf Johansson Dahre and Thomas Fibiger, eds., Etnografi på museum. Visioner og udfordringer for etnografiske museer i Norden. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Haraway, Donna. (2010). When species meet: Staying with the trouble. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 28(1), pp. 53–​55.

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Hastrup, Frida. (2011). Shady plantations. Theorizing shelter in coastal Tamil Nadu. Anthropological Theory 11(4), pp. 425–​439. Henare, Amiria, Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell. (2007). Introduction: Thinking through things. In: Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds., Thinking through things. Theorising artefacts ethnographically. London: Routledge, pp. 1–​31. Holbraad, Martin. (2007). The power of powder: Multiplicity and motion in the divinatory cosmology of Cuban Ifá. In: Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell, eds., Thinking through things. Theorising artefacts ethnographically. London: Routledge, pp. 189–​225. Lassiter, Luke Eric. (2005). From ‘reading over the shoulders of natives’ to ‘reading alongside natives,’ Literally: Toward a Collaborative and Reciprocal Ethnography. In: The Chicago guide to collaborative ethnography. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, pp. 3–​14. Latour, Bruno. (2002 [1993]). We have never been modern. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Marcus, George, and Fischer, Michael. (1986). Anthropology as cultural critique. An experimental moment in the human sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Munro, Eelasaid. (2014). Doing emotion work in museums: Reconceptualising the role of community engagement practitioners. Museum & Society 12(1), pp. 44–​60. Peers, Laura, and Alison Brown. (2003). Introduction. In: Laura Peers and Alison Brown, eds., Museums and source communities. A Routledge reader. London: Routledge, pp. 1–​16. Pietz, William. (1985). The problem of the fetish, I. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 9, pp. 5–​17. —​—​—​. (1987). The problem of the fetish, II: The origin of the fetish. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 13, pp. 23–​45. —​—​—​. (1988). The problem of the fetish, IIIa: Bosman’s Guinea and the Enlightenment theory of fetishism. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 16, pp. 105–​124. Ronan, K. (2014). Native empowerment, the new museology, and the National Museum of the American Indian. Museum & Society 1, pp. 132–​147. Schorch, Phillipp. (2013). Contact zones, third spaces, and the act of interpretation. Museum & Society 11(1), pp. 68–​81. Simon, Nina. (2010). The participatory museum. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0. Vermeylen, Saskia, & and Pilcher, Jeremy. (2009). Let the objects speak: online museums and indigenous cultural heritage. International Journal of Intangible Heritage 4, pp. 59–​78. Verran, Helen. (2001). Science and an African logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —​—​—​. 2002. A postcolonial moment in science studies: Alternative firing regimes of environmental scientists and Aboriginal landowners. Social Studies of Science 32(5/​6), pp. 729–​762.

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PART II

Sensing knowledge

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4 EXHIBITIONS AS PHILOSOPHICAL CARPENTRY On object-​oriented exhibition-making Adam Bencard

In a review of philosopher and media theorist Ian Bogost’s book Alien Phenomenology –​Or What It’s Like to Be a Thing (Bogost, 2012) the theoretician of things Bill Brown (e.g. Brown, 2001) notes a resurgence of theoretical preoccupation with objects: Who could have guessed that things would make such a roaring comeback in the twenty-​first century? What were the odds that the object could leap over such high hurdles: the deontologizing orthodoxies, the fascination with the subject, fixations on the image and the word? And yet, shining brightly, there it is: the object now luxuriating in the critical spotlight. (Brown, 2013, p. 554) This ‘critical spotlight’ is directed from a number of emerging trans-​disciplinary fields and movements concerned with thinking about things and materiality, such as speculative realism (Bryant et al., 2011), new materialism (see Dolphijn and van der Tuin, 2012), new vitalism (see Bennett, 2010), material feminism (Alaimo and Hekman, 2008; Alaimo, 2010), posthumanism (e.g. Braidotti, 2013), the ontological turn (Henare et al., 2007), the nonhuman turn (see Grusin, 2015), and object-​oriented ontology (e.g. Harman, 2005), to name some of the diverse directions in this motley field. While there are major differences, even mutually exclusive positions, to be found in within this cluster, there is a shared concern with attempting to think past certain language-​and culture-​centric understandings of humans, and engaging objects and materiality as something more that blank canvasses for human ingenuity and purposefulness.1 The things now luxuriating in the spotlight look different than imagined in a previous representational/​semiotic framework (eg. Appadurai, 1986); the refocused interest in things is concerned with strange and even alien qualities of things, suggesting that they contain aspects or qualities that does not always relate back to us in transparent ways, and might bring us into contact with what we cannot easily assimilate into our established frames of reference and dominant cultural narratives. As Woolgar and Lezaun (2015) note, the ‘turn to ontology’ often is seen as an attempt to “circumvent epistemology and its attendant language of representation in favour of an approach that addresses itself more directly to the composition of the world” (Woolgar and Lezaun, 2015, p. 322). Building on this refocused interest in things, this chapter contributes to the nexus between exhibitions and research by suggesting that exhibition-making might be sites to experiment with such speculative,

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philosophical research about things. More specifically, the central analytical object of this chapter will be the aforementioned Alien Phenomenology and the ontological speculations it presents. In it, Bogost outlines a philosophy built on number of concerns and underlying aspirations: to propose a realist ontology; to question human exceptionalism in order to articulate a non-​anthropocentric philosophy; and a deep concern with and attraction to objects as confounders of representationalist modes of thinking subject/​ object relations. It should be noted at the outset that I am less interested in evaluating the philosophical correctness of object-​oriented ontology –​I will leave the more strict philosophical debates to others.2 I am mainly interested in the aspects of this philosophy that speak to museum work, and the ways in which it might be generative for exhibition-making and help to generate particular forms of ‘object-​orientation’ –​ both for philosophers and museum practitioners.

Waking up inside an object As a philosophical work, Alien Phenomenology is part of a wider philosophical and theoretical concern with situating humans as deeply entangled in the world, as part and parcel of its material currents. As eco-​ philosopher Timothy Morton writes about the current zeitgeist in which this philosophical reorientation towards things is taking place: “We have realized that the ‘world’ is actually a gigantic object in which we exist like Russian dolls inside a larger Russian doll” (Morton, 2011, p. 184). Philosopher and literary theorist Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht expresses a similar sentiment: It is as if, all of a sudden, we found ourselves in the middle of time and in the middle of objects, with a desire to become part of this material world (and perhaps even of its temporality) which experience, for a sheer lack of familiarity, is confusing for us. In other words, we have to learn what it is to be an observer who stands, with his body, in the middle of a material world to be observed. (Gumbrecht, 2008) These quotes points towards a reconfiguration of a perceived exclusively human-​centered perspective, and manifests as a concern with the properties of nonhuman beings in the world, including things that do not resemble us or are somehow useful for humans. While such statements have to be understood, in part, as a pendulum swing of academic fashion –​that is, as part of a wider reaction to a perceived overreliance and overemphasis on social constructivist and semiotic approaches, which have also been influential within museology –​they also express a philosophical response to a wider cultural concern with things in western societies, where objects increasingly seem to be causes of concern; “There is definitely something afoot, something about everyday (euro-​american) life that is warning us to pay more attention to what we’re doing”, as philosopher Jane Bennett, author of the influential Vibrant Matter (Bennett, 2010), reflects in an interview on the call from the objects around us.3 What might appear as esoteric and abstract discussions about the nature of things gain increasing importance in light of questions of ecology during the Anthropocene age (see, e.g. Morton, 2016). Things seem to have become strange and unruly, as W.J.T. Mitchell suggests: “Things” are no longer passively waiting for a concept, theory, or sovereign subject to arrange them in ordered ranks of objecthood. “The Thing” rears its head –​a rough beast or sci-​fi monster, a repressed returnee, an obdurate materiality, a stumbling block, and an object lesson. (Mitchell, 2005, p. 112)

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Things have become philosophically and culturally interesting (or even disturbing) as something other than modest witnesses to the drama of human culture, which should be good news to museums, both as sites of curatorial practice and theoretical and critical research. Museums, being places where things are stored and studied, are potently suited to be sites from which to explore this posthuman world, in which objects and materialities of all sorts, as well as other species living around, on and inside of us, compete and cooperate to fashion the dynamic environments in which we all live. Things, then, seem to hold out both philosophical promise and cultural relevance. Bogost writes about the object-​oriented ontological project: “Object-​oriented ontology is thus not only the name for an ontology oriented toward objects, but a practice of learning how to orient toward objects ourselves. And, mise-​en-​abyme-​like, how to orient toward object-​orientation”.4 Such an orientation towards object-​orientation is in essence what the chapter will suggest can be fruitfully developed in a recursive pattern moving back and forth between philosophical attempts to imagine new ontologies of things on the one hand, and exhibition experiments with objects on the other. At the outset, then, I will suggest that alongside the normal ‘content-​driven’ research done in museums –​whether that might be the history of Viking travels, 17th-​century scientific instrumentation, 19th-​century developments in surgery and so on across the wide range of cultural and scientific historical museums that this chapter is primarily addressed to –​museums are also uniquely suited sites for philosophical inquiry into the nature of ‘thingness’ itself, to the status and effects of the objects and the wider material world that we are a subset of. Essentially, that museums can make exhibitions which not only put things on display, but also explore ‘thingness’, the philosophical qualities of the material world. And, of course, in some ways most museums have historically always been object-​oriented, even if their purpose and motivations have been articulated differently, and the practice undertaken under their roofs understood differently. Museums are, after all, in some ways “the ultimate materialistic enterprise” (Hein, 2000, p. 51). Finally, it must be stressed that the philosophy discussed in this chapter is not primarily presented as something which in toto can be turned into an exhibition format. It is not a complete theoretical toolbox that can neatly be translated into a set of exhibition procedures that would allow museum professionals to create exhibitions. It is rather an approach that can be used as a tool to attune curators to the different materials potentials in objects –​it is a tuning tool rather than an instruction manual. Just as the philosophers are trying out new methods the rethink our relationship to the material world, so their philosophies can help curators explore different ways to think of the material objects and their display.

Amplifying the dark noise of objects Alien Phenomenology is situated within the so-​called object-​oriented ontology (or OOO as it is often referred to in shorthand), a term originally coined by its perhaps most famous representative, philosopher Graham Harman. However, it is less a book of object-​oriented philosophy per se, and more of an attempt to outline an object-​oriented methodology or practice, making it useful as a bridge between an often very abstract philosophical movement and the multi-​facetted task of creating exhibitions. It is interesting in a museological context because it is an attempt to work out how such an object-​ oriented philosophy might be explored through a material, experimental practice. Alien Phenomenology is an attempt to employ and deploy the ideas in object-​oriented ontology, a call to build things that help explore a reconceptualized world of things, as well as a treatise on appreciating the strange and unfamiliar in the things around us, even those that feel the most obvious and familiar, and a manual for ways of producing a generative or positive state of alienation. Bogost writes of object-​oriented philosophers that

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our job is to amplify the black noise of objects to make resonant frequencies of the stuffs inside then hum in credibly satisfying ways. Our job is to write the speculative fictions of their processes, of their unit operations. Our job is to get our hands dirty with grease, juice, gunpowder and gypsum. Our job is to go where everyone has gone before, but where few have bothered to linger. (AP, p. 34) At the outset, this search for the ‘black noise’ emanating from objects is rooted in an attempt to think beyond the confines of what French philosopher Quentin Meillasoux in his influential work After Finitude calls ‘correlationism’, and defined as “the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other” (Meillasoux, 2009, p. 5). While correlationism historically has had many forms, it is fundamentally the proposition –​inaugurated, in this particular take on the history of philosophy, by Kant –​that being cannot be thought apart from a subject. Correlationism is thus the thesis that what we know of anything is true only for us; it claims that whether or not ‘things-​in-​themselves’ are one way or the other is unknowable to us because we only know how they appear to us, never as they are in themselves. This, according to Bogost, leads to positing human experience as the absolute point of reference for everything, enacting “the belief that human access sits at the center of being, organizing and regulating it like an ontological watchmaker” (Bogost, 2012, p. 5). That is to say, there can be no thoughts without objects, but equally no access to objects outside of thought. Bogost, like his fellow OOO-​practitioners, would try to break from this ‘correlationist circle’ between subject and object by attempting to speculate what the being of being is without thought or as posited by our intentionality. This break or abandonment is not merely a destructive or nihilist move, but a constructive move imploring us to develop ways of thinking outside a human-​centered conception of being: “the philosophical subject must cease to be limited to humans and things that influence humans. Instead it must become everything, full stop” (Bogost, 2012, p. 10). Bogost builds his excursion into alien phenomenology –​a practice of trying to get at the experience of things, however strange such a venture is –​on this ‘full stop’, formulating a very minimalist, ‘tiny’ ontology. Building on the work of Bruno Latour and especially Graham Harman, Bogost formulates a one-​line ontology, by stating that “all things equally exist, yet they do not exist equally” (Bogost, 2012, p. 11, emphasis in original). This ontology, Bogost argues, should be considered a thought experiment asking “what if we shed all criteria whatsoever and simply hold that everything exists, even the things that don’t? And further, what if we held that among extants, none exist differently from one another?” (Bogost, 2012, p. 11). In other words, that the world is full of things and any difference between, say, humans, submarines or centaurs are not ontological but specific. The aim of this ontology is not to exclude humans, but to speculate about the nature and relations of objects with one another as much with ourselves –​that is, to explore the world outside the correlationist circle. The aim is not doing away with the human-​world correlation, as that correlation is part of the world as well, but rather to unseat the human-​world correlate as the only relevant correlation, and instead place it amongst all the other myriads of correlations, as just one amongst a universe of object relations. In short, Bogost employs this tiny ontology to oust the notion that there is something ontologically special about the category ‘human’. This should not be taken as a dismissal of the importance of ethical, political or sociocultural concerns, but rather as what it says: an ontological starting point. With this radical ontological equivalence taken as a first philosophy, Bogost advocates an alien phenomenology, a process of speculating on what it is like to be something wholly foreign to the human reader. This phenomenological process is important because this foreignness resides in everything around us, functioning in everyday life. As Bogost writes:

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The true alien recedes interminably even as it surrounds us completely. It is not hidden in the darkness of the outer cosmos or in the deep-​sea shelf but in plain sight, everywhere, in everything. Mountain summits and gypsum beds, chile roasters and buckshot, micro-​processors and ROM chips can no more communicate with us and one another than can Rescher’s extraterrestrial. It is an instructive and humbling sign. Speculative realism really does require speculation: benighted meandering in an exotic world of utterly incomprehensible objects. (Bogost, 2012, p. 34) Speculation, then, in the context of an alien phenomenology, outlines an attempt at describing the nature of being rather than the human philosopher’s approach to it, but also, more mysteriously, the claim that the black noise of objects itself is form of speculation, that things speculate, and that speculative realism is speculation on exactly this process. The practice of alien phenomenology is not like the reasonable attempts at testing and verifying theories that normally make up much of philosophical and academic practice, but more of an attempt to weird and make strange some of our commonplace assumptions about the world around is. In Bogost’s own words, In the face of such wackiness, one must proceed like the carnival barker rather than the scholar: through educated guesswork. Speculation isn’t just poetic, but it’s partly so, a creative act that beings conduct as they gaze earnestly but bemusedly at one another. Everything whatsoever is like people on a subway, crunched together into uncomfortably intimate contact with strangers. The philosopher’s job is not merely that of documenting the state of this situation but of making an effort to grapple with it in particular circumstances. (Bogost, 2012, p. 31) This is important to bear in mind when attempting to make use of the ideas embedded in Bogost’s object-​oriented philosophy: in a sense, it is also a form of poetry, a speculative trip rather than a handy and reproducible field guide.5 It is a process of attunement to strange objects. This attunement is also part of the attraction for exhibition-making, as it reorients and disturbs notions of what objects are and can do in the exhibition space. This strangeness is echoed in the specific ontology of objects that Bogost and OOO develops, which is based on a conception of objects (in the widest sense, as noted) as being deeply isolated or withdrawn. Bogost, following Graham Harman, argues that “all objects recede interminably into themselves” (AP, 10). In his short work The Third Table (Harman, 2012), Harman describes this ontology through an anecdote from the British physicist Arthur Stanley Eddington, found in the introduction to his 1928 book The Nature of the Physical World. Eddington distinguishes between the solid and substantial ‘everyday table’ that Eddington wrote on, and the ‘physical table’ composed of a swarm of particles rapidly moving in what is mostly empty space. Harman argues for a ‘third table’ lying somewhere between those to. This third table is not reducible either to its components or to its ‘table effects’ on humans –​its reality is not exhausted by physical or cultural explanations. There is “a genuine reality deeper than any theoretical or practical encounter with it” (Harman, 2012, p. 10), the table is an emergent whole which “has features that its various component particles do not have in isolation” (Harman, 2012, p. 7). This ontological reserve posited within each object, that they always hold something back, means that real objects, in Harman’s view, withdraw from each other. Levi Bryant, another proponent of OOO articulates this standpoint: “objects have no direct access to one another and that each object translates other objects with which it enters into non-​relational relations” (Bryant, 2011, p. 26). This separates OOO’s ontology from more relational theories such as actor-​network theory and process philosophy (see Bogost, 2012,

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pp. 6–​7), since, from this perspective, things cannot be reduced to either their relations nor the flux of processual becoming. However, besides real objects and their qualities, Harman develops what he call sensual objects that rather than existing in a withdrawn state, lie directly in front of each other, as the surface appearance, the phenomena available to other objects, depending on their perceptual capabilities. Objects thus never really touch, never fully fuses with or exhausts each other, but rather “somehow melt, fuse, and decompress in a shared common space from which all are partly absent” (Harman, 2005, p. 190). For Bogost, this means that anything we can say about objects is a caricature, a representation, which we, he argues, only ever approach through what he calls metaphorism, and these metaphors are a way to grasp alien objects’ perceptions of one another. This always withdrawn ‘deep space’ residing within all objects is the alien that Bogost aims his speculative approach at, it is the source of the black noise that his alien phenomenology works to channel.

Philosophical carpentry and ontographical experiments In order to develop such an alien phenomenology, Bogost calls for philosophical work that goes beyond established forms of academic writing. Writing, Bogost notes, is dangerous for philosophy because writing and language more generally is only one form of being and continuously working through the medium of language creates a myopic view of other very real forms of being that populate the world. Rather, Bogost urges academics to approach the nonsemiotic world more directly: “If a physician is someone who practices medicine, perhaps a metaphysician ought to be someone who practices ontology” (Bogost, 2012, p. 91). He urges engagement in what he calls ‘carpentry’, understood as constructing artifacts that do some sort of philosophical work. Bogost adapts the term ‘carpentry’ from Graham Harman’s Guerrilla Metaphysics: Phenomenology and the Carpentry of Things, and Harman, in turn, borrows the term from Alphonso Lingis. Harman uses ‘carpentry’ to refer to the metaphysical ways in which objects are joined or pieced together –​that is, not its actual physical construction, but rather a philosophical speculation of its internal structure. Both Harman and Lingis, Bogost says, “use [the] phrase [carpentry of things] to refer to how things fashion one another and the world at large. Blending these two notions, carpentry entails making things that explain how things make their world” (Bogost, 2012, p. 93). In other words, exploring ontology through the activity of making things that ask philosophical questions about things: Unlike tools and art, philosophical carpentry is built with philosophy in mind: it may serve myriad other productive and aesthetic purposes, breaking with its origins and entering into dissemination like anything else, but it’s first constructed as a theory, or an experiment, or a question –​one that can be operated. Carpentry is like philosophical lab equipment. (Bogost, 2012, p. 100) Philosophical carpentry, then, prompts for the creation of constructs –​ranging from machines, to pieces of computer code, to exhibitions and beyond –​that allows us to speculate about the experience of another, whether that other is a person, an animal, or a thing. This is, of course, inherently contradictory, as we are trapped in our humanity like mosquitoes in amber, but it reflects an urgent insistence on the value of the process itself, of attempting through wild speculation and metaphors to approximate what is fundamentally incomprehensible. A sort of philosophical antidote to ontologies of human exceptionalism, as Graham Harman writes: “There is no evidence that trees and houses write poetry, suffer nervous breakdowns, or learn from their mistakes. The question is whether this obvious difference between humans and non-​humans deserves to be made into a basic ontological rift” (emphasis in original)

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(Harman, 2012, p. 119). To the object-​oriented philosopher, the important thing is not to fall back into the correlationist circle, retreating to the more familiar shores of human exceptionalism. What might such philosophical lab equipment look like? I will focus on one example, what Bogost calls his ‘Latour Litanizer’, created in 2009. It is a small program that generates random lists of objects, people, events, places, etc. by drawing from the pages of Wikipedia.6 Here are three random examples produced for this paper, but feel encouraged to visit Bogost’s site and create your own: Intentional camera movement, Toots and Casper, Razee, List of films made in Poland in the Interwar Period, Ethminolia akuana, Inter-​Agency Standing Committee; List of Doc Savage radio episodes, Flashman and the Redskins, Lucius Opimius, Gavin School District 37, Crescent (band), Isodemis brevicera, Dora Gerson, Juan de Urrede, USS Mason, Irish grammar, Ben Lashes, Fort Wetherill, 1995–​96 Slovak Superliga. The notion of a Latour litany stems from a specific stylistic device often found in Bruno Latour’s texts: recurring lists of seemingly unrelated objects, such as this list from ‘Irreductions’: “a storm, a rat, a rock, a lake, a lion, a child, a worker, a gene, a slave, the unconscious, or a virus” (Latour, 1993, p. 192). These types of lists, a sort of invocation of difference and variety, of course do not originate with Latour, but is given his name by Bogost because of the relationship between Latour’s theoretical work and OOO thinking more generally. While at the surface these litanies, both as produced by Latour himself and by the small piece of code written by Bogost appear as amusing and a bit flippant, they also, Bogost argues, serve a philosophical purpose. These lists or compendiums of apparently unrelated things mashed together without clarification or logical coherence, offering instead a glimpse of a bewildering multitude that rests uneasily within more traditional academic narratives, an invocations of the world around the text. As Bogost argues: “[Lists] to the literary ear only emphasise their real purpose: disjunction instead of flow” and, “that no matter how fluid a system may operate, its members remain utterly isolated”, echoing the underlying ontology of withdrawing objects (Bogost, 2012, p. 40). In Alien Phenomenology Bogost embeds these litanies within what he calls ‘ontography’. Ontography is related to ontology, that is, the speculative philosophical study of the nature of being as such, on what is really there (or not) and how it ties together, by being a technique to capture something of the many and varied forms of being and their interconnectedness: We must not confuse the values of the design of objects for human use, such as doors, toasters, and computers, with the nature of the world itself. An ontograph is a crowd, not a cellular automaton that might describe its emergent operation. An ontograph is a landfill, not a Japanese garden. It shows how much rather than how little exists simultaneously, suspended in the dense meanwhile of being. (Bogost, 2012, p. 59) Thus, if ontology is the over-​arching theory of what is there, ontography is the somewhat more mundane task of listing some of those things. It is “a general inscriptive strategy, one that uncovers the repleteness of units and their interobjectivity”, as Bogosts writes (Bogost, 2012, p. 38). An ontograph, in Bogost’s terminology, is a device to explore ‘the rich variety of being’, according to the subtitle of the chapter in which they are outlined. Ontography is a manner of arbitrarily placing units side-​by-​side. They undermine the correlational position by frustrating the human proclivity for organizing things along narrative lines: “Ontographical cataloging hones a virtue: the abandonment of anthropocentric narrative coherence in favor of worldly detail”, as Bogost writes. The continued confrontation with the bewildering

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variety of being is a fundamentally important exercise for those who would explore materiality and objects in a more sustained way: to create an ontograph involves cataloging things, but also drawing attention to the couplings of and chasms between them. The tire and chassis, the ice milk and cup, the buckshot and soil: things like these exist not just for us but also for themselves and for one another, in ways that might surprise and dismay us. Such is the ontographical project, to draw attention to the countless things that litter our world unseen. (Bogost, 2012, p. 51) An ontograph, then, is a kind of willed, unqualified attention to particulars without attempting to order or group them in any way, except their order of appearing: “Lists are perfect tools to free us from the prison of representation precisely because they are so inexpressive. They decline traditional artifice, instead using mundaneness to offer ‘a brief intimation of everything’ ” (Bogost, 2012, p. 29).7 In this sense, ontographical lists can be related to a number of other broadly non-​representational strategies, such as Barthes ‘punctum’ (Barthes, 1980), Fineman’s anecdotes (Fineman, 1989) and Runias metonomies (Runia, 2006; see also Bencard, 2014).8

Philosophical carpentry in exhibition-making The practice of ontography links in a very immediate way to working with objects in collections; storage spaces are literally objects listed on shelves, exhibitions rows of things. But honing their effects as ontographies requires an active process of letting go; letting go of narrative, of systematization, of structure, at least for a little while. One could translate Bogost’s litanizer directly into museum registration system, allowing code to list objects across the collections. This might require many attempts before something interesting happens –​not all litanies are equally suggestive –​but the process itself opens for a different engagement with the objects, one not as focused on their representational values for larger cultural or scientific narratives. This approach bears resemblance to the 2005 exhibition Making Things Public, curated in part by Bruno Latour, in which the intention to stack things in space and see what happened was an important impetus: “in this show, we simply want to pack loads of stuff into the empty arenas where naked people were supposed to assemble simply to talk” (Latour, 2005, p. 7). This packing suggests, among other things, how masses of things themselves can be used to intimate the complexity and importance often unacknowledged complex thing-​world in which everything is suspended; as Katherine Stewart writes in a related anthropological work on ordinary affects: Models of thinking that slide over the live surface of differences at work in the ordinary to bottom-​ line arguments about ‘bigger’ structures and underlying causes obscure the ways in which a reeling present is composed out of heterogenous and noncoherent singularities. (Stewart, 2007, p. 7) Ontographs cover some ground between ontological speculations and the practice of developing sensibility to how such object configurations play out in the world. An example of ontographical thinking employed in museum practice can be taken from the research and exhibition project Mind the Gut at the Medical Museion, a museum for the culture and history of medicine at the University of Copenhagen. Mind the Gut is a semi-​permanent exhibition and opened in October 2017, with this author and Prof. Louise Whiteley as curatorial leads, along with an expanded

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group of co-​curators, including three visual artists, two scientists and curatorial staff from the museum. Mind the Gut deals, as the title suggest, with the complicated relationship between the brain and the belly, between our minds and our guts. Questions surrounding this long-​standing complex relationship –​ one of the oldest questions in the history of medicine –​are being raised with renewed strength by last decade’s groundswell of biomedical research on gut-​brain-​bacteria interaction. This rapidly developing research field is showing that the brain, the gut, the gut’s trillions of microbial inhabitants, and even brain cells living in the gut, interact to a much greater degree than previously thought. And even that mental states and conditions such as memory, learning stress, anxiety, autism and more cannot be understood only from a brain-​perspective, but comes to exist somewhere on the axis that runs between brain, gut and bacteria. This research throws into doubt deeply held cultural notions of what it means to be (and to study) embodied humans, challenging ideas about the body as a physiological machine consisting of separate organ-​systems. In the exhibition, we examined this research in a triangle between science, art and history of medicine, facilitated through an experimental co-​curatorial process (see Bencard,Whiteley and Thon,  2018). The exhibition thus had as one of its central problems the question of how to make an unexpectedly complex body present in the exhibition space? Without resorting to miles of text or didactic diagrams (which are reductive in their own carefully circumscribed ways), how could we give the visitor a sense of the complex and often dark territory, teeming with multitudes of interactions between a host of bodily actors ranging from nerve cells, neurotransmitters and hormones to billions of bacteria and other micro-​ organisms that live on and in our bodies? In the curatorial group, we felt it vital not to give the visitors a feeling of gut-​brain-​bacteria interaction as a well-​understood and neatly parsed out field; this is very much science-​in-​the-​making, a black box which has only just been opened up. We wanted the body to be present, but as a complex body whose linkages were less certain, less understood, less orderly that of an ordered anatomical representation. We drew on, amongst other things, Cameron and Mengler’s (2009) description of how complexity theory enables a critique of traditional modes of organizing knowledge, and how this might relate to museums’ work with their collections. Cameron and Mengler insist that ‘complexity’ is not the opposite of ‘simplicity’ nor simply a matter of being ‘complicated’ either. Complexity, rather, as the authors write: “pertains to the holistic, global or non-​linear form of intelligibility needed to comprehend a phenomenon. It refers to a dense, entangled dimension that appears rebellious to the normal order of knowledg” (2009, p. 194). Hence, ‘complex’ is more than the sum of its parts, and promotes approaches which are non-​dualistic and non-​hierarchical. We were thus trying to figure out ways of displaying a ‘complex body’, one which emphasized openness, non-​reductiveness and non-​linearity, echoing ontographical thinking as outlined in the previous section. In order to accomplish this, we worked with the visual artist Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt, who constructed the work Landscape Epithelia (2017). The work consists of a digital, interactive map of a body that is at once real and imagined (see Figure 4.1). It is composed of images of the artist’s body on several scales: from MRI scans of the artist’s brain and body produced in collaboration with the Danish Research Center for Magnetic Resonance at Hvidovre Hospital, from microscopy images produced through medical biopsies taken from the epidermis and gastrointestinal tract of artist´s personal body in collaboration with microbiologists Lene Bay and Thomas Bjarnsholt at the Department of Immunology and Microbiology, University of Copenhagen, from photographs of the artists own skin, and from satellite images of earth. These were then merged with aquarelle colouring, and collected and composed solely on the aesthetics of the various surface structures according to the artist´s intuitive idea of how they visually associate to one another. The map was displayed on a large touchscreen standing behind a silicone curtain, upon which the images on the screen were projected.Visitors can use the touchscreen to navigate the ‘body’ on the screen, examining layers and resonances, but without particular guidelines

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FIGURE 4.1  Landscape

Epithelia by Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt, 2017. The digital interactive work is composed of images of the artist Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt’s body, including MRI scans of her gut and brain, electron microscopy images from biopsies taken from her intestines and epidermis, combined with photographs of her skin and satellite images of Earth.Visitors can zoom in and out on the images using a touch screen. Copyright: Naja Ryde Ankarfeldt and Medical Museion

or fix points. Outside the silicone curtain, some of the actual tools used in the process were exhibition, such as the biopsy punches and forceps used on the artist’s body and the actual microscopy slides with her samples on them. Landscape Epithelia is thus about connections, but not in any linear or diagrammatic fashion. And it is about disconnections, as its images originate from the same body system but on vastly different scales, in different temporalities, and with all the contingencies that biomedical imaging contains. As Bogost notes, creating an ontograph is drawing attention to and cataloguing both the couplings and the chasms between the things brought into the ontograph, showing how these things “these exist not just for us but also for themselves and for one another, in ways that might surprise and dismay us” (Bogost, 2012, p. 58). As an analogy to this, Bogost calls attention to the exploded view diagram, such as those made by engineers. These drawings, which are meant to provide an overview of a complex, physical system, have an intriguing and otherworldly effect on the unfamiliar viewer. Ontography is, as Bogost writes, “a practice of exploding the innards of things –​be they words, intersections, shopping malls, or creatures” (ibid.). It draws attention to an otherwise unseen set of relationships between things in what we often reduce to one thing –​a submarine, a television set, a watch, bicycle gears. Or a body, in this case. This presents the viewer with a multitude of perspectives on a particular set of things, opening its internal functioning up and exploding its apparent cohesiveness. Unexpectedly complex relationships and interactions appear from beneath the surface of the world of things. This ontographical take on the exploded view diagram felt to us in the curatorial group as a useful approach to avoid the reduction of the medical body into

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a single, coherent thing –​by exploding it through artistic intervention, we could have the body in the exhibition space without representing it in a reduced way, which would have gone against the grain of the theme and content of the entire exhibition project. Ontographical thinking helped edge us towards thus way of getting a body into the exhibition, as a sort of artistic ontograph, a disjointed visual list of things that both fits together but also remains separated, echoing an as yet open and undetermined science of gut-​brain-​microbiome interaction. Landscape Epithelia, through its ontographical traits, induce a non-​anthropocentric awareness by shying away from showing how things fit together (the hallmark of a more narrative, explanatory, meaning-​based approach), instead using images of the body as its artistic medium to bring us into a sensuous awareness of the fundamentally strange and alien nature of the body on display. The point was to avoid showing a transcendent, scientific perspective on the complete system, but to try to point to or reference that which must be beyond perspective. It is a problematization of perspective as such; all scientific images are, in some sense, underdetermined, as they are snapshots of a larger, moving system. Landscape Epithelia can thus be seen as an ontographical machine, as a piece of philosophical lab equipment, exploring a strange, object-​like body consisting of layers at once both connected and withdrawn.

The alien object in exhibition-making What is it like to be a thing, we might ask at the end of this examination of alien phenomenology. According to Bogost, we can only speculate, use wild metaphors, disrupt established narratives through ontographical disjunction, and make things –​and exhibitions. But the very act of speculating –​and an attendant process of building exhibitions as philosophical lab equipment to aid the speculative process –​ is itself a sharpening of a sensibility towards things and thingness. Interrogating and problematizing notions about objects is, as Dudley notes, useful for thinking about practice in museums, but can also “initiate some contemplation of the nature of museum practice itself ” (Dudley, 2012, p. 5). Applying the notion of philosophical carpentry to the reiterative loop between research and exhibitions is less tied to a particular philosophy, such as OOO, and instead speaks to the more general sense in which being and working with things makes the researcher write and think differently, opening new possibilities. And it is a way in which museums can become active sites for ongoing and culturally important discussions about our relationship to things and the world around us. The continued confrontation with the bewildering variety of being is a fundamentally important exercise for those who would explore materiality and objects in a more sustained way. Crafting and framing exhibitions is a process of framing thought in a medium which cannot be reduced to the communication and production of semiotic meaning. It is also material, spatial, sensory, and fundamentally object-​oriented. From the perspective of a philosophical carpentry, this is in itself a deeply philosophical exercise and inquiry into the nature of things –​and it suggests an active role for exhibition-making in research on ontology. Research, importantly, is not only the ordered, rational progress towards more refined knowledge, but also intuitive and imaginative leaps towards something else, something different, that alien phenomenology encourages.

Notes 1 There has also been renewed interest in materialisms within more established academic disciplines, and there have been in the last decade materialist and ontological turns in areas such as literary studies, anthropology, political theory, and history. 2 Also, the actual newness of these philosophies are worth discussing –​how do they differ from earlier traditions of thinking about materiality and objects? These discussions are pertinent, as the new interest in the ontologies

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of things begins moving beyond the initial rush of newness and into a more considerate phase of sorting out which of these speculative approaches and ideas that might have lasting value. Such discussions will not fit into the confines this paper, but at this stage in their academic trajectory they are worth attention, not least because they are symptomatic of a historical moment in which these themes seem to have particular significance and urgency. 3 Quoted from https://​philosophyinatimeoferror.com/​2010/​05/​25/​jane-​bennett-​the-​interview/​, accessed 18 March 2018. 4 Quoted from http://​bogost.com/​writing/​seeing_​things_​1/​, accessed 18 March 2018. 5 Predictably, this has led to a number of critiques of OOO, one of them being that it seems to prefer aesthetics over reasoning, practicing philosophy as ‘riffing’ on themes and suggestive metaphors, rather than sustained attempts to reason –​an process more akin to artistic production of half-​glimpsed intuited insights over more deliberate, carefully logical constructions. This critique, as raised for example by Nathan Brown who writes of the object-​ oriented ontology that it collapses “into absurdity, irrelevance, and infinite regress”, (www.parrhesiajournal.org/​ parrhesia17/​parrhesia17_​brown.pdf –​see also Peter Wolfendales extended critique in Object Oriented Philosophy: The Noumenon’s New Clothes) must be taken into account when attempting to gauge its usefulness. However, I find that it is a productive in a museum context, in which aesthetics and half-​glimpsed connections is a vital force in what attracts us to museums in the first place. They are, as I have written about elsewhere, sites of presence (Bencard, 2014), places where things and history is experienced with a fullness that cannot be captured in meaning, logic or reasoned narrative. In some sense, all exhibitions are ‘riffs’ on particular themes, concepts, historical periods and episodes, and so on, conjured into space, with all the strangeness and unexpected (good or bad) qualities that arises from such contingency. This might also explain why OOO has been taken up most forceful within the art world and in fields sensitive to poetry and aesthetics such as literary theory (see Object-​oriented environs, etc.). 6 It can be found online at http://​bogost.com/​writing/​blog/​latour_​litanizer/​. 7 From ontography, Bogost moves on to what he calls metaphorism, which I shall only briefly mention here: Where ontography describes and enacts relations between objects, metaphorism is a form of creative distortion for revealing how objects perceive and experience relations. A completely speculative and weird practice, which uses “the clarity of distortion” to characterize the alien experience. 8 Similarly, philosopher Levy Bryant has suggested that these lists create a sort of epoché, as described by Husserl, a moment of suspension of judgment about the external world. Following Husserl, the epoché is a way of breaking with our fundamental “captivation-​in-​an-​acceptedness.” Husserl argues that we can’t help but live in an unquestioning and unbroken belief in our customary life in the world, and that the epoché is a moment of bracketing this immanence, this taking for granted of the structures of our normal existence. The ontographical list aims, in a small way, at this sort of rupture.

References Alaimo, Stacy. (2010). Bodily natures, science, environment, and the material self. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Alaimo, Stacy, and Susan J. Hekman. (2008). Material feminisms. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Appadurai, Arjun. (1986). The social life of things: Commodities in cultural perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barthes, Roland. (1980). Roland Barthes. Paris: Seuil. Bencard, Adam. (2014). Presence in the museum: On metonymies, discontinuity and history without stories. Museum & Society 12(1), pp. 29–​43. Bencard, Adam, Louise Whiteley and Caroline Heje Thon. (2018). Curating experimental entanglements. In: Malene Vest Hansen, Anne Folke Henningsen and Anne Gregersen, eds. Curatorial challenges: interdisciplinary perspectives on contemporary curating. London: Routledge. Bennett, Jane. (2010). Vibrant matter, a political ecology of things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bogost, Ian. (2012). Alien phenomenology, or what it’s like to be a thing. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Braidotti, Rosi. (2013). The posthuman. Cambridge: Polity Press. Brown, Bill. (2001). Things. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. —​—​—​. (2013). Alien phenomenology, or what it’s like to be a thing. Common Knowledge 19(3), pp. 554–​556.

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Bryant, Levy R., Nick Srnicek and Graham Harman. (2011). The speculative turn, continental materialism and realism. Melbourne,VIC: re.press. Cameron, Fiona, and Sarah Mengler. (2009). Complexity, transdisciplinarity and museum collections documentation: Emergent metaphors for a complex world. Journal of Material Culture 14(2), pp. 189–​218. Dolphijn, Rick, and Iris van der Tuin. (2012). New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Ann Arbor, MI: Open Humanities Press. Dudley, Sandra H., ed. (2012). Museum objects: Experiencing the properties of things. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge. Fineman, Joel. (1989). The history of the anecdote: Fiction and fiction. In: H. Aram Veeser, ed., The new historicism. New York: Routledge, pp. 49–​76. Grusin, Richard. (2015). The nonhuman turn. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Gumbrecht, Hans Ulrich. (2008). Shall we continue to write histories of literature? New Literary History: A Journal of Theory and Interpretation 39(3), pp. 519–​532. Harman, Graham. (2005). Guerrilla metaphysics, phenomenology and the carpentry of things. Chicago: Open Court. —​—​—​. 2012. The third table. Berlin: Hatje Canz. Hein, Hilde S. (2000). The museum in transition: A philosophical perspective. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books. Henare, Amiria J.M., Martin Holbraad and Sari Wastell. (2007). Thinking through things, theorising artefacts in ethnographically. Milton Park: Routledge. Latour, Bruno. (1993). We have never been modern. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Latour, Bruno, and Peter Weibel, eds. (2005). Making things public, atmospheres of democracy. Cambridge, MA, and Karlsruhe: MIT Press ZKM/​Center for Art and Media in Karlsruhe. Meillassoux, Quentin. (2009). After finitude, an essay on the necessity of contingency. London: Bloomsbury. Mitchell, W.J.T. (2005). What do pictures want? The lives and loves of images. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morton, Timothy. (2011). Here comes everything: The promise of object-​oriented ontology. Qui Parle: Critical Humanities and Social Sciences 19(2), pp. 163–​190. —​—​—​. 2016. Dark ecology: For a logic of future coexistence. New York: Columbia University Press. Runia, Eelco. (2006). Presence. History and Theory 45(1), pp. 1–​29. Stewart, Kathleen. (2007). Ordinary affects. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Woolgar, Steve, and Javier Lezaun. (2015). Missing the (question) mark? What is a turn to ontology? Social Studies of Science 45(3), pp. 462–​467.

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5 MUSEUM OBJECTS IN THE MARKETPLACE Kari K. Aarrestad

Museum versus market as research The University Museum of Bergen, Norway, set up the exhibition “Pop-​up 2015–​2018” at the shopping mall “Lagunen Storsenter” (“The Lagoon”) in Bergen in September 2015. In this project, we wanted to experiment with the sphere where business and museum meet, not so much in the financial sense but in the subject matter itself. We wanted to try and let the museum object meet the sales products, let the shopper become a museum visitor and let the different shops meet cultural and natural history –​with the goal of this leading to valuable new dimensions to all. From our point of view, the main goal was to explore ways for turning exhibitions into research. The museum’s goals for the project were manifold. From a research point of view we focused around two main lines of investigation: (1) how the exhibition space and different ways of exhibiting could create a new understanding of objects, and (2) in the context of the museum meeting with the marketplace –​can a non-​monetary increase in value be ascribed in this kind of cooperation and if so, how can this be mutually beneficial? The Lagoon wanted to attract more shoppers and make the shopping experience pleasant and entertaining, and hoped that the exhibition would give added meaning to the visit. Our experience is that the mall was a more complex and challenging space to present museum objects than a museum, as the museum and shopping centre are opposites in many ways. The role of museums is to provide a place of learning and related experiences and could easily be said to stand in contrast to the role of the mall, which is a place of consumption. The gap has, however, been closed in many ways over the last few decades as the concept of the experience economy has been described and applied. In his book, Museums at the crossroads, Jack Lohman’s first essay is called “Collaboration as Strategy”. That seemed like an admirable and exciting idea to explore for us. In this essay, he says that collaboration may seem like handholding –​very cosy. But he also says, “I want some real difference, not just complementary. We should not be afraid of it” (Lohman, 2013). In this project, we thus set out aiming at being unafraid and open to new ideas.

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A need for attention As the university had initiated and established a rehabilitation project of the museum building, and a reorganisation of the whole museum organisation and management, a project like this was requested by the leadership due to the need for media and audience attention while the building was closed for renovation and new exhibitions were being built. At the time the Pop-​up exhibit was put up, the museum was thus in a special situation. The natural history building, by many seen as the main museum building, was closed for renovation in November 2013 and was scheduled to stay closed for six years. We thus needed to attract attention to maintain contact with the public and also bring new visitors to our other facilities, the Historical Museum and the many gardens, hopefully based on this new arena for museum presence. The mall found it exciting to put cultural and natural heritage on display and thereby to build an image of being a centre for cultural impulses. In the back of our minds, these two provocative quotes from Andy Warhol lingered: All department stores will become museums and all museums will become department stores and Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art Andy Warhol (cited in Twitchell, 2004, p. 227) The audience of the University Museum of Bergen is very faithful and loyal, with strong feelings particularly for the Natural History Museum. Already when the closure was announced, we received feedback from the public that they saw this as a loss and wished the museum would be opened as soon as possible. One morning we found a Post-​it note on the front door saying: “OPEN AGAIN SOON” (Figure 5.1) with a drawing of a lion’s head. We thus had a situation where the public wanted to experience the museum and expressed frustration over not having access to the exhibitions. The Historical Museum does not draw as many people as the Natural History Museum did. Our cultural history exhibitions were open but had comparatively low visitor numbers and we wanted, of course, to attract a larger audience. Based on the difference we wanted to investigate possible factors that could explain the lower numbers. We chose to look at these two situations as parts of the same phenomenon –​ as different aspects of the public’s access to museum objects.

Why The Lagoon? The decision to make an exhibit away from the museum led us to evaluate the kind of venue we preferred. Bergen city centre is, like most city centres in Norway today, challenged by large malls outside of town where parking is easy, many shops are gathered in a small area and shoppers are protected for bad weather by the roof. So a mall would ensure us the advantage of a potentially large crowd of potential visitors. We found that the architecture of this shopping mall was very well suited for our purpose. It is not too big, has only two floors, has light and spacious corridors and has a circular movement pattern which makes is easy to navigate and to get an overview. Also, already from our first meetings it was evident that the management at the mall shared our wish to experiment with mixing museum and shopping experiences. The project was initiated by us, but the mall management saw great potential for positive attention for them in this collaboration.

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FIGURE 5.1 The

Post-​it note on our front door the day after we closed the museum for renovation in 2013. Photo: Siri Skretting Jansen, University Museum of Bergen

The museum was represented by a group of museum specialists and the project was headed by museum management. As this was something new to us, both parties were very open to suggestions and willing to adjust our relative contributions in the project. The shopping centre got an increasingly clearer idea of how they wanted to use it as the project progressed –​they took the opportunity to optimise the potential of other activities in the centre and to add new experiences. From the museum, the project group comprised of 8–​10 people from different departments: mediation, cultural and natural history and conservation. From The Lagoon four people from management and design were part of the project. Discussion had been held with The Lagoon’s management for one year, and plans to achieve our mentioned goals had been elaborated. We had agreed on a duration of three years for the exhibition. During that period we would display objects from the museum collections within natural and cultural history in different locations and with varying durations in the mall (Figure 5.2). In some periods there would be museum objects in the showcases, sometimes no exhibits, and at other times there would be products from the shops in some of the showcases (Figure 5.3). We divided the practical work between us. As the mall wanted to reuse the showcases for other purposes, they handled the drawing and building of showcases, based on our description, and they produced all the written material. We made the website. The Lagoon in Bergen, is a large shopping centre with 70,000 m2 of buildings spread over two floors, with 160 different businesses, approximately 130,000 visitors every week and a total turnover of over NOK 3 billion a year. This is currently a very diverse centre with some retail chains that are well known to the public, but also some specialty stores and smaller chains that are less well known to the public. The centre has no permanent amusement businesses like an amusement park, cinema, swimming hall or gym. They give room to shows and entertainment, crafts demonstration, political meetings, historical exhibitions, book launchings and other events.

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Our idea was simple: to show museum objects to people in places where people gather. A similar example is the Rijksmuseum Schiphol in Amsterdam, which was an inspiration to us as they have had a small exhibition at Schiphol Airport for some time. They show paintings by Dutch artists like Frans Hals, Johan Barthold Jongkind, Jan Toorop and Karel Appel, depicting typical Dutch motifs (van Ulzen, 2011). Their exhibition has become a permanent display in one of the world’s busiest airports, and is celebrating their 10th anniversary this year. In this project the museum placed their art in what they defined as a “non-​space” of the airport, referring to Marc Auge’s observations of such transit places like “the walk between two theatres on Broadway or rides at Disneyland” (Auge, 2008, p. 94). These areas have grossly the same characteristics as most airports have as well (van Ulzen, 2011). At malls like The Lagoon, the “non-​space” characteristic is present, but here it is actively being addressed as an undesirable trait. Even if the main purpose is shopping and a secondary effect is experience, malls have a very active management who are aware of the added benefit of cultural and social activities in the space. The mall’s management were clear on wanting to create a comfortable and relaxing ambience for their guests and also giving them some new inspiration and entertainment during their stay. From the museum, we wanted to use the opportunity to test and reflect on some issues such as the reasons for the significantly different visitor numbers at the natural history versus the cultural history museum. One explanation for the difference could be the fact that the cultural history building has a less favourable location. We asked ourselves if it could be that the objects displayed in both were differently perceived by the public or whether it was simply linked to factors like absence of facilities such as a café or a good shop, or if it in fact reflected an actual preference for natural history. And further, could it be that the visitors in general lack the same level of knowledge and understanding of cultural history objects as they have of natural history objects? Could it be that these objects therefore are seen as less accessible or interesting to the public than the more familiar natural history objects? Or maybe it is our way of displaying that is less available to the public? Another question we wanted to investigate was the public’s perception of the status of the objects and the danger of devaluation when placed in this setting. Would the objects displayed be seen as more expendable, of less value, or would they still be appreciated as unique and valuable in a context where purchase, sale and consumption is the main function? So, in this “non-​space”, we wanted to explore issues relating to our museum practices.

Museum meeting the market at The Lagoon Museum exhibitions are of course included in the term “leisure experiences”. However, in addition to being a leisure activity, museum exhibitions also have considerable educational ambitions. Thus, the mall was very aware of the significance of adding a cultural experience to the shopping experience and this gave them a clear motivation for making our collaboration a successful process. And so were we –​we wanted to get attention and good reviews at a time when we had limited opportunities to produce exhibitions and activities in our own arenas. For us, the meeting with the marketplace was one of some risk as will be elaborated further, but we hoped that it would be one that encompassed increased audience groups, new experiences, developing new methods and meeting new partners for collaboration. As we usually have a deep focus on the educational content in our exhibitions, we found ourselves challenged in this project, as this could not be done in this instance, as we shall see. As an analytic tool for our process, we used the concept,“experience economy”. The concept involves non-​monetary values in addition to the obvious monetary values. When economists B. Joseph Pine and James H. Gilmore launched the concept as an economic concept in 1998, it was based on previous work from 1971 by the American futurist Alvin Toffler, renowned for studying consumer behaviour. He said

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that an experience-​oriented industry will be the future. He believed that we would spend large portion of our money on exciting adventures like travel, knowledge, art and culture (Toffler, 1971). Several other economists also published parallel ideas about the importance of experiences on the national and global economy. Pine and Gilmore made the connection to economy stronger and said that an experience economy is the next step in the Western economy’s evolution from agrarian to industrial to service economy. They define experiences as “events that engage the individual in a personal way” (Pine and Gilmore, 1999, 2012). Flagestad, who studied the experience economy in Norway, says that the “Experience economy concerns itself with the processes and products that create experiences and identity of the customer” (Flagestad, 2006).The concept is based on the idea that the consumer will expect experiences as part of shopping, holidays and work. The theory postulates that experiences will become so important that it will be an economic factor that dominates our new financial future. Put simply, it says that cultural experiences are important and necessary to strengthen both private and public economy, and that trade and finance will become a necessary part of cultural life. This gave an interesting framework for us to work within during the development of the project at The Lagoon. Our museum has been going through a restructuring process and we are also in the process of renovating all our buildings and all our exhibitions. We are now attempting to actively implement this as a strategy to reach new audience groups and to engage with existing groups in new ways in the coming years. The Pop-​up project gave us an opportunity to test if and how education fits into the experience economy.

This is how we do it –​the case Are you putting up new things now? That’s good –​it’s so exciting to follow your work. (Shop attendant, January 2016) The exhibition was installed in September 2015 with 12 showcases spread out on the second floor of The Lagoon, with four showcases in three different spots (Figure 5.2). The objects were exhibited as singular objects of art without much context or information beyond the small text plate. They were individually mounted with a short text and a QR code attached. The code led to a website where you could get further information about the objects. When selecting objects, we focused on finding beautiful objects, objects that were interesting, different to look at, or that had an interesting story. It was, however, important not to select objects that would not tolerate handling or the climate, for example. Unique objects with high cultural, natural or historic value were avoided. But even with these criteria it was not difficult to find interesting objects from the collections, which could appeal to visitors. The showcases were positioned at three different open spaces in groups of four. We had a considerable focus on aesthetics throughout the process. The showcases were well made of high-​quality material, nice-​looking and well lit. They were placed in the main walking paths of the mall. The showcases had a very clear presence as they were different from, and thus stood apart from, other installations at the mall. They were fairly spacious, measuring 60 x 60 cm, and varying in height from 40 to 60 to 90 cm. The objects were placed with some thought as to what other objects they were next to in the exhibition area, but it was more important that the object itself was striking. The type of business that was around the square was also a consideration. We chose to place beer bowls outside the wine store, which the audience thought was funny. Stuffed animals and coins were placed outside the toyshop, and jewellery was displayed outside the jeweller and so on. Museum collections comprise of often significant objects from different areas or periods. There were many similarities between our museum objects and the sales products and commodities in general. Museum objects are in fact often objects for trade and were also often bought by the museum and added

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FIGURE 5.2  One of the three exhibition spots at the mall,The Lagoon. Here you see the knitted objects and the

beer bowls outside the Wine Monopoly. Photo: Kari K. Aarrestad, University Museum of Bergen

to our collections. These are objects that we have chosen to show as objects of beauty in themselves, thus trying to achieve an effect like Dudley describes: they “produce powerful emotional and other personal responses in individual visitors if given the opportunity to engage with objects on a physical, sensory, real-​time way” (Dudley, 2012, p. 5). However, our visitors were not allowed to touch the objects. The movement pattern in the mall goes in a circular track of shops on each side of a wide corridor. The exhibition benefited from this circular pattern of movement as it created an overview and ensured that the visitors saw all or most of the showcases. We have found that a large number of people at the mall visit at least two modules, but most likely the entire exhibit on a given visit. At Christmas the exhibition was reduced in size to one showcase in each of the three areas. The other three showcases were instead filled with products from the shops in the mall (Figure 5.4). After Christmas the exhibition was totally renewed with 12 new objects. The exhibition was renewed this way several times until the end of 2018. The way we worked with the Pop-​up exhibit was different in many ways from the way we usually work with exhibitions and I will show this by comparing it with one of our in-​house exhibitions at the Cultural History Museum, “Imageries from the Colonies”, put up in 2014. This exemplifies how we usually work and I will use it to demonstrate how we had to change our practice in the Pop-​up project. There were, of course, some similarities. Both projects focused around objects. However, at the museum the focus was on the different narratives of the objects and how this can be told using different exhibition techniques, while in the Pop-​up exhibition we had to focus more on the objects’ physicality and not on the narrative, as the space for the narrative was not available.

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FIGURE 5.3  Discussing

objects with the audience. Here are phallic representations from prehistory exhibited and discussed with young male students. Photo: Siri Skretting Jansen, University Museum of Bergen

FIGURE 5.4  Sales

products were presented in a similar fashion as the museum objects were, with a small text plate. Photo: Kari K. Aarrestad, University Museum of Bergen

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One part of “Imageries from the Colonies” was thematic, built around a multitude of narratives connected to one object cluster: a slave’s uniform worn by a Norwegian slave, Christian Børs, to the emir of Alger, in 1769 (Figure 5.5). The objects were the starting point of a presentation and discussion of slaves, slave contracts, workers, mercenaries and even the new security business, illustrated by examples from The Congo. So, from one object cluster the narratives unfolded into complex stories. The other setting for objects in this exhibition was a presentation developed around the donors of ethnographic objects to the museum during the1800s and 1900s. The objects themselves were displayed as objects of art and beauty, much like the objects in Pop-​up, but they were grouped according to donor, which was also focused on in the texts. The display was much like a stock room but, as mentioned, with a multitude of select, beautiful objects artistically displayed, with little text. It is always challenging to choose the right level of complexity in the knowledge one communicates in all museum exhibitions, and we found it particularly difficult with the Pop-​up exhibit compared to the “Imageries from the Colonies” exhibit. There was little room for deep research dissemination beyond what one can say in three sentences in a small text plate. We chose to show the objects alone in a showcase or with just a few other objects. This was also in line with our intention to focus on the materiality of natural and cultural history. By doing so, we hoped to be able to see clearer how museum objects relate to the surrounding multitude of consumer objects in a shopping context. We also chose to compensate for lack of thematic framing by creating an online version of the exhibition where all the objects that had been exhibited were presented with an exhibition text but also supplemented with articles, videos and interviews.

FIGURE 5.5 The

costume used by a Norwegian slave and a collection of ethnographica from the exhibition “Imageries from the Colonies”. Photo: Kari K. Aarrestad, University Museum of Bergen

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The limitations were of course our choice when we were selecting the venue and choosing the design. We wanted to take our study of how to present objects further than we usually do in the Pop-​up exhibit by choosing to remove much of the possibility of context and study the effect the objects themselves had on the audience.

Interacting and observation Observing and interviewing visitors at the mall was done regularly. We used the information to some degree to adjust our exhibition, but mostly to try out new things and also to formulate new questions to investigate in the project. We focused around three main visitor groups: shoppers, students/​teens and employees/​staff. Based on some immediate observations of these groups, our hypothesis was that the shops around the exhibition would create an increased attention to and understanding of the museum objects or the displays on the whole. We went on to investigate how this could be. We noticed that several of the employees/​staff expressed surprise at how many people stopped at the showcases and at the length of time they spent studying the objects. In one instance this was used as a sales strategy by a shop. The shopkeeper began serving samples of his products to exhibition visitors and starting a conversation with them that included thoughts on both the exhibitions and the products. He later told us that this was a strategy to increase sales as well as a social task. So, for this particular shop, the museum exhibition represented an increase in both monetary and non-​monetary value. Another fun effect occurred around the display places outside the Wine Monopoly Store. We were displaying three beautiful, painted wooden bowls traditionally used for serving and drinking beer, outside the liquor store, “Wine Monopoly” (Figure 5.6). The commentary and humour in the placing was

FIGURE 5.6  Outside

the Wine Monopoly. Beer bowls from the area of Fana, the same area where the shopping mall was situated, presented together with sales products. Photo: Kari K. Aarrestad, University Museum of Bergen

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not lost on the visitors. They enjoyed the irony. It also led to an added interest in and fascination with the objects. The text on the bowls was difficult to read, but the placing of the object created an added incitement and stimulated curiosity and further studying of both object and text. Our museum objects have historical links to the market and different financial interests. An interesting parallel we saw in this project relates to the history of the acquisition of objects. Many of the exhibited objects, both at the mall and at the museum, exemplified in the “Imageries from the Colonies” exhibit, were in fact given to the museum in the mid-​1800s. A large part of our early objects were given to the museum by Norwegian merchants, investors in industries abroad, or sailors on Norwegian ships and their families. The donors were in many cases connected to varying commercial interests and had acquired the objects through this activity. In fact, private donors, primarily local merchants, had financed the museum itself, established in 1825. This is why the donors of objects were a major focus point in the “Imageries from the Colonies” exhibition. The Norwegian slave in Alger was also a sailor on a merchant ship. This historic link between commerce and museum made an exhibition at the mall a natural next step or even a step back to the beginning for us, in a way.

Objects –​knowledge –​ value Disparagement? As our work with the exhibition progressed, it became increasingly evident that we were circling around three main issues: objects –​knowledge –​value, in different combinations. We formulated questions and hypotheses where these three elements were analysed in different ways. As mentioned, we wanted to investigate the public’s perception of the status of the objects and determine if there was a danger of devaluation and disparagement when placed in the setting of the mall. Were they seen as expendable and of lesser value, or would they still be appreciated as unique and valuable in a commercial context? Could we, maybe, even see a heightened appreciation for the objects? In our museum, and maybe also in the museum community in general, we have thought that since our work is primarily related to education, knowledge and understanding we would prefer that our dissemination mainly takes place within the physical framework of the university or museum buildings, or the like. Moving objects out of this arena of knowledge production and into the shopping centre would presumably limit our ability to control the environment and thus possibly, we thought, disparage both the objects themselves and knowledge. In the planning of “Pop-​up 2015–​2018”, we were therefore very uncertain of the dissemination in such a complicated setting. The concerns were essentially related to the fact that there were so many unknown factors. We were anxious, and tried to take the necessary precautions so as not to contribute to a devaluation of the objects. Partially we also had concerns that we could contribute to a misunderstanding that museum objects are consumable or alienable the same way products are. But, on the contrary, from our observations and communication with the user groups we concluded that the more immediate the access to our objects and the stories attached to them, the more interesting and exciting they were for the audience. In the following I will show how this was expressed.

Materiality and things The materiality of the Pop-​up project comprised of many elements, such as the exhibited objects themselves, the showcases, the texts and QR-​code, mounting material and the banners and pamphlets. Several authors have addressed the issue of materiality and context. According to Dudley, people respond to objects and give

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value and meaning to inanimate things and this, in turn, influences and cements human relationships and societies (Dudley, 2012). Seen in relation to the concept of an experience economy, this surfaces interesting perspectives both for research and for museum activities. Human relations and society are so greatly influenced by material culture; the economic potential in exploiting this may be vast. However, creating too strong a connection between money and cultural objects may not be the best way forward, exactly because of the human need to connect to and experience the objects themselves. Dudley points out that the materiality of objects –​their shape, colour, density, weight, texture, surface, size and so on –​define our sensory responses to them. Even the study of material culture has, in her opinion, moved away from the “very thingness” of the objects, to focusing on meanings we project onto them. She even argues that museums and visitors are much too focused on information on the object rather than the object itself. So much so that, according to her, the focus on supplying context and explanations for the displayed objects in exhibitions actually take away an essential opportunity to produce powerful emotional and other personal responses in individual visitors if given the opportunity to engage with objects on a physical, sensory, real-​time way (Dudley, 2012). In other words, the “thingness” of the Pop-​up exhibition is what made it a success.

Nature versus culture A central question in our minds when we started working with the exhibition was whether the objects of cultural versus natural history were perceived differently by the public. We asked ourselves this question because we had very different visitor numbers at our two exhibition buildings. From our observations in the Pop-​up we found that that audiences spent equal amounts of time at both types of objects, they used as much time to read the texts and they looked as often at cultural as at natural objects. It is hard to say what items caught their attention the most, but it seems like location and presentation rather than character of objects decided which were the most popular. It was our clear impression that the exhibit between the men’s clothing store Dressmann and Wine Monopoly were very successful. This location was characterised by good spotlighting, plenty of space to move round the showcases, variation in object types, exciting colours and differing materiality of the objects. We also noticed that we had several interesting conversations with the audience here. Also, one of the main entrances into the mall was here, serving a majority of shoppers who came on foot or by tram and bus. Our museum has relatively fewer visitors in the category of adult female 45–​75 years, than should be expected. We are working on understanding the reasons for this and also to increase our appeal to this group. During our observations at the mall this group was most often intrigued by the exhibited objects and spent time investigating them. The textile objects appealed to the adults interested in needlework. They studied the knitting patterns, embroidery patterns and the chest cloth knit pattern. These kinds of objects are also common and attractive to copy within the needle working audience. We saw, however that women often took into account who they were accompanied by and discussed objects that their companion was interested in. In our upcoming public surveys, we will focus more closely on this group with a goal to identify exhibition types and objects that will attract this audience group to visit the museum more often. The character and quality of the object is absolutely critical for good response from the audience. This of course is neither surprising nor a new discovery. Selection of objects and exhibition form in the coming years will be based on the experience gained so far.

Objects displayed with sales products When we disassembled the exhibit before Christmas we chose, as mentioned, to keep one showcase on each square containing a museum object while the rest contained sales products. By doing this we

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experimented with the questions we asked ourselves to begin with: Are objects understood differently depending on how and where they are displayed? When the objects are displayed with sales products are they understood as valuable cultural objects or are they seen as other consumables? Also, conversely, one might be able to register if the exhibited museum objects will have an effect on the audience’s experience of the consumer products. The designer at the mall experimented with this by choosing to present the products in the same way as we presented the museum objects –​one or a few objects together in a showcase with a small text plate placed inside the showcase. This gave the exhibition an impression of unity and the objects worked together as a whole when presented this way. It could also be seen as a humorous comment from the designer on the exhibition concept, which we certainly were amused by! The main function of the display of merchandise is to increase sales through appealing design and beautiful products –​these are shared features with exhibition design. The clearest direct effect of this was registered outside the jewellery store when beads from Africa were displayed over Christmas together with sales products (Figure 5.7). The shop attendant said many customers wanted to buy such necklaces and felt frustrated that they could not do so. As this occurred when we had had a period with a mixed exhibit with sales products and museum objects, the behaviour could be a result of a mixed message on our part or maybe low cultural capital with the visitor. The objects are similar to available products today and thus there is a desire for such products in the market. Our bead necklaces were seen as merchandise, an object of trade, a commodity. A commodity is a product intended for exchange, according to Karl Marx (1867). Appadurai says that commodities are objects of economic value, and he suggests that they are distinguishable from, among others, artefacts and other such objects only in certain respects and from certain points of view (Appadurai, 1986, p. 6). The African bead necklace at The Lagoon exemplifies how the transformation of the status of a commodity from one particular state to another may occur. The objects were made for trade and meant for use, meant to be worn. As they were collected and became museum objects they became rare artefacts representing something beyond themselves. They became examples of the aesthetics and fine art of the particular African society. But, in the present case, the objects were mistaken as being available commodities at the mall, free to be purchased. Was this due to low cultural capital on the part of the visitor? Well, similar objects are in use in West Africa today and are easily obtainable. The aim of the project was to establish a museum exhibition in an unexpected place, to meet a wide audience. What we had done was what Appadurai calls commoditisation of diversion, where value, in the art or fashion market, is accelerated or enhanced by placing objects and things in unlikely contexts (Appadurai, 1986, p. 20). We commonly think of museum objects as part of a very different category from commodities. They should not be exchanged or traded as they represent something beyond themselves like heritage, cultural representations and social status. As this was an exhibition directed towards a shopping audience, we should maybe not be surprised that some visitors thought they could buy the objects –​things are usually for sale at a mall!

The visitor, collaboration and self-​reflections In this project we experimented both with venue and with people in addition to objects. In multiple publications, such as by Falk (2009) and Falk and Dierking (2012), where the visitor`s role is discussed, the object of study –​the museum visitor –​is placed within the setting of the museum. What roles did the different people have when visiting the exhibition in The Lagoon? The term most commonly used when referring to people attending museum activities and looking at our exhibitions is “visitors”. But in this project the role of the visitor was multiple. They were in some cases shoppers passing by, briefly observing

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FIGURE 5.7  Beads

from West Africa displayed outside the jewellery store to the right, presented like sales products. Photo: Kari K. Aarrestad, University Museum of Bergen

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and moving on, sometimes engaging in a dialogue, sometimes contributing with wishes or demands. Their roles were something in between several different roles, like “the general public”, “an audience”, “participant” and “contributor” in addition to shopper, customer, employee, worker. Some may have been “museum visitors” and nothing else, but not many. Mostly theirs were practical, functional roles of people going about their business at the mall as usual –​not roles that we gave them as part of our project. There has been a trend in museums to be participatory, in the sense that the visitor should feel an ownership to the museum and to the subject matter, and thus see the museum as relevant and important to them personally (Simon, 2010). To achieve this, museums would, for example, let children become artists in an art museum, the visitors produce objects in crafts museums or let the visitors bring their own objects to the museum that would comprise a new exhibition. In other words, the visitors are given opportunity to take on different roles in the museum. The overall objective of this approach is to increase the democratisation of knowledge and history. We have tried, in our experiment, to let the museum object meet the sales products, let the shopper become a museum visitor and let the different shops meet cultural and natural history –​hopefully leading to valuable new dimensions to all. So far, we see a tendency that business and shoppers have reacted to the museum exhibition at the mall as representing an added value to their experience. Among both businesses and shoppers, we registered that they seemed to take a personal interest in the exhibitions and in the objects on display. Their reactions correspond to the definition of experience as events that engage the individual in a personal way (Pine and Gilmore, 1999, 2012).This kind of reaction in the audience is also what our museum seeks to achieve in all our exhibitions and events. In conclusion, in this project we have explored how the exhibition space and different ways of exhibiting could create new understanding of objects as they move between a museum and a market setting. As shown, in the Pop-​up project we let ourselves be challenged to let go of some aspects of control. The venue at the mall offered limitations in terms of the context we could supply to the objects. We thus explored other ways of adapting the narrative of the object to the physical environment with a limited possibility of using text or other supporting media. When working at the museum with the exhibition “Imageries from the Colonies”, on the other hand, this was not a limitation but we challenged ourselves by entering into a controversial subject matter in order to explore how objects can be used to trigger debate, as was the case with the slave uniform and also the use of controversial photographs. So, based on our experience, it is more correct to say that to a large degree it was our own –​the museum workers’ –​role that was challenged most in this project and not so much the public at the mall. We have expanded beyond the museum venue, selected objects in markedly different ways than we commonly do, reduced the research and communication aspects of the exhibition and changed the objects in the exhibition depending on what the visitors liked. Our roles as mediators with something to teach the visitor has changed in the project to something else; maybe something like facilitators of cultural and natural history objects.

References Appadurai, A., ed. (1986). The social life of things. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Augé, M. (2008). Non-​places: An introduction to supermodernity. London: Verso. Dudley, S. (2012). Materiality matters: Experiencing the displayed objects. Working Papers in Museum Studiers, Number 8. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan. Falk, J.H. (2009). Identity and the museum visitor experience. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Falk, J.H., and Dierking, L.D. (2012). Museum experience revisited. 2nd edition. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press.

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Flagestad, A. (2006). Opplevelsesøkonomiens vei til Norge. Oslo: Magma nr.3/​2006. Lohman, J. (2013). Museums at the crossroads? Essays on cultural institutions in a time of change. Victoria: Royal BC Museum. Marx, K. (1867). Capital. New York: Modern Library. Pine, B.J., and Gilmore, J.H. (1999). The experience economy. Boston: Harvard Business School Press. Pine, B.J., and Gilmore, J.H. (2012). The experience economy. In: G. Anderson, ed., Reinventing the museum: The evolving conversation on the paradigm shift. Oxford: AltaMira Press, pp. 163–​170. Simmel, G. (1978). The philosophy of money. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Simon, N. (2010). The participatory museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 20. Toffler, A. (1971). Future shock. New York: Random House. Twitchell, J.B. (2004). Branded nation: The marketing of Megachurch, College Inc., and Museumworld. New York: Simon & Schuster. Van Ulzen, P. (2011). International airport as stage for national cultural heritage: The case of Schipol Airport, The Netherlands. In: M. Halbertsma, Alex van Stipriaan and Patricia van Ulzen, eds., The heritage theatre: Globalisation and cultural heritage. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars.

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6 EXHIBITION-MAKING AS AESTHETIC INQUIRY Peter Bjerregaard

Introduction: Exhibition-making as “collapsology” If exhibitions are research what kind of scientific thinking do they make space for? And what are the effects of this kind of research? These are questions that may well be asked to the whole enterprise of the present volume. After all, most people who have dealt with what may be termed “research based exhibitions” have probably faced the same challenge: an exhibition can never incorporate all we know and find relevant of its subject matter.And, at the same time, the format of the exhibition, based in three-​dimensional objects in a physical space, seems to open up a space for individual interpretation that makes it difficult to communicate clearly what we want to say. But perhaps this kind of vagueness may exactly point to the particular contribution of the exhibition to scientific thinking. Therefore, practising exhibition-making as research we should not aim to copy the methods and language of research as it is practised outside a museum context. In this chapter, I will argue that exhibition-making proposes a model for knowledge-​making that we may term “collapsology”: a process where our conceptual knowledge is shattered and we are asked to construct a new set of relations, a new meaningful order by activating an aesthetic approach. I will suggest that this kind of collapsology releases what Claude Lévi-​Strauss has called a “savage” kind of thinking, a logic based in perception, rather than in abstract concepts (Lévi-​Strauss, 1966; Wiseman, 2007, pp. 1–​11). In this way exhibition-​making adds to what we may know by transgressing our everyday understanding of how the world is constituted.1 The chapter follows the making of the exhibition COLLAPSE –​human being in an unpredictable world at the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo (KHM). This exhibition was one of the first concrete results of KHM’s efforts to connect research and exhibitions in ways that would allow exhibitions not simply to disseminate research that had already been undertaken, but also challenge research insights and –​hopefully –​create a “research surplus” through exhibition-making. A central part of the methods applied to do so were a number of workshops where researchers, designers, production staff and external collaborators would engage in practical work with objects and materials. The chapter will follow three of these workshops and trace how the concrete engagement with objects and materials allowed us to relate the apparently unrelated cases of Norwegian pioneer settlement, Polynesian cosmology and contemporary urban gardening.

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Rethinking the Museum of Cultural History COLLAPSE was, from the beginning, embedded in an ongoing structural and strategic change at KHM. KHM was established in 1999 as a fusion of three original institutions: the collection of antiquities, the ethnographic collection and the collection of coins and classical archaeology. Since 1904 these three institutions had shared the same building, the Historical Museum, in the centre of Oslo, but it was only in 1999 that they were merged. However, in 2013, as our exhibition project started, it was still difficult to track the changes incurred by this fusion in KHM’s exhibitions. All exhibitions were still organised according to the collections mentioned and collaboration between sections was sporadic. Indeed, the relation between research sections and the section for exhibitions and public programming was characterised by a certain trepidation rather than common interests. With a change in directorship in 2011 it was decided that exhibitions should be related directly to the museum’s ongoing research and that the museum should cultivate a “project culture” to ensure that it could take advantage of the cross-​disciplinary potential offered by the many different disciplines at work within the institution. At the crux of this whole manoeuvre was an aim of integrating the three F’s (forskning, formidling and forvaltning –​research, communication and heritage management) in a particular kind of scientific practice that would place the museum at the cutting-​edge of scientific development, rather than in the slipstream of university based research (KHM, 2013, pp. 16–​19). Based on these objectives, a cross-​sectional group was established in order to develop a new overall exhibition concept for the museum. The results of this group’s work were formulated in a report entitled “A House for Savage Minds”, Et hus for vilde tanker.2 The report recommends that KHM breaks with their existing exhibition concept based in archaeological periods and ethnographic regions and adopts an approach based on four different exhibition platforms (KHM, 2014, pp. 17–​21; Bjerregaard, 2015a): 1. Core exhibitions: thematic exhibitions that take up questions that may be explored across time and space. 2. Special exhibitions: exhibitions that focus in depth on a particular research project or research material. 3. The Objectarium: exhibitions that allow for the use of large quantities of objects, which are presented without much interpretation, thus allowing for larger parts of the collections to be presented to the public. 4. The Red Zone: an exhibition “experimentarium” that allows for researchers, artists, designers, craftspersons, museum lecturers, photographers, and others to get together and explore scientific questions through material installations. COLLAPSE was identified as a “core exhibition” and, as we shall see later, worked its basic concepts out through workshops in the Red Zone. But at this point I would like to dwell on the title of the new exhibition vision. “House of Savage Minds” obviously paraphrases Claude Lévi-​Strauss’s famous essay “The Savage Mind” (Lévi-​Strauss, 1966). In the first chapter of the essay, “The Science of the Concrete”, Lévi-​Strauss outlines two modes of scientific thinking, “two strategic levels at which nature is accessible to scientific enquiry” (ibid., p. 15). On the one side we have what we may call rational “science”, working through concepts and abstract taxonomies. On the other side we have a mode of scientific thinking that works through perception and imagination towards “aesthetic systematization” (ibid.). Lévi-​Strauss likens the latter, sensory and imaginary, approach to science to bricolage, do-​it-​yourself-​ work. In contrast to the engineer, who works with specialised tools and selected materials, the bricoleur

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works with a limited set of tools and materials. Therefore, he also constantly has to look for the potential use of the materials at hand in order to fulfil the task he has set, and he has to be able to make imaginary leaps to make the various means available fit together. “House for Savage Minds” claims that the apparent restriction given by collections could actually allow the museum to place itself in the forefront of scientific development in the humanities. The museum seems to be particularly well suited for practising a kind of perceptually based, imaginative thinking that has to a large degree been lost to contemporary social sciences. Exhibitions and collection based research does not work through an ideal world, but through the imperfect world of the remnants that have been accidentally preserved from history and more or less coincidentally collected by fieldworkers and donators. In this sense, the exhibition has to create its structures not by replicating abstract ideals of science, but –​as in Lévi-​Strauss’s description of mythological thinking –​by combing the fragments of lost worlds in order to reach new combinations of these fragments (Lévi-​Strauss, 1966, pp. 21–​22). In order to do so exhibition-making rests on aesthetic evaluations. This has nothing to do with a judgement of “beauty” or “artistic value”, but a matter of being alert to and interested in the concrete qualities of materials and objects and the possible relations between them, Thus, one could think of exhibitionmaking as a way of tracing out relations between “the fossilized evidence” of the past in order to suggest new relations, new “arrangements” (ibid., pp. 12–​13). As will be evident from the case presented din this chapter, this kind of aesthetic systematisation does not only rely on relating to objects, but just as much to the act of organising ideas in a physical space. In this sense, the museum could indeed turn itself into a cutting-​edge institution that (while making blatant mistakes once in a while) could foreshadow relations that would only appear in “science” at a later stage (ibid., p. 13). But practising such an approach entails putting all museum staff at “work”, understood as engaging physically and practically in tracing connections not only through conceptual means but also through aesthetic inquiry. It was this kind of thinking that inspired “House for Savage Minds” and which we took with us when we started developing COLLAPSE in the fall of 2013.

From “colonisation” to “COLLAPSE” As with all other exhibitions in The Colonisation Project, the exhibition at KHM started out with a focus on colonisation. Based in the museum’s overall ambition of cultivating cross-​disciplinary approaches to exhibitions and research, our basic idea was to see what kind of perspectives would develop if we engaged the broad range of disciplines present at the museum in a common discussion. So, we started out with what may be termed a kind of “representative cross-​disciplinarity”. A group consisting of four archaeologists (specialising in Norwegian Stone Age and pioneer settlement, Norwegian Iron Age, the Viking Age, and Neolithic colonisation of the Pacific), an anthropologist, a photographer, a conservator and a project leader gathered over a number of meetings to discuss possible takes on the theme. The discussions in this group were quite lively but did not really develop any convincing meta-​ perspective that would allow us to do very new things with the material at hand. We considered whether it would be possible to organise the exhibition according to stages in a colonisation process (Into the unknown, Meetings and hybridisation, Territorialisation, Creating the unknown) but we never really got beyond allowing each case a separate section in the exhibition, like chapters in a book. Eventually, Håkon Glørstad (a Stone Age archaeologist who, during the early phases of the exhibition project took over as director of KHM and therefore later had to withdraw from the project) suggested that we change the working title from “Colonisation” to “Collapse”. Håkon’s idea was that a focus on collapse would stress an important move in the re-​organisation of the exhibitions at KHM. The existing archaeological exhibitions, opened in three steps around 1990, told the story of Norwegian history

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through a linear logic. As the title of the basic exhibition, “From Ice Age to White Christ”3 pointed to, this exhibition narrated, in a quite pedagogical exhibition language, the history from the first settlements in Norway to the Viking Age. By approaching history through collapse, Håkon suggested, we could introduce contingency and establish non-​linear relations in the development of human culture. Inspired by, on the one hand, evolutionary biology, and on the other hand, ideas on the relation between entropy and negentropy, flux and stability, which could be traced both in neo-​evolutionism and cybernetics,4 we wanted to suggest that maybe the most important and radical changes in human history do not occur with the spread of established systems but, rather, in the wake of their collapse. So “Collapse” would not only be the story of Nature’s capacity to destroy cultural worlds, but just as much about collapse as a generator for cultural creativity. However, this double meaning of “collapse” also made it a difficult concept to work with. While some of the members of the exhibition group wanted to follow the idea of the collapse as a kind of release of creative energy, other project members took collapse as an invitation to look into why certain systems collapse, much in the line of, for instance, Jared Diamond’s Collapse (Diamond, 2011). These two approaches seemed to be incommensurable; we had to agree on whether our most important message was what happened before or what happened after the collapse. Eventually, as we never managed to agree, we reduced the size of the working group and established a new group consisting of only five people: an archaeologist, an anthropologist, a museum pedagogue, a designer and a project leader (the author of this article). This group was responsible for developing a coherent concept and for involving relevant expertise in the museum in the process. In this sense we may say that the exhibition not only went from “colonisation” to “collapse”, but also from “representative cross-​disciplinarity” to “operational cross-​ disciplinarity”. We realised that the wish to integrate the three Fs mentioned earlier (research, heritage management and public communication) would not simply develop from having all disciplines in the museum represented in the working group. In order to activate the cross-​disciplinary potential we had first to develop a viable approach that could be agreed upon within the working group. The introduction of “Collapse” as a working title for the exhibition obviously invited various jokes among our colleagues on the fate of the exhibition; a title like that seemed like a self-​fulfilling prophecy for an exhibition project that hardly followed the straight path neither in its conception nor in its workmode. This attitude to the exhibition was probably even strengthened as we were not, in the beginning, able to clearly articulate why “Collapse” was such a good theme. However, the change of working title turned out to be more important to our efforts to integrate exhibition and research than expected. None of the members in the new working group had ever published anything on collapse before or even thought about their field of research as having anything to do with collapses. But rather than being a problem this fact turned out to be an advantage. As we were all quite uncertain on what “collapse” would actually mean we had something to investigate together. In other words, by transgressing our individual expertises we created a common object for research: how can we describe the impact of collapse in the development of human culture? This was a major observation in our wish to develop a particular museum based kind of research. Introducing a strange concept like “collapse” was imperative in order to create a truly cross-​disciplinary approach that did not simply offer different disciplinary perspectives on a theme, but established a problematic we had to collaborate on solving across our different disciplinary backgrounds. Furthermore, as we will see later, “collapse” allowed for a certain material interrogation: What happens when something collapses? How does something new appear from out of the collapse? What do we do to avoid collapses? In this sense, collapse opened itself for an understanding that was not only based in particular scientific definitions but just as much in material images.

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But before we go further into that part let us have a closer look at the collapses we were working from. In the new working group we had condensed the different approaches to three main cases: Norwegian pioneer settlement, Polynesian cosmology and urban gardening. These three cases seemed to reflect on collapse dynamics, each in their own way. The pioneers who came up through southern Scandinavia to what is today Norway, around 12,000 years ago, faced a landscape that was undergoing radical change. In the Oslo fjord area the ice cap that had covered northern Europe retracted with a speed of up to 100 metres a year and in the Northern parts of the fjord area, land would rise up to 8 cm a year after being relieved from the heavy layer of ice. So, the Pioneers were compelled to find their way of living in a constantly changing landscape. In Polynesian cosmology the human being is placed in a highly unstable world; something which is not far from the lived reality of people of these tiny islands, fraught with tornados, thunderstorms and volcanic activity, in the middle of the Pacific. In such a world, protection is obviously necessary and it seems that a particular cross pattern, “x”, holds a capacity to protect. Apparently the “x”-​patterns found in various guises in Tongan ceremonial aesthetics, emerge from basic lashing techniques but have proliferated into other media and increasingly complex patterns based on the same basic structure.5 So, in this case we wanted to follow how an imposing collapse has generated a rich aesthetic creativity based in a wish to protect against an ever present threat of collapse. The final theme, urban farming in contemporary cities, was really the link to the everyday lives of our audiences. The image of an impending ecological collapse, caused by human activity, has caused a concern whether we will be able to avoid the collapse through technological and political means, or if we have to radically change our way of living. As an example of this, we focussed on urban farming, that is, the production of food stuff in cities around the world. In order to grow foodstuff in urban area you have to radically change your perspective on the city, looking for places to grow, ways to use new technology, new ways of collaborating etc. We wanted to drag these activities, taking place right outside the museum, into the exhibition hall to show how the impression of an emergent collapse has generated a spectacular kind of creativity in our contemporary world as well.

Exploring “collapse” After the three central themes in the exhibition were selected we were still left with only a vague picture of how they were to be connected. In order to get a better notion of this, we started out looking at what collapse as a concept might generate. We did so through a small number of workshops that we will look more closely at below. Working through workshops and not the conventional continuous meetings was an approach KHM had developed partly through a research-​cum-​design project on “Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time”, partly through a major special exhibition, “Take it Personally”, on personal jewellery and adornment. Both of these projects had brought together cross-​disciplinary groups for one day to a week at a time to focus on defined tasks, working through material installations (rather than text and speech) and intense debates. Through these projects it had become clear to us that not only did such workshops allow us to get the most out of the limited time our colleagues had at their disposal, but by carving out time where all participants could focus on this project only, not having a meeting later in the afternoon, not having phones to answer etc., we managed to immerse ourselves in the problematic at hand, which generated another level of discussion and comprehension of the core themes of the exhibition. So, we wanted to further develop this approach in the making of COLLAPSE. During the entire COLLAPSE-​process we organised 7 such workshops of various durations. In the present context we will focus on three of them.

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Workshop I: Material images of collapse The first workshop was held in December 2014, entitled “Human Invention Design Workshop: Avoiding Collapse and Disorder”. The idea was to break for a while from our cases and work with our own constructed collapse setting. We asked ourselves questions like: can we define collapse in a general way, as a dynamic, which is not bound to a particular place in time and space? And, can we find collapse-​ aesthetics that may bind together the three core elements in a general aesthetic approach? Starting out with discussions on the core theme and objective of the exhibition, we ventured into hands-​on exercises facilitated by our designer, Adam Bartley. The first exercise was inspired by the British 1970s and 1980s TV show “The Great Egg Race” where a group of scientists were asked to solve practical challenges through very basic materials. In our case the setting was defined as a post-​collapse situation: we are in a world, which has collapsed and we try to build up a new existence on what is left. The only materials available are spaghetti and marshmallows, and we have eggs, our biomass, which we need to protect. From this basic point of departure we were split into three groups and asked, step by step, to: 1. build a construction that can hold the egg at least 30 cm above ground (see Figure 6.1); 2. make a device that will allow the egg to move and drop 15 cm; and 3. create a device that will allow the egg to cross a 30 cm gap (for the last task rubber bands and nails were introduced as new raw materials). These tasks generated an intense work situation. Although some of us were initially rather hesitant to engage in these kinds of activities, everybody ended up being quite absorbed, and the risk of the collapse (the breaking of an egg) was sensed as quite real. In order to respond to the tasks, we could no longer rely on what we knew of the Pioneer settlement, Polynesia or urban farming, but had to take the qualities of spaghetti and marshmallows seriously. How much can a bundle of spaghetti bear, how flexible can it be, how much spaghetti can a marshmallow keep together, how can you best make use of the sticky

FIGURE 6.1  Constructing

Toril C. Skaaraas Hofseth

in order to avoid collapse. Photo: Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/​

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qualities of the marshmallow? In this way, we were set in the position not of a museum expert, but of a do-​it-​yourself-​person having to find out how “making do and getting by”. A more processual aim was to establish a common frame of reference for our subsequent discussions on the concept. Several of us had experienced earlier how an exhibition idea may develop and be agreed upon for quite a long time until someone gives the idea a concrete image in a sketch or a model, and it is then realised that everybody actually holds very different images of what the idea entails. In this workshop everybody had to act and to construct new objects out of materials that were out there in the open. That is, none of us could refer to an exclusive knowledge that was not available to the others. Our references were there, on the table and the floor, as the constructions we had made ourselves. Through our hands-​on activities we wanted to be able to refer to common experiences and images as the ideas were further developed. This exercise obviously did not point towards concrete solutions for the exhibition, but the workshop resulted in two organising principles for the exhibition. First of all, we agreed that we wanted to organise the exhibition as a Venn diagram6 (see Figure 6.2), and we decided that the overlapping zones should not work as exhibitions as such, but rather as activities that would allow audiences to engage physically in the exhibition. The activities in these zones should relate to questions or problems that would come up in the meetings between the three themes. In the overlap between Pioneers and Polynesia we decided to deal with “mobility”, in the overlap between Polynesia and urban gardening we wanted to deal with “maintaining”, and in the overlap between urban gardening and Pioneers we wanted to deal with “create and break”. So, in a sense we started to construct the meta-​communicative frame we wanted to work by. This applied to both the way in which we wanted the three core themes to relate to each other, and the way we wanted audiences to experience the exhibition. What the exhibition would eventually be about was not a concrete, empirical reality, but rather a cultural dynamic, which we hoped to bring forth by putting together apparently unrelated cases.

Workshop II: The board game At the point of the first workshop we had not really started talking concretely about objects as yet. But immediately after the workshop, Arne Perminow, our Polynesia researcher, started to list relevant objects. And a couple of months later our Stone Age expert, Anja Mansrud, started to do the same thing for the Pioneer settlement case.7 So, between 30 September and 2 October 2015 the core group met for the board game workshop, which lasted for two and a half days. For the occasion, Adam had made a simple game board depicting the floorplan of the exhibition hall in scale of 1:25, with Adam’s version of the Venn diagram painted on it. Apart from the board Adam brought bricks of approximately 3 x 3 centimetres in three different colours and a deck of cards with no images or text on them. The task was now to distribute objects or bodies of objects on the board (Figure 6.3). On each brick we would draw an object and for each brick we would fill in a card with the same drawing as well as a name for the object, measurements, a description of why the object should be there and what it tells us about collapse, a brief note on how we imagined the objects to affect the audience, as well as a few words on preservation requirements. Arne and Anja were asked one by one to place a brick with an object and fill in the according card. The idea behind this game was to let the selection of objects develop through a dialogue between the themes and thereby avoid developing the individual themes as closed narratives for themselves. We had hoped that this would lead us to placing objects with potential relations close to each other, on either

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FIGURE 6.2 The

three themes organised as a Venn diagram. Photo by the author. View an alternative version online at www.routledge.com/​9781138646063

side of the activity zones, while objects that would help us exclusively to deal with one of the themes would be placed in the “hot spots” (the parts of the Venn diagram where the three cases did not overlap), remote from the other themes. The game did not develop exactly as planned. Rather than a step-​by-​step progression we tended to focus on one theme at a time. However, this happened with all members of the core group taking part in the discussions on each of the themes. I think it is fair to say that the fact that themes were laid out in a

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FIGURE 6.3 The

board game workshop. Suggestions for objects are placed one by one on the board. The Venn diagram adapted to the dimensions of the exhibition space can be seen on the board. Photo: Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo/Kirsten Jensen Helgeland

physical space rather than in texts gave the whole idea a new reality. For one thing, being faced with the physical limitations of the space we had to focus very directly on what role the single object took in the overall exhibition. Objects could not simply be selected because they somehow “belonged” to pioneer settlement, urban gardening or Polynesia. Each object had to justify its inclusion in terms of the overall organisation of the space. Another important aspect of this workshop was that the themes intermingled. For instance, in the overlap between pioneer settlement and Polynesia we found that these two themes could be connected through fishhooks –​a big, ceremonial hook on the Polynesian side, and a tiny antler hook on the pioneer side. In this sense the objects themselves offered a connection and a way of organising the material at hand. But while the objects so to say offered “patterns that connect” (Schuster and Carpenter, 1996), these patterns did not give away a meaning immediately. So, we had to consider seriously, what kind of connection was actually established; was this about marine cultures; about innovation; about migration; or, about mythology (as Polynesia was mythologically pulled out of the Pacific with a giant hook)? So, if the first workshop to some extend disintegrated the meanings that were brought into the exhibition, the board game workshop started to build a new language. We started to trace out the semantics of objects within the overall space and the division of themes within that. So, the Polynesian fish hook might well be explained meaningfully in the museum data base, but in this workshop we traced out its meaning content in the COLLAPSE-​frame. For that very reason the workshop format was absolutely crucial as all members of the core group took part in the development of this common language. Arne and Anja would retract to sit in their office and focus on their “own” material from time to time, but the overall discussions took place in concert and over a concrete physical entity that could be manipulated and modified as the discussions went on.

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Workshop III: What’s in a pattern? The last workshop I would like to dwell upon focused on Polynesian patterns and lashing. For this workshop we invited the Tongan artist, Filipe Tohi whose art is inspired by the cross-​patterns used in traditional Tongan lashing techniques. The idea for this workshop was, first, to achieve a firsthand experience of the intricate patterns that would be a central element in the Polynesian part of the exhibition, and second to develop ideas for the activity zones in collaboration with Tohi and a Norwegian flint knapper, Morten Kutchera. Morten had also acted in two films for the exhibition, showing two different technologies for making flint tools. On the first afternoon of the workshop, Filipe Tohi presented his work. Filipe explained how patterns and lashings had caught his interest, and how he had taken this into different media such as stone and metal. But he also introduced us to his particular way of looking at these patterns. In a sense, Filipe sees patterns as fractals. Every pattern may be seen as a fragment of another pattern. And if the patterns made for lashing house posts are extracted so that one is able to look into it in three dimensions, one will see another pattern within it. In this sense one may say that, to Filipe, the Polynesian x-​patterns literally constitute a world view. Tohi argues that the Tongan patterns stem from very practical tasks, namely the need to lash together pieces of wood in housebuilding and boat making. From this initial use the patterns have developed and proliferated into different media (woodcarvings, mats, etc.). So, one may argue that the patterns used in Tongan art stems from a very concrete arrangement, strings keeping wood together, which is based on a wish to somehow control the unpredictability of nature. And, indeed, the cross patterns are seen as central elements in ceremonial art that seeks to create stability. This also means that the divide between functionality and aesthetics is really floating. Apart from this introduction to Polynesian patterns the workshop was entirely hands-​on. On the second day, after an opening kava drinking ceremony,8 we started out by being introduced to some of the basic Tongan lashing techniques. Tohi showed us, step by step how one may develop an infinite number of patterns from these basic techniques by using different colours of strings, varying number of strings at a time, focusing on particular parts of the original pattern, and so on (see Figure 6.4). Indeed, this is what Tohi has done for his entire career, taking the same basic patterns into various media and transforming them in different ways. The lashing workshop might have looked like a simple kindergarten activity, but to learn to lash turned out to demand a strong focus from everyone. Indeed, Anja, the archaeologist, mentioned how engaging in a process like this required all participants to be constantly alert. Learning to latch turned out to be a physical practice that demanded full attention from everyone, not only to understand and actually make the patterns, but also to constantly try to reflect on what the practices we were engaged with actually had to do with the exhibition and each of our area of expertise within it. Thus, working with Polynesian lashing kicked-​off speculations on how Stone Age tools might have looked like with lashing, and –​on a larger scale –​how much material has been written out of history as a result of the particular research focus that has developed (in the case of the Stone Age there has been a strong emphasis on technology and functionality rather than on spirituality and aesthetics, which would require a more speculative approach). In other words, engaging in a practical activity as lashing opened for associations on different layers of relations between the parts of COLLAPSE. These kinds of associations were further elaborated as we used the workshop to develop solutions for the three activity zones, which at that point still only had their working titles. Thus, two of the three activity zones ended up being based on the work in this workshop: a globe, where the audience is invited to create patterns with yarn around a 1m wide globe construction, and tupu-​tupu blocks, a kind of building block developed by Filipe Tohi on basis of x-​patterns and used in the exhibition for audiences to make constructions that will eventually collapse.

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FIGURE 6.4 The

lashing workshop. Filipe Tohi is demonstrating how to make x-​patterns. Photo: By the author

“Collapsology”-​in-​the-​making This chapter has suggested a model for how exhibitions can generate alternative orders. As a model for knowledge production, we may understand exhibition-making as a “collapsology”, a destruction of existing orders and the creation of new ones. Initially, the whole idea of COLLAPSE was to challenge the conventional chronological narrative of Norwegian history, suggesting instead that history may have developed in unpredictable jumps and that unexpected relations may be traced across time and space. Going into the making of the exhibition we actually started out collapsing our individual expertises, asking the participants to accept the play, suspend their academic knowledge, and engage in exploring what kind of dynamic a collapse might entail in itself. Thus, our version of “collapsology” started with an intentional breakdown of a structure. But it did not end with the de-​construction. Instead, we built up new relations with the exhibition, the physical space, the idea, and the objects as context (Figure 6.5). In COLLAPSE these steps may have been more explicit than in many other exhibition-making processes, but I do think that “collapsology” actually can be traced as a more general structure in the making of exhibitions. What we do when we make exhibitions is to take objects out of one context (the collection, the world outside the museum) and make them meaningful in another, the exhibition (Bjerregaard, 2015c). Thus, the exhibition comes to materialise an alternative order. Lévi-​Strauss’s idea of the mythological thought that creates “arrangements” out of the fragments of history seems pertinent here. Although Lévi-​Strauss does not provide any detailed definition of “an arrangement” we may consider this concept more closely. While “concept” or “idea” are abstract phenomena, “arrangement” is –​also in Lévi-​Strauss’s thinking, I imagine –​something concrete, a material relation constructed from aesthetic judgment. In this sense, an “arrangement” cannot be reduced to

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FIGURE 6.5  COLLAPSE: human being in an unpredictable world. Detail from the Stone Age part of the exhibition.

Photo: Museum of Cultural History/​Kirsten Jensen Helgeland

language but works through its very physical proportions. In an exhibition, relations cannot be dealt with in the abstract. Here, relations have very concrete colours, distances, sizes, textures, and so on. Relations are not simply a logical link between concepts, but form a very concrete structure. Therefore, it makes sense to think of exhibition-making as a kind of collapsology; in making exhibitions we collapse the basic “sets” –​of abstract science and the concepts we think the world is constructed of –​and engage in ­creating new arrangements of the concrete fragments left to us. Often, when working from the mindset of Lévi-​Strauss’s “engineer”, we conceive of exhibitionmaking as a lower level of research, full of hindrances; a process that obstructs our intentions in relation to the ideal exhibition. We do not have the exact objects we would like to use, we are not allowed to do what we wanted with the objects available, we do not have the money to make the digital installation that would have conveyed exactly what we were thinking of. But it is possible to turn the focus on limitations around and see the less than ideal nature of exhibition-making as the very basis for a particular museum-​based way of doing research. It is exactly by fragmenting our conceptual ideals, and forcing us to construct something new that collapsology has scientific relevance. This argument obviously caters for a particular, processual understanding of science. In collapsology, science is not about creating eternal standards for our knowledge of the world but, quite the contrary, about constantly challenging what we thought we knew. In this sense we suggest that collapsology conforms to a spirit in science to constantly challenge what we know and what can be known, rather than confirming a scientific authority through our institutional identity. Like mythological thinking, this kind of research accepts that our world is constituted by collapses, by constant breaches of arrangements, but it takes up the challenge to build up new arrangements from the debris. In this perspective it is no longer the role of the museum to establish the orders of the world

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and disseminate these to a general public, but rather –​in fact, like in a Polynesian pattern –​to see new patterns and relations emerging What this case specifically suggests is that perhaps the most valuable contribution of exhibition-making to research is to induce mythological thinking to our scientific thinking; it is by constantly confronting our conceptual framework and requesting that we –​as exhibition makers as well as audiences –​create new arrangements, new relations between things we thought were not connected that the exhibition opens up new perspectives, which will hopefully also impregnate the way museum researchers do their “proper” research. In this sense, COLLAPSE came full circle when Anja, the archaeologist published an article (Mansrud, 2017) on Mesolithic fishhooks from Norway opening with an excerpt from the myth of the Tongan demi-​god Maui fishing Tonga out of the water with his magic hook.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank all participants in COLLAPSE for engaging in the discussions along the way and engaging head-​on in the workshops of various formats. In particular, I want to thank the members of the core group, Anja Mansrud, Arne Aleksej Perminow, Kathy Elliott, Adam Bartley, and Mads Pålsrud. I am indebted to Hans-​Jakob Ågotnes for suggesting the term “collapsology”. Finally, I thank the participants in the SENK seminar series at the KHM department of ethnography, numismatics and classical archaeology on 18 February 2016, for their constructive comments to a very early draft of this chapter.

Notes 1 See Bjerregaard, 2015b and 2015c for theoretical developments of this idea. 2 The report was written in Danish and not in Norwegian. This was due to the fact that the report was written by two post-​doctoral researchers –​Anders Emil Rasmussen and the author of this c­ hapter –​who were both working on a research project led by KHM’s director Rane Willerslev. 3 “White Christ” or “Kvitekrist” was the old Norwegian name for Jesus Christ, stressing the purity connected to the colour white in opposition to the darkness related to Norse mythology. 4 For instance, in Lewis White’s neo-​evolutionism, a culture’s development can be measured by its capability to bind energy, and thereby control the entropic flow of energy, in order to create stability and predictability (White, 1959). In Bateson’s famous idea of “information” as “the difference that makes a difference” (Bateson, 2000[1972], 271–​273, 315–​320, 454–​471), this difference is equaled to negative entropy, that is, information is a way of turning the meaningless flow of entropy into internal information in a system (ibid., 504). 5 In an earlier exhibition at the museum, “The Value of ‘X’ ”, the ethnographic curator in COLLAPSE, Arne Perminow, and Tongan artist Filipe Tohi, had followed how such cross-​patterns had developed. 6 A Venn diagram is a diagram that shows all possible relations in a given set. So, in our case, having three cases, the diagram would show each case as a circle, and the three circles would create overlapping zones between Pioneer-​ Polynesia, Pioneer-​Urban gardening, and Polynesia-​Urban gardening, as well as a central zone where all three cases would overlap. 7 Anja came in late to the project as the first Stone Age expert had to withdraw from the project due to other project responsibilities. 8 Kava is a drink made from the root of the kava-​plant, Piper methysticum. Kava is used throughout Polynesia.

References Bateson, Gregory. (2000) [1972]. Steps to an ecology of mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bjerregaard, Peter. (2015a). A house for untamed thinking: Re-​connecting research and display at Museum of Cultural History. In: Fransisca Lanz and Elena Montanari, eds., Advancing museum practices. Turin: Umberto Allemandi & C., pp. 115–​123.

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—​—​—​. (2015b). Disconnecting relations: Exhibitions and objects as resistance. In: Øivind Fuglerud and Leon Wainwright, eds., Objects and imagination: Perspectives on materialization and meaning. New York: Berghahn Books, pp.  45–​63. —​—​—​. (2015c). Dissolving objects: Museums, atmosphere and the creation of presence. Emotion, Space and Society 15 (May 2015), pp. 74–​81. Diamond, Jared. (2011). Collapse: How societies choose to fail or survive. London: Penguin Books. Et hus for vilde tanker. (2014). Available at: www.khm.uio.no/​om/​et-​hus-​for-​vilde-​tanker/​et-​hus-​for-​vilde-​tanker-​ 1.pdf [Accessed 2 November 2017]. Gell, Alfred. (1995). Closure and multiplication: An essay on Polynesian cosmology and ritual. In: Daniel de Coppet and André Iteanu, eds., Cosmos and society in `Oceania. Washington, DC: Berg, pp. 21–​56 Hallam, Elizabeth, and Tim Ingold. (2007). Creativity and cultural improvisation: An introduction. In: E. Hallam and T. Ingold, eds., Creativity and cultural improvisation. Oxford: Berg, pp. 1–​24. Kulturhistorisk museum. 2013. Funksjonsanalyse 2013. Available at: www.khm.uio.no/​om/​organisasjon/​ funksjonsanalyse/​fa-​rapoort-​endelig-​med-​vedlegg.pdf [Accessed 2 November 2016]. Lévi-​Strauss, Claude. (1966)[1963]. The savage mind. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Mansrud, Anja. (2017). Untangling social, ritual and cosmological aspects of fishhook manufacture in the Middle Mesolithic coastal communities of NE Skagerrak. International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 36(1), pp. 31–​47. Schuster, Carl, and Edmund Carpenter. (1996). Patterns that connect: Social symbolism in ancient and tribal art. New York: Harry N. Abrams. Sheikh, Simon. (2015). Towards the exhibition as research. In: Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, eds., Curating research. London: Open Editions/​de Appel, pp. 32–​46. White, Leslie A. (1959). The evolution of culture: The development of civilization to the fall of Rome. NewYork: McGraw-​Hill. Wiseman, Boris. (2007). Lévi-​Strauss, anthropology and aesthetics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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7 OBJECT-​SPACES? Sensory engagements and museum experiments Elizabeth Hallam

Introduction Analysing bodily and material engagements with museum objects and spaces, this chapter draws on debates in anthropology, material culture and museum studies, combined with museum practice, to explore ways in which objects and spaces are undergoing critical reconceptualisation, and re-​presentation. Just as objects are being reconsidered in these fields, museum practices are enabling similarly critical and searching exploration of objects through diverse visual, material and display strategies. Museum spaces are being reinterpreted in terms of their social, cultural, political and sensory dimensions, as museums are undergoing significant shifts in their rationales, agendas, display strategies and architectures. This chapter examines current discussions of “objects” and “spaces”, and situates these in relation to an exhibition and an installation which I devised and curated in 2015–​2016 and 2017. The former displayed experiments undertaken in the design of three-​dimensional (3D) models for medical education, and the latter more explicitly put experimental methods and display techniques into action in a vacated anatomy department of a medical school. Both exhibition and installation formed modes of anthropological research conducted through museum practice that critically explored categories of, and distinctions between, objects and spaces. This questioning of what museum objects and spaces are, and could become, undertaken through conceptual work that is also grounded in curatorial projects, is developing in tandem with a growth in experimental exhibition practices. Central to this is recognition that exhibitions can form “site[s]‌for the generation rather than reproduction of knowledge and experience”, as Basu and Macdonald point out (2007, p. 2). Thus, rather than simply communicating previously established knowledge, contemporary exhibitionary practices, that are also experimental, potentially give rise to fresh understandings, insights and sensory awarenesses. Just as experiments are conceived and conducted with the use of particular apparatus and methods to produce knowledge, so exhibitions are not always simply “means for the display and dissemination of already existing preformulated knowledges”; they can be instead, as Basu and Macdonald suggest, characterised by open-​endedness and capacity for transformation (2007, p. 2). Displays are open-​ended in that their outcomes cannot be known in advance, especially when participants, including museum visitors, are interactively engaged in such displays rather than assumed to be passive viewers, and also when the material entities involved are not assumed to be already formed or

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finished objects. Transformative dimensions of exhibitions for people and for the materials involved also become apparent, as Basu and Macdonald show with reference to Latour’s (1999) work on experiments. So, for example, shifts in the perceived qualities or meanings of exhibited items might unfold as significant consequences of their display. In a similar vein, Marcus and Fischer have argued, with regard to bodies of work in the history of science, that while experimentation can involve critique, transgression of, and “challenges to conventional modes of representation” it also provides a means of “intervening in the world, and changing it” (1999 [1986], pp. xxxi–​xxxii). Again, exhibitions in an experimental mode are not passive presentations of what already exists, rather they enable interventions and effect changes. Intersecting with the increased participation in these museum practices, are developments in anthropology that foreground experimental ways of working in terms of method, thematic focus, theoretical engagement and analysis as well as experimental approaches to the media and sites, such as museums, that are enlisted for communication with regard to anthropological projects. Innovating in a field of research, in which there are long-​term developments in anthropologists’ concern with the experimental, and in which the meanings of the term have necessarily changed over the past century (see for example Malinowski, 2013 [1935]; Marcus and Fischer, 1999 [1986]; Boyer et al., 2016), anthropologists are pursuing experimental projects that are explicitly exploratory, collaborative, and increasingly making use of a wide range of media –​and indeed, mixed media –​that move across the visual, material and textual.1 Whether working with (combinations of) written words, photography, film, drawing, and exhibitions, anthropologists are developing experiments, with the aim of more effectively identifying and framing issues, documenting, theorising and communicating (see Bakke and Peterson, 2018; Marcus, 2010, 2014; Pandian and McLean, 2017; Schneider and Pasqualino, 2014; Schneider and Wright, 2013). Focusing on sensory engagements and experiments in museum contexts, in the sections to follow, conceptual issues relating to objects and spaces are explored alongside two extended ­examples –​an exhibition and an installation both of which I curated in medical museum settings that are (or have been) centrally concerned with the human body, its anatomical understanding and its surgical treatment. The exhibition, “Designing Bodies: Models of Human Anatomy from 1945 to Now” (2015–​2016), focused on the design of 3D anatomical models used in medical teaching and surgical training at the Royal College of Surgeons of England, London, and displayed experimental aspects of the design process. The installation, “Rooms experiment: a fast installation” (2017), at the Anatomy Rooms of Marischal College, University of Aberdeen, was undertaken as a collaboration that used experimental methods and display techniques to explore, record, and digitally project images and sounds of spaces in a complex of rooms including a vacated anatomy museum.2 Both displays then, as I will argue, participated in the experimental, yet in different ways, and while one traced the material and sensory formation of “objects” the other engaged with and displayed “spaces” in ways that reconfigured those spaces, encouraging a re-​sensing of rooms within a particular architectural site. And in both displays there was a reflexive questioning of what objects and spaces are. Within the broader research context for this exhibition and installation, anthropological and historical research on displays of the human body, especially in medical and surgical education, interrogates the ways in which “objects” are constituted through particular cultural practices that are situated within specific material spaces –​spaces that are dynamic and always still in formation (and disintegration), and never static (for example, see Alberti, 2010; Alberti and Hallam, 2013; Hallam, 2016; Knoeff and Zwijnenberg, 2015). This research is, in turn, informed by wide-​ranging debates in the history of science regarding the embodied, material and spatially located practices entailed in the formation and communication of knowledge in science (see for example Daston and Galison, 2007; Daston, 2007; Hallam, 2016, p. 355, n.6). In medical museum practice, too, critical perspectives are developed with close attention to how objects have been formed, how they modify in matter and meaning, and how they can be more effectively

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curated now and in the future. At the Wellcome Collection, London, for example, experimental projects and exhibitions have traversed boundaries between art and science (see for example Arends and Thackara, 2003), a strategy in discipline encounter and exchange that has characterised innovative exhibitions at the Wellcome’s galleries for the last decade. At the Medical Museion, Copenhagen, curator and researcher Karin Tybjerg argues that it is possible to move beyond exhibitions that simply show “delineated objects” by “design[ing] displays that allow the material unfolding of scientific experimentation or practice to continue in the exhibition”; with careful attention to method, museum displays are enabled as “material set-​ups for generating knowledge” (2017, pp. 269, 281, see also Meyer 2011). Thus research does not end with a “finished” exhibition, instead exhibiting becomes part of, and integral to, the research process. Key current debates in anthropology, material culture and museum studies as well as in museum practice are, then, questioning and exploring, on the one hand the perceived nature of material objects, and, on the other, the possibilities that are opened by museum spaces for research, analysis, communication with a wider public, and collaborative projects leading to fresh insights and understandings. The following sections discuss some salient aspects of these debates, with regard to “objects” and “spaces”, situating these in relation to specific museum practices, and drawing on the grounded research which I conducted during curation of “Designing Bodies” (2015–​2016) and the “Rooms experiment” (2017). I argue that both objects and spaces are sensorially and conceptually emergent rather than always already present and fixed; as such they form ongoing interrelated social and material processes rather than discrete entities. In conclusion, I refer to “object-​spaces” to highlight the openness of both objects and spaces, their capacity for reworking, reinterpretation and, indeed, transformation, within museum contexts.

“Objects” The perceived nature of objects and the usefulness or otherwise of the very concept of “object” have come under scrutiny within anthropology, material culture and museum studies. Debates within these fields question how material objects are produced and defined, and how objects are best treated and theorised in order to develop understandings of them and their significance in social life. Similarly, engagement with objects in terms of their material and sensory dimensions through museum practices and displays is leading to critical discussion of what material objects are and how they can be effectively and appropriately mobilised for research and public exhibits. Such explorations can amount to a “reconfiguring” of museum objects, so that they are grasped not as discrete already present physical things but as entities that are continuously formed within “object-​ subject interaction[s]‌” (Dudley, 2010, p. 5). From this perspective, objects come into being, and their qualities are realised through the sensory interactions that people have with those objects. These object-​ subject relations are reciprocal, so that material objects have capacity to help shape the persons who interact with them just as those persons give rise to material objects. And, indeed, from a phenomenological perspective, as Dudley notes, the distinction between subject and object dissolves through sensory engagement with material things; as she argues “[s]ubjectivity of response, and material qualities, are intertwined with each other, and both (together of course with the framework within which you see the object) determine the experience and interpretation of objects” (2010, p. 12, see also Dudley, 2012). The “framework” here invokes the spatial location of the object-​subject encounter and interrelation, so that the surrounding material setting is also implicated in, and in some ways inseparable from such encounters –​issues that are further discussed later in this chapter. In some exhibition contexts, distinctions between object and subject become very evidently unstable and potentially problematic or disturbing. There are many such instances of object/​subject instability, or oscillation, especially when museums collect and display entities derived from human bodies. A large-​scale,

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widely publicised example is the touring exhibition, “Body Worlds”, with over 47 million visitors in 130 countries and perhaps the most visited exhibition of all time.3 This displays anatomised, preserved and anonymised human bodies, and claims to offer a “unique, exciting and interactive journey through the human body”, which is reportedly described by many as “emotional”, “extraordinary” and even “life-​ changing”.4 With the making and exhibiting of what are termed “plastinates” –​which are dissected and preserved bodies –​this still-​evolving exhibition stages displays that transform subjects into anatomical objects, yet these “objects” retain potential capacity to appear as subjects that elicit empathy, depending on viewers’ responses to them, since they are evidently derived from deceased persons (see Hallam, 2016). Retaining the notion of “object”, Gell’s (1998) influential anthropological work advances an analysis of art objects as distributed, or dispersed in parts that are nevertheless connected across space and time. Objects in these terms are not self-​contained single material instances, but rather come to form sets comprising “many spatially separated parts with different micro-​histories” (Gell, 1998, p. 221). Thus Gell argues that a corpus of art objects (such as the Marquesan art that he analyses) comes “into being only by historical accretion (and deletion) via a network of social relations”, for example among artists, patrons and collectors (ibid.). This distributed object, formed through the social relations of those involved in the production and circulation of the artworks that comprise it, is not an “aggregate of fragments” because it has an “inner integrity” (ibid.). Here such integrity is derived primarily from the process of making in a specific social context where each part of a distributed object relates to another, bearing similar motifs for example, so that relations of kinship are formed between those parts. Furthermore, within Gell’s analysis, distinctions between objects and persons tend to break down in various ways; objects can form components or extensions persons and, indeed, the differentiation of internal person (“mind”) and external person (sets of related objects) is relative and porous rather than fixed and impermeable (1998, pp. 21, 222). Persons can, therefore, also become distributed in time and space, rather than forming single “bounded biological organisms” (Gell, 1998, p. 222; see also Chua and Elliot, 2013). In recent debates, anthropologists have also questioned the usefulness of the very concept of “object”, problematising the interpretation of material entities as complete and clearly bounded. Ingold (2015, p. 16) describes a world without objects (WWO), critically shifting attention to material formations of “things” that continuously emerge and transform within a field of relations. This re-​directs analytical attention toward materials, sensory perception, movement, and mutability of form (Ingold, 2015, pp. 18–​20, 2013; see also Harvey et al., 2014). From these perspectives, materials, in the social world and over time, variously stabilise and take shape, change and disintegrate. Distinctions between what have been defined as artefacts, on the one hand, and organisms, on the other, are also questioned in anthropological work that examines the interrelation of what is made and what is grown (Hallam and Ingold, 2014). A further aspect of debate regarding “objects” is concerned with developments in digital technologies, especially their implications for people’s access to, and engagement with, museum collections. For example, Graeme Were’s (2014) research in Papua New Guinea suggests that creating virtual 3D versions of ethnographic museum objects can lead to new and productive interactions between source communities and collections in museums. Were explores possibilities for virtual repatriation where digital versions of material objects render those objects more mobile and open to an expanding range of uses within wider social networks. Perceptions and understandings of museum objects are thus crucially inflected by the social and the digital relationships in which they have been, are, and might in future be enmeshed (see Gosden and Larson with Petch, 2007, see also Geismar and Mohns, 2011). Engaging with these debates, contemporary museum and exhibition practices offer fresh and challenging insights with regard to what kinds of objects can and should be displayed, for what purposes and in what kinds of spaces. Museum curators participate in innovative exhibition design that questions not only the definition, selection and presentation of objects for display but also how entities that are displayed

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are necessarily caught up with, and in some ways difficult to distinguish from galleries and other spaces for exhibiting. So, for instance, museums display living organisms such as trees, in parallel with artefacts, in open-​air galleries thereby shifting perceptions of what museum collections can encompass (at the Melbourne Museum, Forest Gallery, for example); they deliberately incorporate the historical apparatus of colonial collecting into displays, along with objects collected, to critically reflect on the politics of museums and their histories (for example, “Return to Angola” at Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel, Switzerland, 2007–​2010); they create immersive atmospheres where visitors add to compelling, ever-​ growing assemblages that seem powerfully active rather than held static behind glass (at the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum, for example); and they develop exhibition strategies that shift the focus of display to bodily sensations such as touch in animated, interactive exhibition settings (for example, “Touch” at the Le Mudac et le Musée de la main, Lausanne, Switzerland, 2012–​2013). Such attention to the sensory engagements entailed in exhibiting has developed in parallel with now extensive museum studies that analyse sensory perceptions and regimes in museum collection and display contexts (see for example Candlin, 2010; Classen, 2012; Edwards, Gosden and Philips, 2006; Howes, 2014; Levent and Pascual-​Leone, 2014). In these areas of exploration there is current interest in the limits and potential of museum objects and spaces, along with possibilities for their conceptual, material and sensory reworkings. Furthering this work between anthropology and museum practice, Nicholas Thomas (2010) has formulated an approach to the museum as method –​suggesting that curatorial work involves not so much the selection of pre-​existing material objects for display, but the discovery of them within museum collections. Pressing this perspective further, I argue that processes of exhibiting actively help to create museum objects and spaces. This draws attention to the productive capacity of exhibition curating –​the work of making an exhibition, including research, and the exhibition’s life after its launch, have generative potential, both for the material objects involved and the social interactions and relations that come into play over time. The next sections of this chapter focus on the interrelated conceptual and material exploration of objects and spaces, reflecting on how exhibition curating forms a mode of research in terms of method, analysis, exposition, and open-​ended sensory engagement. Attending to, and participating in, experiments of various kinds reveals exhibitions as sites for research, and the formation of open object-​spaces, which I highlight by way of conclusion.

Displaying experiments Curating the exhibition “Designing Bodies: Models of Human Anatomy from 1945 to Now” (2015–​ 2016) was both a research process in itself, entailing many knowledge generating practices, as well as a project that aimed to display processes of knowledge making, especially those involved in the specialist design of 3D models for surgical training (Hallam, 2015a) (Figure 7.1). Based in the Qvist Gallery of the Hunterian Museum, at the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS), the exhibition aimed to display the work of designing through which three significant sets of models at the RCS were made and used in medical education. Many of these models had never been displayed before in a public gallery, so the exhibition involved the movement of material entities –​and the material traces of practices associated with them –​out of restricted-​access zones of the RCS (reserved for medical educators, other professionals, and students) and into exhibition spaces designed for public exhibitions. Building on previous curatorial projects in which I have explored, through museum display, how processes might be displayed or rendered visible, and open to examination (see Hallam, 2000, 2009), “Designing Bodies” was devised to trace material practices of design involved in the production of 3D models made and used to research and teach anatomy and to provide training in surgery. Rather than offering museum visitors views of models as completed, clearly bounded and “finished” entities, the exhibition aimed to engage visitors in what was, at the time, an ongoing process of design that had given

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FIGURE 7.1  “Designing

Bodies”, exhibition, Qvist Gallery, Hunterian Museum, RCS, 2015–2016. On the far left, a corrosion cast of the brain, photographed by Michael Frank. Photo: John Carr

rise to numerous interrelated models at the RCS over the past 70 years. Research was necessarily integral to the making of the exhibition, just as research had been crucial within the processes of design that were the subject of display. This exhibition research gave rise to unexpected issues and brought forth previously unknown aspects of the models concerned, indeed the exhibition in some respects produced models, rather than simply showing models that were already present in the RCS’s collections. The practice of exhibition-making, as I had discovered was possible during earlier display projects (for example Hallam, 2009), also provided unanticipated conceptual insight that would not have emerged otherwise (Hallam, 2015a). While the museum, as Thomas asserts, can form a “research resource” and a “site of analysis” (2010, p. 6), exhibition-making can also be a generator in both material and theoretical terms. Displayed for the first time in “Designing Bodies”, three sets of models at the RCS with associated images, documents, tools and equipment were arranged in relation to three bodily areas of model design: the brain, vessels (tubes through which blood, fluids and air flow, for example vessels in the brain and the lungs), and limbs (in this case the lower leg and foot). The exhibition’s introductory graphics panel outlined the display’s central concerns with model design; the panel proposed that in the context of anatomy and surgery, design is a process that crucially involves experimenting with materials, techniques of making, and also practices of use that include critical reflection upon and feedback into subsequent modifications and adaptations of models. So in the gallery visitors read the following: Anatomists and surgeons use models today for medical education and to develop the latest surgical skills. […] Anatomist David Hugh Tompsett made elaborate casts to show surgeons the vessels within organs, which were designed to be carefully viewed. Surgeon John Herbert Hicks designed movable wooden models to demonstrate how joints work. They both worked in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. Today, conservator Martyn Cooke builds replica heads for practicing brain surgery. To design these models their makers worked with living and dead human bodies, and experimented with a range of different materials, from wax to plastics. Through hands-​on trial and error, models are made, tested, used and adapted. Designing is not only about thinking and planning –​designing is about doing.5

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Pitched to ensure accessibility as far as possible for a wide non-​specialist audience, which could range from people aged 14 and upwards, the graphics panel drew attention to design as collaborative (even when particular models are associated with the work of particular makers), exploratory and embodied. The material practices of model design explored here also brought the living and the dead into particular relationships and interactions, with implications for how models come into being as entities for the generation of anatomical and surgical knowledge and skills. The making of Tompsett’s corrosion casts at the RCS, Hicks’ work at a hospital in Birmingham, England, and Cooke’s development of the Modelled Anatomical Replica for Training Young Neurosurgeons (MARTYN) again at the RCS, involve the use of deceased bodies, preserved for medical purposes, in different ways (Hallam, 2015b). Such work with the dead produces models as entities that disrupt distinctions between human bodies and material objects, as well as assumed boundaries between organisms that grow and artefacts that are made (see Hallam, 2014). Focusing on the display of experiments in medical design practices, two examples from the “Designing Bodies” exhibition highlight curating as research that produces rather than simply disseminates in material, sensory and conceptual terms.6 I have explored modelling with techniques of corrosion casting that focus on the body’s blood/​fluid vessels and airways in organs –​particularly the work of Tompsett (1910–​1991) as a prosector at the RCS –​elsewhere (Hallam, 2014), and here turn to the design of MARTYN and of the limb models associated with John Hicks’ practice as a surgeon. Research at the RCS in 2015, as part of my role as guest curator for “Designing Bodies”, involved lengthy discussions with those involved in designing MARTYN, many of which took place in laboratory, workshop and museum (gallery and storage) spaces as well as the photography studio, and many of which I documented and interpreted with digital photography. The spatial context of these discussions was crucial as many of these facilities were the locations used to develop and make initial versions of the model, along with the model’s subsequent iterations and transformations. In these settings model design processes were explained and demonstrated to me, and this was where we (RSC museum staff and I) also worked out which aspects of these processes were (and were not) possible to display in the public gallery. Work at the RCS had begun on MARTYN in 2011 when Major David Baxter, a neurosurgeon in the Royal Army Medical Corps, asked if an “anatomically correct” brain and skull could be made for training in emergency head-​trauma surgery (Cooke, 2013, p. 158; see Craven et al., 2014). This initiated a collaborative and ongoing design process led by Martyn Cooke, Head of Conservation in the museums department. The team also drew in medical artist Lydia Carline and Imperial College London medical student Claudia Craven, and at a later stage medical model-​maker Clare Rangeley for the design of an infant version, babyMARTYN for training in paediatric surgery (see Craven et al., 2018). By 2015, 53 adult MARTYN models, used by trainee surgeons to hone a number of specific skills needed to deal with, for example, head injuries and brain haematomas (blood clots), had been produced (see Hallam, 2015b). In the laboratory of the RCS’s museums department numerous experimental trials with materials and techniques had been necessary to find the best way to model key components with the most effective material for the tasks required of MARTYN in surgical training; these were to provide practical hands-​ on experience for trainees, and especially to enhance skills in the procedures of cutting into the skull and draining fluid from the brain. The modelling materials were therefore required to look and feel like parts of the living human head. As anthropological studies have argued, decisions regarding the selection of materials for particular purposes, based on perceptions of their properties and on their capacities and effects, are central to design (see Hallam, 2013; Were, 2013). So during MARTYN’s design, experiments with materials to test their capacities were undertaken. To display these experiments in “Designing Bodies”, I devised a display case collaboratively with Cooke (Figure 7.2), whose work in the building and realisation of the exhibition was crucial.

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FIGURE 7.2  Materials

used in trials to develop MARTYN, display case. Photo: Elizabeth Hallam

Items relating to the original tests for the look and feel of materials (which had been kept in the lab for future reference in model design) were exhibited, including residue from three tests with powdered resin wood glue mixed with water to find material suitable for modelling the skull (Figure 7.2, no. 3, centre right). All three variants were rejected, and the skull was eventually cast (from a human skull in the RCS’ museum collections) using polyurethane resin. To model the dura mater (a membrane lining the inside of the skull) rice paper was tested; this had a convincing feel when wet but was far too crispy when dry (Figure 7.2, no. 4, centre top). Materials for making (by casting) the brain, including gelatine variants mixed with other substances, similarly underwent a series of trials (Figure 7.2. no. 1, left top). To enable museum visitors to understand the significance of materials in design, I had initially proposed a “texture panel” comprising a number of samples that could be touched to get a sense of their tactile qualities. In the design of MARTYN, the extent to which the model’s components visually resembled parts of the living human head was deemed important, but the tactile feel of these were crucial, given that MARTYN was to be a training device for handling and indeed conducting surgical procedures upon. In the context of a public exhibition, a texture panel (which in practice became a texture table positioned horizontally rather than mounted on the wall) was intended to facilitate tactile experiences of materials tested for the model brain, skull, dura mater, and muscle: examples of rejected materials were displayed alongside those that were selected for use in the model. Visitors were invited to “Please touch!” so that they could compare the materials and feel the importance of tactile qualities in model design. To realise the exhibition in the space of the public gallery, then, work was focused on the display of design as a material and embodied as well as a conceptual process which is collaborative in practice. Display in this context, therefore, required not the placing of objects (in this case, 3D models) in the

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gallery as already finished objects, but the exhibition of processes that brought those objects into being, and propelled their take-​up, circulation, use and modification. The research I developed for “Designing Bodies” involved fresh identification and interpretation of models at the RCS. Many of the items relating to MARTYN which were displayed were considered by museum staff as “working objects” (for example, tools, moulds and equipment for model making), rather than conventional “museum objects” for exhibiting and long-​term preservation. By presenting items involved in the process of making MARTYN, instead of an apparently “completed” model, the exhibition responded to the challenge of displaying the practice of model design. The exhibition involved (re)interpretation of the design process for those involved in it, and since the development of MARTYN models was still ongoing at the time of the exhibition there was potential for these reflections to then feed into further future developments in the design and uses of next-​generation models at the RCS.7 All aspects of the research conducted as part of exhibition-making cannot be fully specified in advance because it is important for such research to be responsive, as appropriate, to the possibilities and limitations of specific contexts. Thomas suggests that the power of the museum as method –​involving encounters with “arrays of objects” in which curators discover rather than select things –​lies in its unpredictability (2010, p. 7). I would argue that the unanticipated aspects of research embedded in exhibition-making can be productive both of material entities for display and of embodied conceptual insights, as borne out in a second brief example from “Designing Bodies”. Here the emphasis was not so much on encounters with pre-​existing objects, as tends to be evoked in Thomas’ discussion, but rather on the processual production of material entities and sensory experiences. Part of my research for the exhibition was based in the archive of the RCS (in addition to the museum collections), which holds the substantial files that orthopaedic surgeon John Herbert Hicks (1912–​1992) compiled while designing and using models of the leg and foot at Birmingham Accident Hospital during the 1950s and 1960s. To interpret and demonstrate function and movement in the limbs, and thereby to help improve medical treatment of injuries, Hicks experimented with models, wrote extensive notes, took photographs and x-​rays, and made films along with innumerable sketches and drawings (Hallam, 2015b). In the archive files of Hicks’ research papers, photographic prints and negatives, I happened upon three disconnected, and previously unidentified, parts of what I realised was a cardboard model of the foot (Figure 7.3). Working out how the model was designed, and for what purpose (the demonstration of movement in the foot), I assembled the model and made a reproduction for display (Figure 7.3, no. 10, right). Copies of the model’s parts printed on sheets of pop-​out cardboard, were made available in the gallery for visitors so that they could also make the model themselves. This aspect of engagement with the exhibition’s audience, which encouraged participation in the making of a model, was significant in that Hicks –​like many of his contemporaries involved in medical education –​advocated active, embodied involvement in the learning process. For instance, to encourage readers of his research articles to more fully understand his work, Hicks suggested that readers themselves participate by making –​and even themselves becoming –​anatomical models of feet. Thus Hicks recommended: To overcome the difficulties of a description confined to the two dimensions of this page the reader if he wishes to be convinced of the essential simplicity of all this he must make for himself the cardboard model illustrated. The essential part of the model is a piece of cardboard with an oblique (diagonal) fold across it. If the model is held […] and moved about the hinge, foot movement will be simulated with surprising faithfulness.8

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FIGURE 7.3  Models

of the foot, display case and photographs. Photo: John Carr

Hicks went on to instruct: If the reader has not done the experiment before perhaps he will now stand on one foot and observe the movements he makes to preserve his balance. He will see that his leg is constantly moving, rotating alternately a little one way and then the other.9 With this, Hicks encouraged his readers to become their own living anatomical model, a strategy also promoted in medical schools where students of anatomy studied their own anatomy from the surface of the skin. Happening upon this aspect of Hicks’ experimental model making, during research for “Designing Bodies”, became a catalyst for more experimentation in the gallery as Hicks’ instructions were displayed on a graphics panel. So museum visitors were enabled in also performing the experiment of becoming an anatomical model, to develop their own embodied sense of movement in the limbs.

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The exhibition “Designing Bodies”, and the research that was integral to it, promoted the production and display of objects not as discrete material entities, but as interrelated forms emerging through processes of design. This called into question the notion of objects as fixed and clearly bounded, highlighting instead their openness, given that they are in formation and undergo modification and re-​making (see Hallam, 2016, pp. 13–​18). Here any clear differentiation of object and subject could be disrupted when living persons, as museum visitors, performed and imagined themselves as moving models of anatomy.

“Spaces” Exhibition curating demands not only consideration of what is displayed and how, but also of course where it is displayed. Museum spaces have been analysed extensively, through wide-​ranging debates, as zones for the operation of power and cultural encounter (see Bennett, 2018; Clifford, 1997; Macdonald, 2011), the regimentation and orientation of bodies (Duncan, 1995; Leahy, 2012), and the politics and aesthetics of display (Lidchi, 1997; Kratz, 2011). Museum spaces are dynamic and perpetually in motion within their material settings (even when emphasis is placed on stasis and fixity), motion that can entail spatial expansion for museums as well as contraction (see Hallam, 2016). During the last two decades some museums have expanded dramatically, visibly marking their extension out into their wider environments. Spaces in museums are not divorced from the architectural settings in which they are situated and the broader contexts in which they operate. As curator Hans Ulrich Obrist observes museum spaces should be envisaged as “always in contact with other oscillating spaces” (2003, p. 150). Further to this recognition of the interconnectedness of museum spaces, their relations with spaces beyond themselves, is the current design and reconfiguring of those spaces. Such changes in museums’ spatial dimensions also expresse and prompt shifts in the ways that museums –​along with their “objects”, purposes and practices –​are being conceived and defined. Architect of the 2017 extension of London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, Amanda Levete, explains that with this urban “cultural project” she aimed “to bring the city into the museum and take the museum out on to the street”.10 This opens a courtyard to visitors at a time when the museum is attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors to its “blockbuster” exhibitions that draw on and generate the spectacle and atmosphere of fashion shows, music festivals and cinema.11 Reconfiguring the Museum in this way, to form a “social space” that remains open to the public after visiting hours is in sync with exhibitions that innovate with gallery display to extend connections with sites of entertainment beyond the museum.12 Online reporting on a “cultural revolution” –​during a phase in which major museums, with newly designed striking architecture, have had major impact within their cities, attracting visitors and promoting economic renewal –​highlights ten new and re-​designed museums due to open in 2018 alone.13 This expansion in museum spaces and the wide reach of their effects within urban contexts is working not just to heighten the international visibility of museums but also to redefine them. This is evident at Singapore’s ArtScience Museum, whose mission statement places the museum at the intersection of “art, science, culture and technology” where “new ideas are formed. We like to say ‘it’s where the future is created’ ”.14 Here 21 gallery spaces immerse visitors in high-​tech interactive artworks in the form of digital installations, as well as showing large-​scale exhibitions of artists’ work ranging from da Vinci to Dali. The formulation of a museum as a space for exploration and the generation of “new ideas”, rather than the exhibition of already existing material objects, also animates plans for the Museum of the Future in Dubai. Currently under construction, and scheduled for opening in 2019, this museum, described as

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the “world’s most complex building”, is designed as an “incubator for futuristic innovation and design”.15 It is anticipated that the museum will “evolve” with “exhibits of the future of education, health care, smart cities, transportation and government services”.16 The architectural form of the museum, is a mirrored torus (oval ring shape) with a space or void at the centre which represents “what we don’t know”, according to the architect Shaun Killa. The architecture of this museum therefore spatialises the unknown, situating it as central to the institution and its aim to encourage a “looking towards the future” and the discovery of “new possibilities”. In this respect the museum with its reach toward what is not yet known, and its plans to “demonstrate and test the latest inventions and prototypes”,17 is akin to the experimental exhibitionary practices discussed by Basu and Macdonald as “site[s]‌for the generation rather than reproduction of knowledge and experience” (2007, p.2). Museum spaces, some of which are emerging as international mega-​projects, are therefore opening out and undergoing redefinition as generators of new ideas and technologies that do not yet exist. Whereas some museum spaces are proliferating and expanding –​especially those dedicated to art, design and technology –​changes affecting other museum spaces entail decline and disappearance. One such field of instability –​although there are varied museum trajectories involved, some of which involve growth and reinvestment –​is in the area of medical museums (see Alberti and Hallam, 2013). Here there are further possibilities for the experimental, which the last section of this chapter goes on to explore.

Experimenting with display We have already seen that museum spaces are shifting rather than static, and in this respect they might be described as “open” rather than bounded and fixed. At the site of my long-​term anthropological and historical research in an anatomy museum –​where I have been analysing the material and visual practices involved in the generation and communication of anatomical knowledge –​I devised an experimental installation to explore the life of spaces more closely, with attention to their material and sensory dimensions. This was a very different environment that shifted attention from processes of design that constitute 3D models, as discussed above to processes of undoing involved in the ongoing (trans)formation of 3D architectural spaces. At Marischal College, University of Aberdeen, the anatomy museum had been located in its neo-​ gothic granite architecture since the mid-​19th century, where it underwent sometimes radical changes until its relocation in 2009 to a new purpose-​built facility at the University’s medical school situated in the city’s large clinical site with extensive hospital and research facilities (see Hallam, 2016). The vacated anatomy museum, together with its surrounding ground-​floor complex of rooms in the anatomy department –​including the dissecting room, laboratories and offices –​were subsequently repurposed as artists’ studios and work spaces, now known as the Anatomy Rooms, which are open to visitors. The remaining two floors of rooms in the old anatomy department, situated below the anatomy museum, have been locked and remain inaccessible and unused, in the care of the University. A workshop (still with technicians and carpenters’ equipment), photography dark room, storage areas, corridors, staircases, and a mortuary have, therefore, ceased to operate for the past ten years. In May 2017 I devised an installation project to explore and re-​display these spaces that were once intimately related to, and crucial for the maintenance of, the anatomy museum. The “Rooms experiment: a fast installation” (22–​25 May 2017), which I curated in collaboration with a multi-​disciplinary team,18 set out to use experimental methods and display techniques in an open-​ended exploration, and responsive interpretation and recording, of the vacated spaces. The work of the collaborative team spanned across anthropology, architecture, and art practice.

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To initiate the experiment, I circulated an outline of the project to the team, drawing inspiration from writer Georges Perec’s explorations of spaces, as follows: I have several times tried to think of an apartment in which there would be a useless room, absolutely and intentionally useless. […] It would be a functionless space. It would serve for nothing, relate to nothing. For all my efforts, I found it impossible to follow this idea through to the end. (Perec, 1974) This installation is based on an experiment that asks: what insights can anthropologists generate by analysing a locked-​up part of a vacated building? Following my long-​term research on the Anatomy Museum at Marischal College, Aberdeen –​which was relocated in 2009 –​the experiment explores rooms put “out of action” for years. Can multi-​sensory exploration and documentation of these rooms yield productive anthropological understandings? Do rooms have lives when people leave them behind? The quotation from Species of Spaces was fitting. Perec was a member of Oulipo (the workshop for potential literature), a group of post-​surrealists experimenting with literary production by adopting systematic constraints and procedures. Here Perec indicates that there can be no absolutely useless space. (He would go on to explore a spatial void in Life: A User’s Manual, published 1978, set in a Parisian apartment block composed of 10 x 10 units including a vacant square). In line with Perec’s suggestion that an entirely useless room is impossible, the “Rooms experiment” was to find that locked and “disused” rooms are not necessarily lifeless, empty spaces; they have their own social, material, and multi-​species dynamics, as we were to discover. Security guards continue to visit the rooms, surfaces gather dust, paint peels and disintegrates, heating systems make their own noises, birds occupy outdoor staircases and passageways, mould grows; being within such rooms, switching on lights, walking across warped and cracking floors, creates an active interior soundscape. Having been granted permission by the University’s Estates department to undertake the project in a restricted-​access zone, the team used various media to respond to, interpret, record, and re-​display the locked rooms. I was permitted to photograph and make digital video, as well as making sketches and rubbings of surfaces (graphite on baking parchment), while other members of the team made audio recordings, drawings and photograms using paper with materials found in situ. The project was devised as site specific and restricted in terms of the time allocated to document the spaces and to make an installation. Within the four-​day project, the installation was on display for a few hours, in the form of four mixed-​media interventions situated in the publicly accessible Anatomy Rooms.19 The installation effectively traced and re-​located aspects of the locked rooms so that they could be experienced by visitors on the floor above. At the end of four days the installation was dismantled, and removed, although I retained (with permission) some photographs and digital video of the installation, and the making of it, for my future research. The project was deliberately a fast installation, which drew attention to the dimension of time, it was low-​budget and produced with a do-​it-​yourself (DIY), low-​ tech aesthetic. This DIY, fast intervention ethos was a deliberate strategy to enable a do-​able, experimental project which had unpredictable outcomes, unburdened by lengthy grant applications needed for large-​scale labour-​intensive and long term research projects. While “fast” in that we created the installation in three days and displayed it for a matter of hours, it was conducted with careful attention and respect for the spaces, and the digital video projections and sound recordings were deliberately slowed down to draw

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visitors’ attention to the sensory effects of movement within spaces –​their varied textures, colour and shapes, their shifting sounds and changing lighting for example. The ephemeral nature of the installation was also a reference to memento mori, which are concerned with the passage of time and the ephemerality of the material world (see Hallam and Hockey, 2001; Hallam, 2016). Digital video and accompanying audio recordings, made as I walked through the rooms by directing my recording device slowly over floors, walls, ceilings, fittings and discarded equipment picked up the tones, textures, and sounds of spaces. At two sites in the building we projected these visual recordings slowed down and, with audio recordings to accompany them. “Locked rooms” (Figure 7.4) moved through the mortuary, for example, where the sound of water from taps in a sink could be heard. My sensory journey around the secured areas of the building, usually out of sight to all but the security officers who regularly visit to check them, was then projected on the wall of the vacated anatomy museum store. Spaces in a different architectural location were, thereby, projected and re-​displayed in an ex-​museum space where they could, nevertheless, be seen and heard by visitors to the installation.20 A similar digital video projection –​following usually invisible internal pipes and cables through restricted-​access corridors –​ and with an accompanying audio piece by Ray Lucas (made by recording sounds in the locked rooms) was shown through a window in a part of the installation we called “Bird Staircase” due to the feathers and bird bones deposited on the mainly disused, weathered outdoor steps (Figure 7.5).

FIGURE 7.4  Installation

in the “Rooms Experiment”, 2017: “Locked Rooms: walking through rooms two floors below the dissecting room including workshop and mortuary”. Projection of digital video and audio recording (by Elizabeth Hallam). Photo: Elizabeth Hallam

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FIGURE 7.5  Installation

in the “Rooms Experiment”, 2017: “Bird Staircase: walking through locked rooms, one floor below the dissecting room, including pipes”. Projection of digital video (by Elizabeth Hallam) and audio recording (by Ray Lucas). Photo: Elizabeth Hallam

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Through this experimental installation, sensory engagement was facilitated with spaces that were usually locked and inaccessible; such spaces were re-​composed and re-​sited, through projections within rooms adjacent to a vacated anatomy museum –​a museum that in its past was dependent, for its very maintenance, upon practices taking place within those now locked rooms (see Hallam, 2016). This was a sensory experiment, through visual images, sound and touch, that provoked a re-​thinking of how architectural spaces shift over time, especially when they are vacated, and no longer used for the purposes for which they were designed. It also allowed exploration of visual and sensory methods for the interpretation and indeed reproduction of such spaces.

Object-​spaces? Under the rubric of object-​spaces, I end by arguing that in practice museum objects and spaces are both open and interrelated, sometimes so much so that distinctions between them breakdown, or do not arise. Objects and their spatial surroundings can thus dissolve into one another (see Bjerregaard, 2015). Through exhibitions as research, the processual nature of both objects and spaces can be foregrounded, thereby countering the often assumed fixity and stability of museum collections and architectures. In order to display the material entities produced through experimental design practices (in “Designing Bodies”) it was necessary to distribute and connect 3D models within the space of the gallery –​spatial layout thereby facilitated the exploration of objects and their relationships as ongoing material processes. Such 3D models were themselves explorations (and productions) of spatial arrangements within the human body. The experimental installation (“Rooms Experiment”) made inaccessible usually locked spaces themselves the “object” of attention and display, and these were reconfigured by re-​locating them via projection in spaces surrounding a vacated anatomy museum. Such relocation perhaps amounted to a temporary transformation of both the locked rooms and the spaces where they were redisplayed, during the time of the installation display at least. In both exhibition and installation, experimental practices entailed and provoked a reflexive questioning of what objects and spaces are and can become.

Acknowledgements This chapter began with a paper presented in Oslo; I am very grateful to Peter Bjerregaard for inviting me on that occasion, and for his generous support with this chapter. It developed through an anthropology seminar paper given in Oxford (November 2015) and, vitally, through work undertaken for the exhibition “Designing Bodies” (2015–​2016) and the “Rooms experiment” (May 2017), the latter of which was supported by the “Knowing From the Inside” (KFI) project led by Tim Ingold. Many thanks to all of those involved in these two projects, especially Sam Alberti, Martyn Cooke and staff at the RCS, John Carr, Michael Frank, Ray Lucas and the experiment team, and staff at University of Aberdeen.

Notes 1 If the printed word has formed a predominant medium for the communication of anthropology (Boyer et al., 2016; Schneider and Pasqualino, 2014), nevertheless, work with a range of media is expanding; see for example curatorial projects by the Ethnographic Terminalia Collective, http://​ethnographicterminalia.org; and by the network Colleex –​a collaboratory for ethnographic experimentation, https://​colleex.wordpress.com. Laboratories, convened at the Association of Social Anthropologists’ annual conferences (for example ASA2018 in Oxford) and at the European Association of Social Anthropologists biannual conferences, are also an expanding forum for developing experimental modes of anthropology.

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2 I curated and produced the “Rooms experiment: a fast installation” in collaboration with a team: Ray Lucas, Jen Clarke, Marc Higgin, and Elishka Stirton, with Dani Landau as production technician. Conducted with permission from the Estates department at the University of Aberdeen. 3 Mark Brown, “Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds to open London Museum”, The Guardian, online 6 September 2018. 4 “Body Worlds London”, www.bodyworlds.com, accessed October 2018. 5 As the guest curator of the exhibition I wrote all of the graphics panels (and selected images for these), case labels, object captions, and textual headings for sections of the display. These were then edited by curatorial staff at the RCS before I approved the final version. 6 For relevant approaches to curating, see, for example, Graham and Cook (2010), Obrist (2014), O’Neill (2016). 7 For example the further generation of MARTYN under development for pediatric surgery (see Royal College of Surgeons of England 21 November 2016; Craven et al., 2018), and a number of iterations of MARTYN were being testing for functionality and potential utility in testing robotic surgery (see Marcus, Darzi and Nandi, 2013, Marcus et al., 2014). 8 J.H. Hicks, “Mechanics of the Foot: The posterior hinge movement”, p. 15, typescript, c. 1955, MS0186/​3/​2, RCS Archive. 9 J.H. Hicks, “Mechanics of the Foot III: The ‘windlass’ ”, p. 12, manuscript, early 1950s, MS0186/​3/​3, RCS Archive. 10 Quoted in Oliver Wainwright, “The V&A’s £55m new courtyard: ‘Like a Marbella beach bar airlifted to South Ken’ ”, Guardian, online, 28 June 2017. 11 For example, “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty”, and “David Bowie is”, both at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 12 Ellis Woodman, “The V&A’s new £48m Exhibition Road Quarter is a triumph –​review”, Telegraph, online, 28 June 2017. 13 Ellen Himelfarb, “10 new museums opening in 2018: fresh additions to the world’s archaeology, art and design scenes”, Spaces, online, 1 January 2018. 14 ArtScience Museum, website, www.marinabaysands.com, accessed 15 August 2018. 15 The Museum of the Future, www.museumofthefuture.ae, accessed 9 December 2018. 16 Kim O’Connell, “Dubai’s Museum of the Future Is Shaping Up as the World’s Most Complex Building”, Redshift, online, 13 February 2018. 17 Sam Bridge, “Dubai’s Museum of the Future shortlists firms for tech innovation”, Arabian Business, online, 10 August 2018. 18 The team, drawing on anthropology, architecture and art, included Elizabeth Hallam (acting as curator) with Jen Clarke, Marc Higgin, Ray Lucas, Elishka Stirton, and production technician Dani Landau. 19 “Rooms experiment: a fast installation” comprised four mixed-​media interventions in the publicly accessible Anatomy Rooms, Marischal College, located in the lecture theatre’s projection box, the vacated store of the anatomy museum, the dissecting room, and an external staircase. 20 The installation was displayed during a week-​long gathering of the “Knowing From the Inside” (KFI) project, led by Tim Ingold, Department of Anthropology, University of Aberdeen.

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Levent, N., and A. Pascual-​Leone, eds. (2014). The multisensory museum: Cross-​disciplinary perspectives on touch, sound, smell, memory, and space. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Lidchi, H. (1997). The poetics and the politics of exhibiting other cultures. In: S. Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural representations and signifying practices. London: Sage, in association with the Open University, pp. 151–​208. Macdonald, S., ed. (2011). A companion to museum studies. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell. Malinowski, B. (2013 [1935]). Coral gardens and their magic,Vol. 1. Hamburg: Severus Verlag. Marcus, G.E. (2010). Contemporary fieldwork aesthetics in art and anthropology: Experiments in collaboration and intervention. Visual Anthropology, 23(4), pp. 263–​277. —​—​—​. (2014). Prototyping and contemporary anthropological experiments with ethnographic method. Journal of Cultural Economy, 7(4), pp. 399–​410. Marcus, G.E., and M.J. Fischer, eds. (1999 [1986]). Anthropology as cultural critique: An experimental moment in the human sciences, 2nd edn. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, H.J., A. Darzi and D. Nandi. (2013). Surgical simulation to evaluate surgical innovation: Preclinical studies with MARTYN. Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 95, p. 299. Marcus, H.J., A. Hughes-​Hallett, P. Pratt, G-​Z. Yang, A. Darzi and D. Nandi. (2014). Validation of MARTYN to simulate the keyhole supraorbital subfrontal approach. Bulletin of the Royal College of Surgeons of England, 96, pp. 120–​121. Meyer, M. (2011). Researchers on display: Moving the laboratory into the museum. Museum Management and Curatorship, 26(3), pp. 261–​272. Obrist, H.U. (in conversation with Vivian Rehberg, and Stefano Boeri). (2003). Moving interventions: Curating at large. Journal of Visual Culture, II, pp. 147–​160. —​—​—​. (2014). Ways of curating. London: Penguin Books. O’Neill, P. (2016). The culture of curating and the curating of culture(s). Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pandian, A., and S. McLean, eds. (2017). Crumpled paper boat: Experiments in ethnographic writing. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Perec, G. (1974). Species of spaces and other pieces. London: Penguin Books. Royal College of Surgeons of England. (21 November 2016). Press release: Lifelike model of child’s skull and brain created using 3D printing, heralding breakthrough in surgical training. Royal College of Surgeons of England. www.rcseng.ac.uk/​news-​and-​events/​media-​centre/​press-​releases/​new-​model-​created/​ Schneider, A., and C. Pasqualino, eds. (2014). Experimental film and anthropology. London: Bloomsbury. Schneider, A., and C. Wright, eds. Anthropology and art practice. London: Bloomsbury. Thomas, N. (2010). The museum as method. Museum Anthropology, 33(1), pp. 6–​10. Tybjerg, K., ed. (2016). The body collected: The raw materials of medical science from cadaver to DNA. Copenhagen: Medical Museion. —​—​—​. (2017). Exhibiting epistemic objects. Museum & Society, 15(3), pp. 269–​286. Were, G. (2013). On the materials of mats: Thinking through design in a Melanesian society. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 19, pp. 581–​599. —​—​—​. (2014). Digital heritage, knowledge, and source communities: Understanding digital objects in a Melanesian society. Museum Anthropology, 37(2), pp. 133–​143.

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Collaborating with audiences

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8 EXHIBITIONS, ENGAGEMENT AND PROVOCATION From Future Animals to Guerilla Archaeology Jacqui Mulville

Introduction This case study demonstrates how a single exhibition, and associated activities, can go on to inspire substantive research with varying foci. The definition of an exhibition employed here includes all events that bring the public and material culture together in a physical space for a fixed time. The initial exhibition created was temporary pop-​up focused not on expensive and rare items in a static display, but on activated objects as a source of engagement. Research emerging from these events includes evaluations of the direct impact of the exhibition on audiences. Additionally, the act of creating exhibitions and events provides space for practice-​led research and training to emerge. In 2011 a crowd-​created exhibition of images, ‘Future Animals’, was hosted at the National Museum Wales, Cardiff, over a single week and its legacy has lasted to the present day. This chapter draws on Future Animals, and subsequent events, to examine this volume’s themes of exhibitions as research. Future Animals was a public engagement focused exhibition which stimulated new research throughout the cycle of their creation, execution, and reflection. The year-​long project had numerous outcomes; new knowledge, skills and networks at an individual and organisational level were also developed and the use of exhibitions as mode of engagement was refined. One outcome was ‘Guerilla Archaeology’, a new collective based on the team and building on the principles and practices of Future Animals. Guerilla Archaeology set out to engage audiences with archaeological research through short term exhibitions and interactions; employing archaeology as a way of challenging modern attitudes and encouraging individuals to consider the economic, social, ritual, and symbolic aspects of past and present lives. Guerilla Archaeology is active today and reaches an audience of thousands each year. The Future Animals project, and subsequent Guerilla Archaeology activity, has precipitated research within three different arenas; evaluatory research, practice-​based research and enquiry-​led academic research. The first area, research evaluating the direct effect of these projects on the intended audiences, is briefly considered here but the focus is on the relationship between the other forms of research activity. The link between practice-​ based and enquiry-​led research is central to this chapter, and is explored through the sequence of doing and thinking. Doing Future Animals stimulated new ways of thinking about engagement and resulted in the development of a provocative and playful working practice. This provocation, central to Guerilla

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Archaeology’s success, emerged from working with young adults during Future Animals, and was further reinforced by Tilden’s book, ‘Interpreting Our Heritage’ (1957). Tilden stated that interpretation must relate to the personality or experience of a participant and address the whole individual, and be a revelation based on information with a chief aim not of instruction, but of provocation. His provocation aimed to ‘stimulate’ someone ‘toward a desire to widen their horizon of interests and knowledge, and to gain an understanding of the greater truths that lie behind any statement of fact’ (p. 4). These principles resonated with the experiences of the Future Animals team. Subsequent exhibitions and events, delivered through Guerilla Archaeology, employed provocation, rather than instruction, to work with young adults. This has allowed the co-​creation of a past rooted in archaeological research and in doing so has also developed new lines of research enquiry. The chapter begins with a description of the Future Animals, and the outcome from the project. The outcomes included a large degree of evaluatory and practiced-​based research and the impact of this on subsequent activity is discussed. The insights gained during the development, execution and evaluation of Future Animals indicated that our interdisciplinary and creative practices, team work and a reflexive approach to engaging our target audiences were key to the project’s success. The further exploration of these approaches through training and new engagement focused exhibitions is described. This new activity led to the creation of a set of guiding principles, and the subsequent section explores how these became the springboard for the creation of Guerilla Archaeology and were embedded in its practice. The chapter concludes by looking at the ways in which new enquiry-​led research is also an outcome of exhibitions and engagement. At the heart of this account of an exhibition-​led research journey is the team that has come together to create and to support these projects. As the chapter develops language that acknowledges the role of this collective enquiry will be employed, and the emphasis will move from the individual author to the collective effort.

Future Animals The stimulus for the Future Animals project was the creation of the ‘Beacons for Engagement’ national network. The ‘Beacons’ set out to support, recognise, reward and build capacity for public engagement by changing the culture in universities, and assisting staff and students to engage with the public’ (National Co-​ordinating Centre for Public Engagement [NCCPE], 2015). This network was a response to a radical change in landscape of engagement within Britain over the last decade. A new focus on sharing the activity and benefits of higher education and research with the public has emerged (Wilson, 2008). This public engagement is ‘a two-​way process, involving interaction and listening, with the goal of generating mutual benefit’ (NCCPE, 2015). Today public engagement has a series of institutional, social, and economic benefits, contributes to individual researchers’ career trajectories, and is central to how universities and museums are funded and ranked (Wilson, 2008). In 2009, the ‘Beacons for Wales’ put out a call for projects that would develop public engagement focused on 14-​to 19-​year-​olds. The theme, ‘Our Place in the Future’ caught the attention of a lecturer in archaeology (the author), an artist (Paul Evans) and a biology lecturer (Professor Mike Bruford) who had all recently met due to a mutual interest in human:animal relationships and in communicating with wider audiences. This thematic call spoke to our interests and coincided with the anniversaries of both Darwin’s birth and the publication his book ‘On the Origin of the Species’ in 2009. In response, we developed an interdisciplinary proposal that employed art to engage young adults with Darwin’s work, and to understand how his theory of evolution remains relevant today. With the support of the public engagement team at the Amgueddfa Cymru –​National Museum Wales (ACNMW), a successful application was made and ‘Future Animals’ was born.

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FIGURE 8.1  Future Animals, created

by the young people. Photo: Future Animals project

This project comprised a series of workshops that focused on Darwin, dog breeds, and drawings and concluded with a public exhibition. Our core team of three was supplemented by post-​g raduate students. The museum, and other partners in the Beacons project, provided training in engagement techniques. We targeted three groups of young adults (circa 20 individuals each). Two groups (aged 14–​16 years) were recruited from local secondary schools and were preselected by their educational establishments. The third group comprised 16-​to 24-​year-​olds who were either unemployed or economically inactive young adults (Not in Employment, Education or Training or ‘NEET’s). These individuals were recruited via a local training program which was linked to their access to benefits. NEETs have often had little engagement with education and are typified by a lack of qualifications (House of Commons Library, briefing paper, 2015). Each of the three groups joined a series of workshop with activities that explored the principles and practices surrounding animal evolution, domestication, and pet breeding. The biologist introduced Darwin and explained the biological concepts of evolution whilst the author, a zooarchaeologist, provided a perspective on the human control of animal breeding up to the present day. The artist encouraged the young adults to create artistic responses to these ideas by designing and drawing the pets and farm animals of the future. The participants were also stimulated to discuss and debate the rights and wrongs of animal breeding, exploitation, and management. This was achieved by posing provocative questions by for example ‘is it right for us to change the way that animals look and behave just so that we can have a cute or cuddly companion or a docile source of food?’. A commissioned film on the project captured the content of the workshop and reflected on the debates. The resulting images were mounted and exhibited in ACNMW along with the film (Figure 8.1). The themes caught the public imagination and over the course of a single week over 1,500 people drew their own ‘Future Animals’ in response to a challenge to create new creatures (Figure 8.2).

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FIGURE 8.2  Future Animals, created

by the museum audience. Photo: Future Animals project

Outcomes The exhibition stimulated research within three interlined areas. Firstly, research using both quantitative and qualitative evaluation methods, examined how successful the project was at engaging the public. Participants involved in creating and/​or viewing the exhibition were interviewed. The results demonstrated that the young adults taking part learnt information, developed critical skills, and had fun. The public found the exhibition thought-​provoking and both groups valued engaging via art. Other tangible outcomes from this project, in addition to the exhibition and film, included a funders report, a blog (futureanimals.wordpress.com), a second film that focused on the outcomes for the staff and postgraduates involved, a National Co-​ordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) and other case studies. Further evaluation focused on the Beacons aim of developing Public Engagement capacity in HEIs. Future Animals was conceived and led by an interdisciplinary team with little experience in public engagement before the event and ill-​defined working practices. There was a paucity of research or guidelines available for public engagement, and as such participation in the project was our main source of information. Those delivering the event, both the lead and supporting teams, were evaluated using pre-​and post-​project questionnaires to assess how their experiences of working with the public changed. At the start of the project all team members reported a lack of skills and experience in engagement, low confidence in working with young adult audiences outside formal educational environments, and for most the NEETs were an entirely new group to work with. After the event the academic leads and the postgraduate helpers reported increased knowledge, skills, confidence, and interest in engagement.

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The project leads also felt they had gained a clearer understanding of communication strategies relevant to their intended audience. Overall, Future Animals provided insights and inspiration for new ways of working as individuals, as teams and with the public, shaping careers and developing new engagement strategies. In addition to evaluation of the outcomes for those involved in Future Animals, the team also reflected on the working practices employed. Identifying which activities lie at the core of the project’s success makes it possible to employ similar strategies elsewhere. Three elements were identified as pivotal; interdisciplinary collaboration, the use of the creativity to support participant exploration of the exhibition themes and developing ways of working that responded to our target audiences. Whilst each of the project leaders had some experience and/​or interest in one or more of these elements, this project created an entirely new space for exploration and developed expertise and confidence. These observations were briefly described in the formal report for the Future Animals project but a more detailed account of how each of these elements emerged and was employed is described below.

Interdisciplinary working The diverse team that created Future Animals spanned arts and science. Whilst interdisciplinary working is often promoted as way of making connections between ideas and concepts across different disciplinary boundaries within academia, and elsewhere, true collaboration can be difficult. For the parties involved interdisciplinary working was a novel approach but the creation of the Future Animal exhibition provided a platform for its development. During the project, each lead partner was encouraged to learn from the others and to extend the boundaries of their practice. The academics were encouraged to think outside the formal modes of discourse and reframe their research within a different context for new audiences, whilst the artist gained a much clearer understanding of scientific knowledge as well as academic ways of thinking and working. Working together the team challenged the assumption of privileged knowledge and developed expertise in communication to new audiences.

Creativity The second element, creativity, is closely related to, and emerged from, interdisciplinary working. As described above the artist, Paul was the inspiration for the projects use of art, and imagination, as the central exploratory methods and outcomes of the Future Animals. Art was employed to project the process of domestication forward in time and to create new species. Participants could draw on mythical beasts and magical animals from history and fiction as their inspiration and choose to focus on any aspect of present or future life. This was the first time that other members of the team had used these modes of communication to engage the public with scientific knowledge. Our evaluatory research revealed that, for all participants, exploring complex ideas non-​verbally was effective and drew on a different, often less appreciated, set of skills. Creativity was also successfully used as tool to evaluate engagement. Each image produced by workshop participants, and those visiting the exhibition, demonstrated that individuals had understood and engaged with the concept of Future Animals.

Audience research The third element to Future Animals success emerged from our commitment to developing appropriate ways of working with a young adult audience through practice-​based research. As noted above, the team had little experience in this area, and the groups we targeted, whilst of a similar age, all had different

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characteristics and presented us with various challenges. Our response to these challenges initially drew on external advice but were further developed by our practice-​led research. There were three main areas in which engaging with young people developed our expertise. Firstly, working with young adult audiences quickly forced the entire team to change the way we expressed ourselves and interacted with them. We constantly refined our way of presenting ideas, employing different vocabularies and sentence structures –​e.g. replacing ‘archaeological’ by ‘ancient’ or ‘old’. We also worked hard at being fully inclusive, altering our communication strategies as well as managing space and leader/​participant behaviour. All present at the workshops, staff, postgraduates, teachers, and young adults, were encouraged to take full part in activities and the use of artistic expression proved to be an ideal leveller. We noticed that our postgraduate students were particularly successful in engaging the young adults through peer to peer engagement. Secondly, we discovered that young adults’ engagement with Future Animals varied from group to group, and that this was a primarily a reflection of the motivation of the individuals involved. For example, it became apparent that attendance at externally funded workshops were viewed either as a reward or as a distraction by the young adults and their educational leaders. Within the two school groups we encountered individuals who were ready to engage and familiar with the format of workshops as well as less interested and motivated individuals. The final group, the NEETS, were different. This group is characterised by low educational attainment and whilst the workshop was made available to them as part of a government training scheme their attendance was voluntary. During the delivery of Future Animals all the young adult groups provided a lively audience but it was the self-​selecting NEET group that stood out as being more actively engaged. This led to our third observation on audience interactions; individuals that were less constrained by ‘appropriate’ ways of behaving within the workshop format were the most interesting to work with. Of all three groups, it was the NEETs, who, despite their lack of positive educational experiences and the lowest level subject-​specific knowledge, were the most receptive to new ideas and interested in exploring the entire breadth of our expertise. They exhibited a wide range of views and experiences and, rather than accepting our version of facts as the truth, provided many scenarios with which to challenge us. This led to wide ranging discussions, for example on the possibility of humans giving birth to kittens (the NEETs insisted this have been being reported in media sources). This issue lay outside our scripted responses but in tackling these queries we could describe how species are defined, the biology of reproduction and the nature of reporting. Other spin-​off discussions centred on food security, global trade and migration and the potential of future armed conflicts based around increasingly scarce resources. Their provocative questioning and transgressive attitudes to established knowledge challenged our own assumptions and sparked new conversations, forcing the team to examine knowledge from a different point of view. Academic discourse often occurs at a very small scale or as the broad sweep of a grand narrative, however these young adults wanted discussions at a human scale and demanded a transdisciplinary discourse. Rather that sticking to a linear narrative, engaging with them called into play a wide range of skills and experience, and forced us to explore new knowledge and make new connections. These exchanges were challenging, thought provoking and fun. Over the next couple of years, the Future Animal team expanded in numbers and skills by training new members in a workshop, Postgraduate Environmental Archaeology and Community Engagement (PEACE), in December 2010 at Cardiff University. This event shared these three elements; embracing interdisciplinary and creative practices and continuing to develop strategies for working with young adults with groups of post-​g raduates. The workshop participants were then supported in the creation of new exhibitions and activities based on their research (Mulville and Law, 2013). The combination of

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Future Animals and PEACE resulted in a skilled and motivated group of individuals with an interest in working particularly with young adult audiences to create exhibitions and associated activities.

Back to the Future In 2011 an opportunity to work with a local music festival arose. ‘Green Man’ (capacity 20k) put out a call for workshops to engage festival goers with science. In response, our interdisciplinary team re-​ designed and augmented Future Animals, drawing upon the insights gained from previous events. The team adapted the creative workshops to make them attractive and deliverable within the flexible drop-​ in environment of a festival. This new event ‘Back to the Future’ ran over three days, and once again engaged the young adults, and others, with issues surrounding animal evolution and selective breeding via art. This time instead of a pre-​selected static audience the team had to attract and engage a more diverse group of individuals, and compete with other festival attractions. Once again, we employed a provocative approach to engage individuals with the subject of animal manipulation. We also created a sense of fun by drawing on elements of the ‘Back to the Future’ film, for example in fancy dress. The experience was successful. There were numerous young adults within the festival audience and they derived from a wide range of social and economic groups (Figure 8.3). Large numbers of individuals helped to create new Future Animals for our pop-​up exhibition and formal evaluation indicated a high degree of engagement by the targeted audiences. The team members also enjoyed the festival environment and the flexible format of delivery. Buoyed up by these successes the author suggested that the team further developed these working practices and Guerilla Archaeology was born.

Guerilla Archaeology Guerilla Archaeology is a Cardiff-​based collective made up of archaeologists, scientists and artists. The group is dedicated to getting out and about, down and dirty with the public and the past to think about our present lives and future hopes. To bemuse, amaze and astound with fascinating insights into previous times through participation. (Guerilla Archaeology, 2016) Guerilla Archaeology came into being in 2011 and continues up the present day. The group benefits from the support of Cardiff University as part of this institution’s outreach and engagement agenda. Guerilla Archaeology’s central aim is to engage the public with archaeological research and over the past six years has been very successful in doing this. Our audience evaluation has indicated that the methods we employ allows Guerilla Archaeology to successfully reach groups traditionally excluded from, or unaware of, academic research many of whom did not normally engage with the archaeological past (Mulville, 2014). Over this time practice based research by Guerilla Archaeology has helped us to develop a series of guiding principles that built on the principles of creativity, interdisciplinary working and audience interaction that emerged during the original project. This section sets out these principles and goes on to describe how they emerged and are enacted within Guerilla Archaeology to create of sustainable and successful exhibitions based events. To allow the reader to understand how the various elements combine an example of a festival based exhibition and associated event is provided. The final section examines how the creation of Guerilla Archaeology has also resulted in new enquiry-​led research.

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FIGURE 8.3  Back

to the Future at Einstein’s Garden. Photo: Paul Evans

Guiding principles Guerilla Archaeology’s central aim is to engage the public with archaeological research. The guiding principles at the central to the creation and delivery of engagement for the collective are • •

To grow and sustain an interdisciplinary team and working practices To develop creative, provocative and playful interactions with audiences

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• •

To engage self-​ motivated young adult audiences (15–​ 35-​ year-​ old) outside traditional learning environments To stimulate new research

The impact of each of these principles on the development of Guerilla Archaeology is considered below.

Interdisciplinary teams and practices From the beginning of Future Animals, teamwork has been central to this achievement and Guerilla Archaeology came into being as a collective, with a commitment to group working. Guerilla Archaeology built on the founding team by attracting new members via formal and informal recruitment techniques across various platforms. As result over the past six years more than 100 individuals, including academic staff and students and those working within museums, heritage organisations, creative arts, performance, crafts, and other sectors, have contributed to the project. This combination of the breadth of archaeology as a discipline with our diverse team membership is key to our creative process.

Creative, provocative and playful interactions Central to the success of Future Animals was the use of art and provocation to work with young adults. Our research indicated that such creative responses created new space for thinking and that provocative and challenging queries engendered a stimulating and participatory debate about our common human past, present and future. Guerilla Archaeology has since gone on to place provocation and play at the centre of our activities, both as a way of attracting and retaining our audience and as way of co-​creating a past. Evaluatory research has indicated that by employing this provocative practice we have been to reach a diverse range of both internal (those delivering events) and external audiences and change the way people engage with heritage (Mulville, 2014). This use of provocative and playful topics, performances and interactions emerges from our team-​ led interdisciplinary and creative working practices first initiated by Future Animals, and developed in later activities. We invite all our interdisciplinary team to play a central role in designing our activities during ‘brainstorming’ workshops, and/​or to contribute via social media. Team members are involved in selecting a suitably provocative theme that can be addressed via archaeological enquiry. Examples have included shamans, drugs, death, beauty and archaeocosmology. Once selected the group brainstorms possible modes of engaging our target audience with this theme (such as art, debate, adornment, disguise). These themes and methods are then developed and refined to produce site-​specific events through research, negotiation, trial, and conversation. By continuing to work with creative arts practitioners Guerilla Archaeology has been able to incorporate music, visual arts, performance, immersion, and theatricality in our events. We also use creativity to support the learning theory strategies that underpin our workshops in speaking to a range of learning styles (visual, auditory, and kinaesthetic, Coffield et al., 2004). The team’s energy, experiences, skills, specialist subject and audience knowledge allows us to approach our themes and audiences from a variety of perspectives. The team is also central to our continual process of reviewing our aims, objective, events, outcomes and working practices as well as our commitment to generating new research. We have also found that working collaboratively encourages new ways of thinking and doing to emerge and supports creativity.

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Engaging young adult audiences Our decision to focus on engaging young adults was initiated by the success and reward of Future Animals and subsequently reinforced by a broader impetus. Research has indicated that many young adults disengage with heritage and/​or science from the time they leave formal education up until they become parent/​carers for a new generation of children (Black, 2005; Castell et al., 2014). In 2004 only 27 per cent of museum visitors in England were from the under 35 age group, and of these only a small proportion were independent attendees (i.e. outside formal education) (Xanthoudaki, 1998; Mason and McCarthy, 2006). By focusing our attention on this group, and building on our skills and experiences, Guerilla Archaeology is trying to make a real difference to young adults’ engagement with heritage and science through archaeology. We now have a clear idea of how and where to best access and engage this group outside formal educational environments; Guerilla Archaeology employs peer to peer engagement, situates activities in appropriate locales, and designs events that speak to directly to young adults. Peer to peer engagement is essential as young adults typically inhabit a ‘different cultural field from older generations, consuming and producing material in different modes and with different perspectives’ (Museum Marketing, 2012). To facilitate peer engagement Guerilla Archaeology is continually recruiting new young adult members, as well as retaining the skills and experience of previous members. We have found that the young adult members’ personal experiences of engaging with our target group helps to foster a close link between audiences and deliverers. This success of such peer to peer engagement is clearly articulated by N8/​ Nacht (www.n8.nl/​) in Amsterdam. This annual event sees young people running numerous museums takeover events. The young adult volunteers are key in identifying appropriate themes and attracting audiences that are mostly made up of those under 35 (Museums Marketing, 2012). Guerilla Archaeology operates a similar model with undergraduate and postgraduate archaeology students providing a valuable resource that we draw upon to create and run events. In return our volunteers gain employability skills and, as discussed below, can attend music festivals for free. By placing our events in suitable locations, we circumvent the inherent problems in attracting diverse young adult audiences. Whilst this group is underrepresented in traditional museum and heritage audiences, young adults gather in large numbers during sporting, shopping, and leisure events (e.g. festivals). Festivals are a rite of passage that large proportions of young adults take part with the result that festival audiences have an average age of 26 years and derive from a broad array of social, economic, and cultural groups (Festival Awards, 2012, 2015; Drury, 2013). By locating our activity within the music and arts festival scene we have instant access to this group. Our emphasis on peer to peer engagement at festivals also works particularly well for young adults. Our young team are familiar with festivals and their audiences, and this helps both during the design of events and facilitates their delivery. A common language, interests and experiences (bands, weather, camping etc.) narrows the gap between ‘us’ and audience. Festivals are also a valuable tool in recruiting young adult team members, particularly as participation includes free tickets, early arrival, specialist camping facilities, as well as the excitement of being part of the backstage team. The third strand in our toolkit for accessing young adult audiences revolves around how to get them interested and involved in an event, exhibition, or activity. The key aspect of this is a commitment to our provocative way of working. This provocation works well within the festival environment and is complimented by counter-​culture ambitions of many events. Archaeology is also of interest to young festival audiences with events invoking heritage, both physical and spiritual, real and constructed (e.g. ley lines, the Glastonbury stone circle and Glastonbury town), as part of their creation myths. The reality is that most British music festivals are in rural settings with substantive archaeological sites or activity

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within a close radius, and this allows Guerilla Archaeology to draw explicit links between the ancient and present (albeit temporary) inhabitants of the area. The popularity of adopting new costumes and identities (described by some as a form of ‘participative surrealism and a curiously British phenomenon not seen to occur at other European festivals’, Robinson, 2015, p. 94) has also been exploited by Guerilla Archaeology. Working with skilled costume designers and actors allow us to bring ancient characters to life in performance, whilst archaeological themed clothing and accessories (e.g. red deer skull head dresses, see below) speak to the festivals audiences interest in transformation and new identities. These elements often encourage our young audiences to don a disguise and get involved via social media fuelled ‘selfies’.

Stimulate new research Our final guiding principle emerges from our previous aims, and embraces research in its broadest sense, from the creation of new ways of working, to new collaborations, research projects, and publications. Innovation comes directly from our interdisciplinary membership, and our emphasis on, and respect for, our team as source of knowledge and inspiration. The provocative themes, a sense of fun and the freedom to draw inspiration from across the entirety of human history allow us to effectively create our own research projects each year. These projects draw on, but are not limited to, archaeological research from Cardiff University. We draw on use a wide range authentic of evidence to support interdisciplinary themes, for example, our theme ‘Beauty’ in 2016 combined art, artefacts, osteology, mummies, and bog bodies to create a ‘Bog Body Shop’. Finally, we are never afraid to say when information is unclear, contested or the answers unknown. We use these areas of contention as a location where we can negotiate new knowledge by involving the public in finding solutions. The successful tailoring of these events to festival audiences is demonstrated in Guerilla Archaeology workshops featuring in the ‘Top 40 Things to Do’ at Glastonbury in 2017.

Guerilla Archaeology in action A full account of the range of themes, activities, and events, and supporting information from our events can be explored at the Guerilla Archaeology website (https://​guerillaarchaeology.wordpress.com/​). Our events always employ the exhibition of material culture. We mostly use modern materials, as security, presentation and conservation of ancient materials at festival sites can be difficult and we want people to interact with the past through the handling of materials. To get a feel for how any single event combines our guiding principles, a brief description of the first Guerilla Archaeology event in 2012 follows. This event was a shaman-​focused exhibition and associated workshops (Figure 8.4). We chose shamans as a theme as they have several resonances with modern festival audiences (e.g. music and altered states) and we could combine several of our own academic research strands in this single event (e.g. Reynolds, 2009, 2011 and 2013). As a result of our research interests, we also had contacts with a practicing shaman who was interested in attending festivals and interacting with audiences. The following text is from our 2012 festival programme description. Shamanic Street Preachers This year we will be taking our ‘Shamanic Street Preachers’ out to meet the public performing at a range of exciting festivals across Britain. Prepared to wonder at the richness of human societies in the past, follow in the footsteps of ancestors and explore your wild side.

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FIGURE 8.4  Shamanic

Street Preachers 2012. Photo: Paul Evans

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The Shamanic Street Preachers draw on ten thousand years of experience to give you the chance to get a new perspective on the world. Shamans mediated between animals and humans, ourselves, and the spirit world, the living and the dead. They healed through ceremony, ritual, music, and dance and used animal spirits to communicate with other worlds. With our costumes and disguises we want to bring out the beast in you and breathe new life into Shamanic ideals at our Great British festivals. This engaging event uses the famous red deer antler head-​dresses from Star Carr as ‘gateway’ artefacts. These compelling ‘Shamanistic’ objects, along with other examples of Shamanism at British archaeological sites, provide a route for understanding the Mesolithic worldview. A series of activities provide details on the construction of archaeological knowledge and challenge festival audiences to both engage with past ways of living and reflect on their own present and future engagement with the wider world. There are four themes to our Shamanic shenanigans –​Explore, Make and Do, Play and Sing, and Listen and Speak. In Explore we introduce archaeological research, science, and experimentation –​examining ethnographic evidence for shamans world-​wide and the archaeological evidence for the British and Irish versions. In our pop-​up exhibition, there will be recent shamanic objects you can handle, ancient artefacts to wonder at and materials you can transform. One part of understanding past societies is the tracking of individual movements, archaeologists do this via isotopes, and we invite festival goers to engage with our research and past migrations by creating tribal markings based on their own personal life journeys. By identifying where people lived as children, and ascribing colours to the various geological and climatic conditions experienced, participants can create body markings that reflect their ‘iTribe’ identity. In Make and Do we invite people to experience the power of Shamanic transformation through disguise. Alongside a Shamanic portrait gallery for inspiration, we will have copies of recent Shamanic dress alongside the recreation of a 9,000-​year-​old antler headdress for you to wear. This transformation will be recorded digitally with participants given the chance to ‘tag’ their experience. Over the festival weekend we will collect crowd-​created splatter handprints to decorate our Shamanic lodge. Images are common in prehistoric caves their creation builds an individual link to the past. Everyone attending our events will be encouraged to create ‘antler’ headdresses to wear during our Shamanic events, and to take out into the wider festival community. Play and Sing workshops will lead people through the process of using music and movement to enter a transformative state. Active participation, including dancing and drumming led by our professional drummer will be encouraged. There a large finale performance with all those who have ‘Become Shamans’ encouraged to come together. Finally, in Listen and Speak there will be a series of face-​to-​face encounters with those involved in Shamanic practices. This will include storytelling, shamanic ethnographies, conversations (between a modern-​day shaman and a researcher) and a question and answer session based on the both the live audience and questions posted by previous ‘Shamanic’ visitors.

Enquiry-​led research This final section looks at how the process of creating and exploring themes via exhibitions and associated activities generated new academic research within the Shamanic Street Preachers workshop. In this event, we combined the author’s research interest in red deer (e.g. Mulville, 2010) and the public’s interest

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in Shamans by accurately recreating the flint-​worked Mesolithic Star Carr antler ‘headdresses’ (Clark, 1954). These evocative worked red deer skulls are both rare and fragile. Their role in prehistory has been interpreted through multiple lenses and we wanted the public handle to and wear these items as a way of understanding them. This ambition stimulated preparatory research on the fragile originals to examine methods of making and on the tools required. Five headdresses were fashioned by one of our team. The process of their creation has refined our knowledge on antler working and antler selection, whilst their handing and wearing has provided insights into their use and longevity. These new skills and interests in antler working then stimulated the experimental recreation of other, metal worked, antler artefacts from Cardiff research projects focused on later British societies. This once again built on the author’s research (Mulville, 2015) and drew on an associated excavation archive, resulting in new insights into the manufacture and trade of Viking composite combs (Sharples and Dennis, 2016). The lack of tools suitable to create such artefacts within the archive inspired additional research into these missing Norse tools and led to their recreation and use (Forward, 2015). The recreated combs have in turn formed part of exhibitions on antler working and the handling, use and damage, of these artefacts by the team and the public have made it possible to examine use wear, tactics for repair and the resistance of materials to daily abuse. Meaningful relationships with craft specialists, have also developed, leading to the creation of further research projects on craft as engagement, the transmission of knowledge, the development of expertise, and the contribution that archaeologically focused antler craft working could have rural economies. There are numerous research avenues that we have explored. This includes gathering information on public attitudes to archaeology to directly inform our work as well as the discipline of archaeology in general. We have explored the display of human remains (Figure 8.5), examined the role of a recently constructed Stone Circle in myth making at Glastonbury and co-​created pop-​up museums at festivals (e.g. Mulville, 2017) to demonstrate curation and explain material culture and agency. The exhibition as engagement has directly impacted on teaching and learning at Cardiff University. A new participatory module undergraduate ‘Heritage Communication’ sees student teams design and deliver new engagement projects, which in turn engage the students with all forms of associated research. Students can choose to take four week assessed placements with Guerilla Archaeology, and many have gone on to use this experience to get jobs, whilst the exhibitions, events and resources developed are now used to communicate research back to the students.

Exhibitions to action This account of the journey from exhibition to action set out both to reflect and to inspire. The consequences of the Future Animals exhibition examined here were mostly unforeseen. Whilst the seeds for engagement, training and research were sown by the ‘Beacons’ and watered by changes in institutional support, it took time, space, and the continual sunshine of collective creativity to make the project grow. Freedom and confidence to think creatively, as well as the resilience, support and enthusiasm of collective working was essential to creating a sustainable project. Whilst it is hard to plan for the unexpected in any project, new positive outcomes can be planned for by acknowledging the value of the creative process, structuring working practices to allow innovative ideas to emerge once projects have commenced and providing resources as appropriate. It is hoped that by identifying the conditions in which we developed, other institutions, exhibitions and individuals will be inspired to move towards working practices that allow curiosity to flourish. By encouraging flexible, responsive, interdisciplinary working the perceived boundaries of exhibition related research will fall away. If this case study inspires future research, provocation and

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Is it Acceptable to Display Human Remains in a Museum? 53 responses: Age range: 5−52 years old Average age: 27 Male: 21 Uncertain/probably not Female: 29 Unspecified: 3

“...I find myself as an individual horrified at the grotesqueness of it all.” “It’s just a body, we need to stop making biolology scandalous.”

6%

46%

48%

iti

on

a ll

y

, Yes

u

“All in the name of education” “It’s the only way to break the western death taboo.”

nd

nd

iti o

co

n a ll

y

, Yes

“There is a big difference between 1000’s of years to present.”

o nc

Conditions for the Display of Human Remains More bodies wanted Warnings displayed first Not recent dead (100yrs+) Displayed with historical context With consent of dependents Displayed respectfully 0

1

2

3 4 Number of people

5

6

7

FIGURE 8.5  Data

gathered from consultation with the public at Wilderness Festival 2016, Oxfordshire. Image created by Kirsty Harding

fun to emerge with diverse audiences within and without museums, then the Future Animals effect will continue to grow.

Acknowledgements This chapter, Future Animals and Guerilla Archaeology would not have existed without the support of a very extensive team. Thanks, go to Michael Bruford, Ciara Charnley and Paul Evans and the other founding members of Future Animals, Julia Best, Jennifer Jones, Richard Madgwick, Matthew

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Law and Ffion Reynolds; to Henry Droselda, Dylan Adams and Edwina William-​Jones for their creative contributions and to Barbara Brayshay, Ian Dennis, Sara Drysdale, Lorna Dougherty, Susan Greaney, Rhiannon Philp, Jerrod Seifert and Holly Stenae-​Price, for forming the backbone of Guerilla Archaeology for many years. We also indebted to our students and occasional volunteers who are too numerous to mention individually.

References Black, G. (2005). The engaging museum: Developing museums for visitor involvement. London: Routledge. Castell, S., A. Charlton, M. Clemence, N. Pettigrew, S. Pope, A. Quigley, J.N. Shah and T. Silman. (2014). Public attitudes to science 2014. London: IPSOS MORI Social Research Institute. Clark, G. (1954). Excavations at Star Carr: An early mesolithic site at Seamer near Scarborough, Yorkshire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coffield, F., Moseley, D., Hall, E. and Ecclestone, K. (2004). Learning styles and pedagogy in post-​16 learning: A systematic and critical review. London: Learning and Skills Research Centre. Drury, J. (2013). The Festival Awards Market Report 2013. Available at: www.festivalinsights.com/​wpcontent/​ uploads/​UKFA2013_​SHOWGUIDE_​MarketReport.pdf [accessed 1 September 2014]. Festival Awards. (2012). The Festival Awards Market Report 2012. Available at: www.festivalinsights.com/​wp-​ content/​uploads/​2012-​UK-​Festival-​Market-​Report.pdf [accessed 1 September 2014]. —​—​—​. (2015). The Festival Awards Market Report 2015. Available at: www.festivalawards.com/​wp-​content/​ uploads/​2015/​07/​UKFA2014_​MarketReport.pdf [accessed 1 September 2016]. Forward, F. (2015). The Norse manufacture and use of ‘Razor saws’ for composite antler comb decoration and manufacture. Unpublished Undergraduate Dissertation. Cardiff University. Guerilla Archaeology. Welcome! (2016). Available at: https://​guerillaarchaeology.wordpress.com/​ [accessed 1 September 2016]. House of Commons Briefing Paper. (2015). Available at: http://​researchbriefings.files.parliament.uk/​documents/​ SN06705/​SN06705.pdf [accessed 1 September 2016]. IPSOS MORI. (2011). Public attitudes to science. London: IPSOS MORI Social Research Institute. Mason, D., and C. McCarthy. (2006). The feeling of exclusion: Young people’s perceptions of art galleries. Museum Management and Curatorship, 21, pp. 20–​31. Mirza-​Davies, J., and J. Brown. 2016. NEET: Young People Not in Education, Employment or Training. House of Commons Library briefing paper no. 06705. Mulville, J. (2010). Wild things? The prehistory and history of Red Deer on the Hebridean and Northern Isles of Scotland. In: T. O’Connor and N. Sykes, eds., Extinctions and invasions: A social history of British fauna. Oxford: Windgather Press, pp. 43–​50. —​—​—​. (2014). Changing people’s perceptions of the human:animal relationship. Impact Case Study for Cardiff University Unit of Assessment 17 REF 3b. Available at: www.google.com/​url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc= s&source=web&cd=1&ved=2ahUKEwj7vOHxi7neAhUop4sKHRO4DQEQFjAAegQICRAC&url= http%3A%2F%2Fresults.ref.ac.uk%2FDownloadFile%2FImpactCaseStudy%2Fpdf%3FcaseStudyId%3D3405&usg =AOvVaw1KJY88mZNd7g2dxcui7W1U [accessed on 3 November 2018]. —​—​—​. (2015). Dealing with deer: Norse responses to Scottish Isles Cervids. In: J. Barrett, ed., Maritime societies of the Viking and medieval world. The Society for Medieval Archaeology Monographs. Leeds, UK: Maney Publishing, pp. 289–​307. —​—​—​.(2017).Swn Music Museum.In:J.Mulville,J.Gregory and K.Harding,eds., A spotlight on Swn Music Festival 2016. Cardiff University Festivals Research Group Report, pp. 11–​12. Available at: www.cardiff.ac.uk/​_​_​data/​assets/​ pdf_​file/​0004/​672529/​Festivals-​Research-​Group-​Report-​March-​2017.pdf [accessed on 3 November 2018]. Mulville, J., and M. Law. (2013). Environmental archaeology and community engagement: Activities and advice. Cardiff: The Association for Environmental Archaeology and Cardiff Osteoarchaeology Research Group. Available at: www.envarch.net/​publications/​papers/​Environmental%20Archaeology%20and%20Community%20Engagement.pdf [accessed on 3 November 2018].

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Museum Marketing. (2012). How do you get young people excited about museums? Available at: www.museum marketing.co.uk/​how-​do-​you-​get-​young-​people-​excited-​about-​museums/​ [accessed on 1 November 2015]. National Co-​ordination Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE). (2015). What is public engagement? Available at: www.publicengagement.ac.uk/​[accessed 6 June 2019]. Reynolds, F. (2009). Regenerating substances: Quartz as an animistic agent. Time and Mind: The Journal of Archaeology, Consciousness and Culture, 2(2), pp. 153–​166. —​—​—​. (2011). Totemism and food taboos in the Early Neolithic: A feast of roe deer at the Coneybury “Anomaly”, Wiltshire. In: J. Thomas and H. Anderson-​Whymark, eds., Regional perspectives on Neolithic pit deposition: Beyond the mundane. Neolithic Studies Group Seminar Papers, vol. 12. Oxford: Oxbow Books, pp. 171–​186. —​—​—​. (2013). Tracing Neolithic worldviews: Shamanism, Irish passage tomb art and altered states of consciousness. In: C. Adams, D. Luke, A. Waldstein, B. Sessa and D. King, eds., Breaking convention: Essays on psychedelic consciousness. London: Strange Attractor Press, pp. 13–​30. Robinson, R. (2015). Music festivals and the politics of participation. Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series. Farnham: Ashgate. Sharples, N., and I. Dennis. (2016). Combs and comb production in the Western Isles during the Norse period. In: F. Hunter and A. Sheridan, eds., Ancient lives: Object, people and place in early Scotland. Essays for David V Clarke on his 70th birthday. Leiden: Sidestone Press, pp. 331–​358. Tilden, F. (1957). Interpreting our heritage, 3rd edition. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Wilson, A. (2008). Punching our weight: The humanities and social science in public policy making. London: British Academy. Xanthoudaki, M. (1998). Educational provision for young people as independent visitors to art museums and galleries: Issues of learning and training. Museum Management and Curatorship, 17(2), pp. 159–​172.

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9 DEVELOPING AND PROMOTING RESEARCH IN A MUSEUM THIRDSPACE Breaking barriers where people walk Ellen T. Bøe, Hege I. Hollund, Grete Lillehammer, Bente Ruud and Paula U. Sandvik

In the museality of thirdspace Museums are no centres of the universe. This is a statement both true and false whether it is the expert or the none-​expert traveller doing museum practice with collections or public activities. This situation of different approaches and interests between museums and the public is sometimes overwhelming for the museum worker, who is expected to perform both cutting-​edge research and public outreach. Living with this ambiguity, how can we move forward as pioneers pushing the boundaries of research communication? Guided by the criteria of the Norwegian university museums’ collaborative Colonisation project on “outreach as research” 2013–​2015, and its focus on the topic “colonisation”, the overarching research questions for the Museum of Archaeology (AM) evolved gradually to become the following: • • •

What is the main impact of carrying out research communication by active participation in a research project, where the public interact as both research subjects and objects? Would feedback from participants turn the research in new directions? Is such collaboration with the public something that is advantageous to develop and incorporate to a greater degree in museum research and outreach?

Museums are thirdspace environments (Soja, 1996; Lillehammer, 2012a), hybrid spaces of museality made up of a mixture of materiality and immateriality from the past collected as scientific evidence, and then recirculated and staged as cultural artefacts in the present (Lillehammer, 2012b). The public spaces such as exhibitions, showcases and inside and outside activity areas form part of museality creations of the past in the present. Museum environments are not lived places of home or dwelling, but places of passing through for the practitioners. They are non-​places, transitional spaces of leisure and commerce resulting in a profound alteration of awareness, the logic of supermodernity (Augé, 1995). Museums are also relational in practicing their craft; they leak like porous sites of “local invention” (Carter, 2004, pp. 1–​5; Grewcock, 2014, pp. 225–​227). Take the past and present perspective of archaeology, a discipline deeply connected with modes of thought, forms of organization, and social practices that are distinctly modern, but which studies past worlds through an intellectual apparatus that is thoroughly embedded in the present (Thomas, 2004). In

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2009, the AM integrated with the University of Stavanger to take on the status and role of a university museum. As a site for museum critique bringing about new initiatives (King and Marstine, 2006), and with the aim to bridge the gap between the science community and society, has its new status influenced ways of working and changed approaches and methods of research communication to the public? On the international scene, various advancements in museum studies, museum archaeology and public archaeology deal with the involvement of cultural heritage and museums in society (Black, 2005; Marstine, 2006; Holtorf and Högberg, 2007; Knell, Macleod, and Watson, 2007; Swain, 2007; Synnestvedt, 2008; Sørensen and Carman, 2009; Carbonell, 2012; Skeats, McDavid, and Carman, 2012; Grewcock, 2014; Guttormsen and Hedeager, 2015). In the background of contemporary Norwegian museum practices are the impetus of New Museology (Vergo, 1989; Maure, 1988) and the Research Council of Norway (RCN) strategic initiative to develop museology as a discipline, and to strengthen research co-​operation and competence in the university museums (Maurstad and Hauan, 2012). Heritage museum environments entail dimensional complexities as homelands (Lowenthal, 1998), but not one’s home (Augé, 1995). The AM is an open universe where natural and cultural data are continuously being transformed through research activities. In this environment, the University of Stavanger’s slogan to “challenge the well-​known and explore the unknown” is a strong motivation to embolden outreach practice and experiment with co-​ creation of knowledge.

The well-​known –​a long story As one of five university museums with responsibilities under the Cultural Heritage Act in Norway, the AM functions as advisor and competence centre, especially in connection with archaeological heritage planning and environmental violations (cf. http://​am.uis.no/​about-​the-​museum/​cultural-​heritage/​). Its background sprang from the archaeological department of a multidisciplinary museum, Stavanger Museum. A separate interdisciplinary museum, Museum of Archaeology in Stavanger, was established in 1975, but for many years, the mother-​institution held its exhibition and storerooms. The development of public spaces was slow, and a strategy of decentralization in the museum outreach came on the agenda, which saw the creation of new thirdspaces –​Der folk ferdes.1 “Sunday walks to the past” to different municipalities were regular parts of the museum programme for 25 years. Mini-​exhibitions ranged within varied types of local meeting places in people’s living environment: museum, cultural centre, school, town hall, shopping centre and bank. A functional method of co-​operative teamwork evolved with horizontal operating systems and alternating specialised teams composed of different experts in the organisation. From 1989 onwards the museum adopted the slogan ‘The Open Museum’, and developed new public areas, among other things the Museotek, a public centre at the museum which was a combination of exhibition, archive, library and activity areas. In dealing with the merging of interdisciplinary boundaries, the setting up of a new permanent exhibition and the IT-​revolution, the process included challenges and barriers with regard to established museum structures, hierarchies and outreach (Lillehammer, 1999, 2009). The establishment of an internal thirdspace arena lessened the need for decentralisation of outreach projects. Instead, the museums’ outreach work adjusted to the demands of public services to schools, kindergartens and other visitors, mainly within the museum premises.

The unknown –​the humans and colonisation When the Colonisation project emerged on the museum scene, it was established in a top-​down fashion and linked directly with an ongoing research program BEVARES (Biological EnVironmental and Archaeological interdisciplinary RESearch on life-​course, material and materiality in human depositions),

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which represented three different research areas: palaeo-​ecology, conservation science/​bioarchaeology, and archaeology. An interdisciplinary team of five persons was selected from four different departments: pedagogue (1), designer (1), and researchers (3). The designer functioned as the project leader and coordinator. The core group had free rein to work down and up all through the project. The group held a series of meetings brainstorming ideas and solutions on how to communicate knowledge production by going beyond the boundaries of the museum and academic sphere. The group realized that the need for external space was a familiar situation and that they could draw experiences from earlier days when both museum specialists and display cases where taken out of the museum, –​where people walk. In retrospect, it was the long experience in thinking alternatively about dissemination and working in cross-​disciplinary teams that made the team see the light at the end of the tunnel. A platform of potentials and limitations of public outreach was set up, which gave the necessary framework for wide ranging discussions about where to start and end within the project period, as given here: • • •

The plans for a new exhibition and change in the Museotek areas: part 1 –​the humans The Open Museum in 2015: No space available for exhibitions! The Colonisation subject: was it to present the past, the past in the present, or what…?

In order to get the process up and going, the team set its focus on public involvement, and kept the work within the familiar perspective “Where people walk” (cf. note 1), (although with a slight twist, as the aim of the museum experts now became to “colonise the city”). The team followed a set of old and new methodological approaches: • •

Use interdisciplinary teams to develop activities Apply a stepwise approach of experiments and improvisations within the concept “Meet the Researchers”, using three themes: Insight –​Challenge –​Crime scene.

Improvisations –​the experimental process In order to move along freely with developing ideas of thirdspace sceneries, inspiration was sought through a workshop by Jacqui Mulville, reader in bioarchaeology at the University of Cardiff and founder of “Guerilla Archaeology”. This is a group of scholars that works with public engagement and participation far outside the realms of museums and universities (see also Chapter 8). The approach provided an introduction to the background and principles of public engagement, and described opportunities, challenges and experiences in the area. Through her workshop at the museum to help with creating own pathways to new audiences, the project group acknowledged that it could rely on its own creative experience. To provide insights into new research approaches to scientific material, and to try out a wide range of co-​creative involvements with the public, the decision to keep the focus group above the age of 12 years was made clear. To establish a creative mindset and a knowledge platform for experimentation, and to accommodate any reference pegs that acted as intermediaries for approaches to museality scenes, procedures of improvisation became essential. Working together for something meaningful and worthwhile, one of the main objectives was to develop a good dynamic of cooperation within the institution, and to transfer the output of these efforts to other exhibitions and public outreach projects. Importantly, the project leader wanted to test out some processes and methods. Given the most appropriate conditions, creative management is a method that leads people through processes, ensures that those involved are working together, creates ownership and triggers the creativity of everyone involved in the operation (Schei and Sverdrup, 2011). In practice

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this involved, amongst other things, interdisciplinary brainstorming sessions where ideas were written on large paper scrolls covering the walls of the meeting room. These scrolls were later used to present the project to the museum management. At a time of transition and change in the Museotek areas, the lack of exhibition space meant that thinking of alternative ways of interacting with public audiences/​partners, such as working back and forth in smaller groups, became crucial. This was not a novel situation. Building on former ideas, and renaming the Colonisation-​project as “Where people walk”, various outreach concepts were tested and revised, resulting in new ways for the public to “Meet the Researchers”, also including other museum specialists in different settings within and outside of the museum environment. This involved experiments with inviting public groups to participate in museum/​research working processes based on the hypothesis that engagement and participation give deeper insights, empowerment and a feeling of ownership and connection. This in turn may change attitudes and perspectives, such as the view that archaeology is irrelevant to present day society. In order to analyse and explain the new insights and challenges that were planned and organised on macro and micro levels, a closer, more detailed description of observations of the dynamic process in the set-​ups, and feedback and responses to the main activities follows in the section below, as Steps 1–​4 (Figure 9.1): Step 1. Step 2. Step 3. Step 4.

Dialogues  1–​3 Participation Partnership and cooperation Dialogue 4

Developing “Where people walk” –​observations of “Meet the Researchers” Alternating the experts stepwise (Steps 1–​4), the start was the running of a laboratory of initial tests through dialogue and participation, using researchers as mediators in Step 1, and a pedagogue in Step 2. During these activities it was paramount to develop partnerships and take further steps in looking for new clues and strategies. In Step 3, people were invited to become partners in a research project using the researcher as mediator. In-​between the process, a concerted effort was made to develop the idea for a more permanent solution of facilitating public involvement, Step 4.

Step 1. Dialogues 1–​3 In Dialogue 1, a class of high school students talked with a researcher about the concept, “colonisation”, and discussed how to apply and link it to a museum setting. People’s movements through the ages was a challenging subject, but what they most associated the concept with was a modern Western-​biased view of world history, and not with museum mediation. In presenting historic themes, the preferred type of language was the “cool” rather than the academic style. They came up with the idea to involve themselves as partners in writing sessions, which would create a more satirical or humorous approach to history. They would use computer games rather than role-​playing, and referred to the French animation TV series, Il était une fois l’homme,2 which is a brilliant presentation of world history from children’s perspective. The pupils were negative to the focus on historic place combined with too many words and details, whereas they appreciated overviews where the main historic events were presented. In short two students in the audience said: •

“Where’s the fun?” -​“World history in 8 minutes, thank you!”

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COLONIZATION engagement isotopes changes migration participation past pioneer DNA hair present movement humans

CSI:

Resercher conversations with school kids about colonization and other shit. It’s all the same shit!

CRIME SCENE INVESTIGATION

Real ‘crime’ scene investigation: Engaging by participation in excavation work.

Shit matters! No shit?

You become what you eat-it’s all in the hair: Engaging by participating as researcher and research object.

Behind the scenes: What do museum researchers do?

Wow!

Food for thought: Lecture on palaeodietary research with complementary nibbles.

Between heaven and earth. Interdisciplinary dialogue-based guided tour of the city cathedral’s secrets. The museum researchers colonize the city.

RESEARCH STATION

Meet and ask the rearcher: How do we study human remains and what does it tell us about colonization?

FIGURE 9.1 The

expert group experimented with ideas, and improvised a variety of approaches to public involvement in the working process of the project “Where People Walk”

Dialogue 2 consisted of an experimentation with different types of archaeological material, in which a group of pupils from secondary school met “The ancient humans”. The first stop was a display of funerary remains showing the partially decomposed and fragmented human skeleton of a male individual. When told that there were two Iron Age burials in the showcase, one of the pupils asked spontaneously: •

​“Where is the other?”

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When made aware of the regular and irregular distribution of artefacts in the grave inventory, some of the pupils looked around for clues in the exhibition room. One pupil caught sight of the Museotek display next to the showcase heading the theme “The humans”, in which texts informed about name, sex, age, status, position, and work, and asked promptly: •

​“What’s his name? “

Dialogue 3 was an auditorium presentation of “Shit matters” involving the Children’s University. This is events organised every year at Norwegian universities during the Science Week to support culture for learning, tease children’s curiosity, and increase interest in higher education. The intention was to convince the audience that dung and rubbish have far-​reaching research potentials for understanding human life in the past (Sandvik and Petersén, 2010). The researcher explained about the traces of human lives (Sandvik, 2011), sometimes made intentionally, such as a tombstone, sometimes without leaving physical remains of the dead. Observation of a human body is possible at death. If exposed the corpse will disintegrate into the environment as a part of the sediment record in the soil. Shit matters because microscopic remains and all kinds of rubbish, spread intentionally or unintentionally, tell us about humans in all times and ages. The researcher had a hard time convincing the children.

Step 2. Participation A familiar scene from today constituted Crime Scene 1. A modern analogue was applied featuring the remains of a modern children’s birthday party. Using similar methods as in the handling of prehistoric material evidence, the scene of exploration was set up as a crime scene to trigger pupils’ interest as investigators and detectives looking for clues. Some simple guiding questions formed the basis for discussion. Then, for the pupils to follow a find in the museum and to meet researchers, the use of replicas was chosen to create Crime Scene 2, now featuring a woman’s grave from the Viking Age. Compared with Dialogue 1–​2, in this case the artefacts were “new”, so the objects were easily recognizable, and a spearhead left at the breastbone generated a crime scene image. With this item, and taking the exploration further and backward in time, a mindset and a methodical approach was established for the representation of museum collections. Afterwards, the students were introduced to the “real grave” in the Museotek exhibition where the displayed objects were associated with a human skeleton, as in Dialogue 2. However, the question remained: Did the scenes spur understanding about the logics of scientific thinking? Both researchers and pedagogue were highly doubtful. Then a new opportunity arose. Crime scene 3 evolved in the wake of a severe conflict between archaeological heritage management and local interests (Bøe, 2015), within the grounds of a primary school with about 100 pupils. Construction work in the schoolyard caused damages to parts of an Iron Age archaeological site with a farmhouse foundation and four burial mounds. The municipality was fined and had to cover costs of rescue and restoration work. The outcome of the conflict received negative media coverage in the community. The Museum of Archaeology decided to test community archaeology as a method of reconciliation, where the aim was to provide a change in public attitude towards the past for ensuring protection of the ancient monuments in the future. During the restoration work, pupils were invited to participate in the work. The objective was to establish a feeling of social ownership to the ancient monuments. This involved meetings with teachers and representatives of the regional museum and the municipality to convey ways in which they could include excavation work in school curricula, to establish positive personal contacts for participation, and to present the field archaeologists to the pupils at the school. A formal Heritage Application for participation to remove turf from the burial mound, a first grade lesson about the Iron Age and a short briefing by the project manager followed these events.

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FIGURE 9.2  Pupils

doing archaeology in a restoration excavation at the Hellvik elementary school grounds

As the pupils were divided into groups alongside the archaeologists, their eagerness was great, and they worked hard (Figure 9.2). They said: •

​“I played here and did not know that there had been a house.”

For the lead archaeologist, experiencing the effect of close collaboration with both the museum outreach department and the local community, the project also had an impact. She exclaimed: •

​“When we work together, we can achieve so much more!”

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Step 3. Partnership and cooperation The initiative for a research-​based outreach came from the researcher, whose expertise includes various types of analyses of archaeological skeletal remains. TV shows have led to great interest in the analyses of human remains, and topics relating to food, diet and health are frequently part of the current public debate. Motivated by the fact that this could lead to interesting comparative data, we wondered: Would engaging lay people in research be relatively easy? Using chemical analyses of Stavanger skeletons in a recent palaeodietary research study had showed how bone chemistry reflects cultural changes in food through time, which we might understand as the colonisation of people´s diets: The identified changes correspond with different types of historic colonisation events, such as the introduction of new species of animals and plants as well as new ideas, for example the religious upheavals at the end of the Viking Age and the Reformation (Hollund, van der Sluis, and Denham, 2013; van der Sluis et al., 2016). In order to communicate these results to the local public in an engaging way, the idea came up to obtain modern comparative data using the same methodology.3 The research aims of this pilot project were two-​fold: (1) To investigate cultural changes through food habits over time and up to modern times, and testing palaeodietary theories of how diet is reflected in protein chemistry (as seen in hair or bone). (2) To test the impact of such research participation –​on the participants as well as on the researcher and the research project. In making use of the network of the outreach department, a collaboration was established with a teacher at the local high school situated in the city centre, wall-​to-​wall with the medieval cathedral where the analysed skeletons had been excavated. The project was adapted to the teaching plan of one school class of 17-​year-​olds (A level). The pupils prepared samples of their own hair for analysis (Figure 9.3), wrote food diaries, and received the raw data to use for writing a scientific report where

FIGURE 9.3  Research

partners in a palaeodiatory study: Sampling hair in the high school lab., Stavanger

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they themselves analysed and interpreted the data. This involved meeting the researcher, who presented the project to them, a laboratory-​based class for taking and cleaning hair samples before analysis, and a second meeting with the researcher where the pupils asked questions regarding the writing up of their reports. Quotes from feedback forms included the following: • •

“​ To be involved in real research makes education more interesting…Doing real research is a good way of learning.” ​“It was interesting to get our results and see how we compared with the ancient samples.”

The project spurred a “spin-​ off ” outreach project. In collaboration with the Mealscience and Nutrition department at the School of Hotel Management, University of Stavanger, a popular scientific lecture on the palaodietary study was developed. The talk was coupled with the food-​expert’s concept of a “story plate”. The researcher talked the students through food culture history of the last 10,000 years by showing the results of the palaeodietary study, and the audience tried a “taster” that represented both a historical period and a chemical signal used to identify consumption of different foods in the past. The idea was that sensory experience allows the audience to remember the talk, and to understand the concepts behind the research better, while creating a more informal atmosphere where the audience would interact more with the researcher and each other due to the common experience of food tasters (Figure 9.4). Comments from participants included:

FIGURE 9.4  A “story

plate” event: Historic food tasting tests at the Research Days in Stavanger

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• •

“​ What would the chemical signal of insects be?” ​“Did you know that the Stavanger Museum has a collection of 19th century art made from human hair?”

Step 4. Dialogue 4 The idea of a more permanent installation in the orbit of museality activities was launched to combine events inside or outside the museum environment. The aim was to “colonise” spaces where people walk in order to meet and interact with new groups of potential museum seekers. The objective was two-​ sided: (1) to establish a mobile research station (the in/​outbox) as an activity room suitable for “Meet the researchers” sessions, and (2) to arrange researcher-​guided city-​walks to archaeological find spots (cf. Figure 9.1). The concept of the in/​outbox is a kind of mobile visitor-​centre, for people to have dialogues with researchers and specialists on relevant topics wherever this “space-​shuttle” is docked. The tools to achieve these illuminations include, in addition to personal storytelling of researchers, information material created by communication specialists such as a graphic designer and photographer as well as performance art by local artists. The initial tests of the in/​outbox have been carried out inside the museum. The effect of Step 4 has materialised in the first part of the new exhibition, “The Humans”, where the public has met researchers working with human skeletal remains (Figure 9.5), and in a plan to use the box outside, in the museum garden. The intention is to create a space for dialogue, both between different museum experts, and between museum experts and visitors.

Reflective analyses of the outreach As the public involvements were improvised set-​ups organised and arranged by the project team, they analysed and evaluated the input and output of methods in the experimental process, such as the similarity,

FIGURE 9.5 The

first “Meet the researcher” event in the museum in/​out box: Sean Dexter Denham explains the mysteries of ancient human bones

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variation and differences in activity and participation in the dialogues and the crime and research scenes, and in the creation of the in/​outbox. The conventional museum exhibition scenario was challenged and brought out of the comfort zone of academic research dissemination. Step 1 represents oral presentations of established knowledge and understanding using regular methods and techniques of communication, alternating experts and social groups of the audience with spatial settings inside a museality space: classroom/​auditorium, and exhibition. The researchers learned the importance of language and humour, and that though scientific research is a serious-​minded business, it is perhaps performed too seriously sometimes. Some students showed a keen interest, and even themselves opted for cooperative work, introducing the idea of creative partnership using computer games. Others were curiously seeking answers to puzzles that were challenging to interpret and understand, such as whether “Shit matters!” as a case of microscopic materiality rather than just a catchphrase. Developing insights in scientific processes for the public, and establishing systematic approaches to the material of human remains became an important issue for the researchers. The evaluation of Step 1 showed that the possibility or difficulty in research communication with the public about colonisation and ancient remains seemed to rely also on virtual effects, compared to the materiality of the “real thing”, such as skeletal remains and microscopic residues in soil deposits. The Step 1 experiences led to Step 2, which represents the integration of pupils in investigations using the analogue of crime scenes. As participants in detection, the involvement differed from the first Dialogues. Using the pedagogic method of learning-​by-​doing, interpretation of material objects was changed by inviting museum researchers from outside the project core team to participate in the outreach. The pupils gained insight on how to approach exhibited materials. The researchers acknowledged however that doing scientific deduction and inference to understand the historic background, context and circumstance of the material evidence were difficult for the pupils in an enclosed museum setting. It became obvious what was required –​the establishment of a cognitive link between exhibited museum objects and the origin of archaeological finds in the heritage landscape. This idea of linking museum objects directly with excavation activity drove the audience out of the museum to the extended scenery of “the real thing” in the outdoor environment. The pupils were able to excavate and work out possible interpretations of scientific materials for themselves. They conquered new intellectual spheres of influence and achieved a level of “common language” with the researcher. The fact that they engaged with the “real thing” was of great importance; they actually did what archaeologists do, and how they do it. Several of the youngest pupils made their own “toy excavation” on the gravel path afterwards, building a sand mound mounted by turf on top, and then they “cleaned” up. The pupils’ concern as reflected in the toy was a visible proof that they had gained knowledge and ownership to a nearby scenery, an unfamiliar heritage landscape until the excavation. Drawing on Steps 1 and 2, Steps 3 and 4 evolved simultaneously based on the dialogues and crime scene experiences. The impact of Step 3 was testified by the written anonymous feedback from the pupils, where everyone recommended similar approaches in future teaching projects. From the researcher’s point of view, it was clear that the co-​development of research and public outreach was beneficial. Adding an active dialogue with different groups, from 17-​year-​old pupils to adult food experts, helped to gather data, build networks and think about the project in new ways, which triggered new ideas for possible future research and experiments. The idea of an in/​outbox on the move where people walk, and of doing comparative analyses on ancient and modern populations, helped fulfil the main aim of the Colonisation project: to explore the boundaries and synergy effects between museum outreach and research. The pilot research project benefited the museum outreach work by establishing a completely new concept for communication. Prehistory, research results and methodology could be taught in a manner otherwise not available in schools, while including teenagers, an age group often difficult to reach. The pilot provided

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experience and inspiration, and the concept can be further developed and re-​used in different contexts with other target groups. In the improvisation process, and led by the straightforward questions and remarks that various audiences addressed to researchers, experimentations with materiality and authenticity of the scientific evidence in time and space proceeded from the known to the unknown. The process included moving scenes from the past to the present as well as backwards from the present to the past, both inside and outside the museum environment. The team worked down-​up and top-​down, involving colleagues, but also working to influence the museum management. The meeting room was plastered with papers from ceiling to floor, and the group members could at any point grab a pen to address sentences, keywords or concepts during discussions. The group leader later used these scrolls of “mind maps” to explain and convince the museum management of the value of the work and the new approaches suggested. Still, the costs were deemed too high, particularly concerning time spending of the museum specialists and researchers. This required a modification of the ambitions, but it was found that much could be achieved despite limited time and with little effort from various museum staff. This included short public dialogues during work hours in different settings, inside and outside of the museum, aiming to dissolve the communication thresholds between expert and public. The relationships deepened radically outside the museum as social barriers dissolved and broke down the conventional patterns of doing science and research communication. In all these improvisations, a change appeared in the content of activity as well as the role of the public from observer to investigator to research object and subject. In interpreting the scientific material, both public and researchers became partners in trust rather than in crime. Therefore, public institutional preconditions, stumbling blocks and even failures were essential to how the project expanded to include spin-​offs, and how it changed in co-​creative involvement, impacting on: exhibition space; collegial fear, attitudes, will, and conviction in the academy; and the resources of time and money. An obstacle in engaging the researchers in public communication projects is the fear of appearing to peers and colleagues as unscientific. In that respect, due to experience and practice within The Open Museum, the attitude amongst the museum researchers towards popular dissemination was positive, this being seen as a necessary and important part of the museum’s mission as a publicly funded research institute. However, resources for outreach were limited, and museum structures still constituted stumbling blocks. Outreach is often seen as something separate and additional to research, and not as part of it. Many of the museum staff are project-​funded, and therefore under pressure to work within budget and meet deadlines. Thus, to engage museum specialists outside the core group or in non-​permanent positions was a challenge, as was funding the in/​outbox. A rather unexpected barrier was the standard university stance of not undertaking public dissemination before peer-​reviewed publication. This academic attitude towards the process of research is different from the valuable experiences in The Open Museum before its integration with the university sphere. As part of ongoing research projects and excavations, and despite the university stance, The Open Museum has now strengthened the effort to keep public outreach integrated in the research process for testing theories, hypotheses and methods, and for exploring material and materiality within a scientific framework.

Outcome of the project –​changes in the Museum The project “Where people walk” set out to explore new ways of research communication with the public. Did it succeed? On a general level, the most evident impacts are that the advancements of new knowledge, research questions and new perspectives lead to change on several levels of operation, such as institutional changes, changes in attitudes of researchers and museum specialists and changes in attitudes of non-​museum people, as detailed here.

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Museum arrangement • • •

Public participation during excavations occur regularly on rescue excavations during the year More emphasis on the fact that researchers participate in communication outside of the regular fora of scientific dissemination –​with some more resources (time and money) earmarked for this New way of inter-​departmental working with smaller inter-​disciplinary brainstorming groups and think-​tanks, and spin-​offs in connection with new exhibition and communication projects

Museum researcher and expert • •

Realisation that engagement with others can be very fruitful Braver in the approach to public outreach work (out of the box). New way of thinking of outreach and research in combination.

Non-​museum  people • •

Creation of links to the past and feelings of ownership Deeper insights into the value and meaning of caring for and doing research on cultural heritage

The museality of thirdspace opens possibilities to explode boundaries and create movements in-​between the two cultures of art and science, beyond these dual positions of knowledge and understanding of the past. Its physical and mental character in combining space with social and historical perspectives on micro and macro levels is exactly what kicked off new approaches to make the public experience a research process in its own space. In thinking of exhibitions and the process of producing them, what is the meaning of the concept “research”? Take the research pilot project such as changes of palaeo diet and food culture through time. The impact of research participation was a thirdspace co-​creation based, crucially, on a socio-​ethical relationship and structure of creativity and respect; that is, it impacted the researcher (attitudes, awareness, connections), the people participating (insights, attitudes, enthusiasm), and the research project (new lines of research, spin-​off projects). Considering the snowball effect set in motion, where are the cutting edges in the working process? When are the activities played out in a museality scenery, and when is the scenery for real –​at the excavation or the high school? Somewhere along Steps 1–​4 of “Where people walk” something happened so gradually that the outcome took its members by surprise. It led to the revitalisation of earlier approaches where the public are in a non-​academic setting. In applying the idea of researchers meeting the public, this was tried within both known and unknown frameworks. The project managed to explode the set ways in which the museum had worked earlier in order to innovate new ones. In the process of achieving its ends, the outsiders/​others came to the rescue, with crucial pushes and helping hands. When they reflected on how to communicate the concept of “colonisation”, they applied their own expert ideas of doing museum outreach participation. When participating in the hair analysis project they were not mere objects of study, literally contributing with a piece of themselves, but active subjects in the process, challenging the researcher with questions regarding both the purpose of the project and the boundaries and limitations of the methodology. At the elementary school, linking participation in excavation with the concretisation of educative objectives in the curricula was an unqualified success and managed adeptly; it was not merely a random happening but took a diverse spectrum of subjects, such as digitisation, arts and crafts, and social studies, beyond their usual boundaries. The school decided to use time and other resources on activities designed

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for hands-​on involvement with heritage research in its nearby environment to increase knowledge, understanding, and interest in archaeology and history. On the higher level of development of a participation model, this creation of new spaces for dialogue and working methods effected a general change in attitude to what had formerly had a negative connotation in the local community due to a conflict between the municipality and cultural heritage authorities. At the university museum, the project generated an initiative with the successful establishment of a new PhD position focusing on museology and research communication. It created new research ideas of dialogue, partnership and cooperation as arenas for future research and development of the many perspectives of museum archaeology and public archaeology in society.

Conclusion On a general level, considering the overall mission and the impacts of a thirdspace project such as “Where people walk” on contemporary museums, the gain from the work in the outside arena is that cultivation of new models of research participation is possible on the inside, in the future; that is, both bringing the world beyond the museum into it, and aspects within the museum to wider audiences outside it. This achievement is a re-​vision of cross-​disciplinary application, handling and re-​use of models, resources and products in museums as well as on cultural heritage sites. It is the engagement in learning team-​ building relationships of co-​creativity across borders. It is the breaking of social barriers in knowledge and understanding about how to choose and involve experts and the public in audience interactions. Working with public outreach as social arena is to challenge differences in the opinion and attitude towards expert knowledge and experience on museum mediation in the academy and beyond. Lest one takes it for granted that people want to access the past, a university status may not trigger a museum revolution (Knell, Macleod, and Watson, 2007). Nonetheless, in the context of an ongoing museum flux of continuous change, and experiencing the value of interdisciplinary working, a composition of a successful team shapes new ways of doing science in the thirdspace of a museality universe. In seeing museum practice from a different perspective, the wider recognition and understanding of potentials and limitations of this space are accomplished even more. People’s attitudes towards the past change, and team members themselves change in their way of thinking and doing museum mediation. In finding new ways of linking research processes with public outreach, the overall impact is the invention and “innovation” of working processes in making the public a research partner in outreach activity; that is, the process of jointly building partnership and acknowledgement of people’s voices in museums. A whole set of new questions relating to the concept of “colonisation” comes up, not so much concerning whether museums colonise the past of others, but more as where to draw social and ethical lines of equality in practicing partnerships between museum travellers in the present, be these interactions with the public and/​or interactions between the experts themselves. During the painstaking and meticulous process of observation, the acknowledgement of the full quality, extent and value of various historical backgrounds and experiences stands out, in particular in challenging the hardcore university practice of doing science. Both researchers and top management of institutions must have the will to engage in projects where research crosses into the area of public engagement –​they must believe in the project, and have an interest in contributing to more than museum politics. The institutional supports (time, money, incentives) are important, as are the interest and attitude of each individual researcher. The basic practice of cross-​disciplinary teamwork revitalises methods of cooperation and confronts decentralised approaches to museum mediation and public research communication in general. By setting up multidisciplinary teams where each member’s expertise is rooted in different departments of the institution, good

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interdisciplinary working methods are accomplished, which generate further interdisciplinary cooperation between various museum departments and beyond. Doing museum outreach by engagement is something that will boost academic productivity and creativity in society. Intensified outward contact surface increases the chances of encounters that spark new ideas, collaborations and projects, and of doing truly innovative research. The contrast between university and museum attitudes towards public dissemination may be an expression of the fact that doing research in museums is something different to traditional academia, and contains an extra dimension precisely due to the dialogues in thirdspace. Being at a museum, with collections, outreach experts and exhibitions near at hand, researchers have an extraordinary opportunity to boost their work by doing outreach and research in tandem with the public, allowing the participants to be creative in a different way. Learning even more to appreciate these liberating qualities at the cutting edge of research, and to advance stages in the development of public outreach, it is paramount that museums work harder in the future to rely on these particular open spaces of mutual developments as an enjoyable universe for all.

Notes 1 In English: Where people walk. 2 In English: It was once a man. 3 Such a comparison allows active contributions from people of the region by sampling body tissue (hair) of people living in the city/​region today. Stable isotope analysis for palaeodietary reconstruction provides an ideal opportunity to invite a wider audience to be both research objects and research partners. Obtaining modern isotope chemistry data allows testing of palaeodietary theory (you become what you eat), since their diet is known.

References Augé, M. (1995). Non-​places: Introduction to anthropology of supermodernity. London: Verso. Black, G. (2005). The engaging museum: Developing museums for visitor involvement. London: Routledge. Bøe, E.T. (2015). Spennende dager på Hellvik. Frá haug ok heiðni, 2, pp. 11–​14. Carbonell, B.M. ed. (2012). Museums studies: An anthology of contexts. 2nd edn. Oxford: Wiley-​Blackwell. Carter, P. (2004). Material thinking. Melbourne: Melbourne University Press. Grewcock, D. (2014). Doing museology differently. London: Routledge. Guttormsen, T.S., and Hedeager, L. eds. (2015). Public archaeology. London: Routledge and Francis and Taylor. Hollund, H.I., van der Sluis, L., and Denham, S.D. (2013). Bevarte skjelett som arkiv for levd liv: Nye metodar for undersøking av beinmateriale frå Domkyrkja. Stavangeren, 3, pp. 95–​100. Holtorf, C., and Högberg, A. (2007). Talking people: From community to popular archaeologies. Lund Archaeological Review, 2005–​2006, pp. 79–​88. King, L., and Marstine, J. (2006). The university museum and gallery: A site for institutional critique and a focus of the curriculum. In: J. Marstine, ed., New museum theory and practice. Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 266–​291. Knell, S.J., Macleod, S., and Watson, S. eds. (2007). Museum revolutions: How museums change and are changed. London: Routledge. Lillehammer, G. (1999). Nature as resource: Curiosity killed the cat. In: L. Selsing and G. Lillehammer, eds., Museumslandskap. Stavanger: AmS-​Rapport, 12A, pp. 23–​36. Lillehammer, G. (2009). Historieformidling og historiebevissthet: Den utfordrende fortellingen om den fjerne fortiden. In: M. Nitter and E.S. Pedersen, eds., Tverrfaglige Perspektiver. Stavanger: AmS-​Varia, 49, pp. 7–​20. Lillehammer, G. (2012a). Travels into thirdspace: The archaeological heritage of children’s spaces. A view from beyond. Childhood in the Past, 5, pp. 7–​19. Lillehammer, G. (2012b). “Ta den ring og la den vandre”. Fra fast kulturminne i landskapet til løst kulturminne i et magasin. In: A. Maurstad, and M. Hauan, eds., Museologi på Norsk –​ Universitetsmuseenes Gjøren. Trondheim: Akademika Forlag, pp. 169–​191.

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Lowenthal, G. (1998). The heritage crusade and the spoils of history. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marstine, J. ed. (2013). New museum theory and practice. Oxford: Blackwell. Maure, M. (1988). Ny museologi –​En internasjonal bevegelse organiserer seg. In: J.A. Gjestrum and M. Maure, eds., Økomuseumboka –​ Identitet, Økologi, Deltakelse. Tromsø: Norsk ICOM, pp. 130–​134. Maurstad, A., and Hauan, M. eds. (2012). Museologi på Norsk –​ Universitetsmuseenes Gjøren. Trondheim: Akademika Forlag. Sandvik, P.U. (2011). Levde liv –​Undersøkingar av skjelettmateriale frå grunnen under Stavanger Domkyrkje. Frà haug ok heiđni, 2, pp. 8–​10. Sandvik, P.U., and Petersén, A.H. (2010). Anthropogenic sediments as cultural heritage: An archive of objects, fossils or molecules? Poster 16th EAA, The Hague, the Netherlands. Schei,V., and Sverdrup, T.E. (2011). Når kreative team mangler kreativitet. Magma, 6, pp. 67–​72. Skeates, R., McDavid, C., and Carman, J. eds. (2012). The Oxford handbook of public archaeology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Soja, E.W. (1996). Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and other real-​and-​imagined places. Malden: Blackwell. Sørensen, M.L.S., and Carman, J. eds. (2009). Heritage studies: Methods and approaches. London: Routledge. Swain, H. (2007). An introduction to museum archaeology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Synnestvedt, A. (2008). Fornlämningsplatsen: Kärleksaffär eller Trist Historia. GOTARC 51, Series B. Gothenburg: Department of Archaeology, Gothenburg University. Thomas, J. (2004). Archaeology’s place in modernity. Modernism/​Modernity, 11(1), pp. 17–​24. Van der Sluis, L.G., Hollund, H.I., Kars, H., Sandvik Paula, U., and Denham, S.D. (2016). A palaeodietary investigation of a multi-​period churchyard in Stavanger, Norway, using stable isotope analysis (C, N, H, S) on bone collagen. Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports, 9, pp. 120–​133. Vergo, P. ed. (1989). The new museology. London: Reaktion Books.

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10 VISITOR DIALOGUE AND PARTICIPATION AS KNOWLEDGE GENERATING PRACTICES IN EXHIBITION WORK What can museum experts learn from it? Guro Jørgensen

Introduction This is a presentation of the case of “The Laboratory”, an initial phase of the production process of the exhibition “Continuous Change –​From the Ice Age to the Future. 12,000 Years in Norway”, which was the outcome of “Research in Collaboration” at The NTNU University Museum in Trondheim. Internally we referred to this exhibition work as “The Colonisation Project”. The aim of “The Laboratory” was to facilitate dialogic visitor experiments and gain feedback that could influence the framing and design of the final exhibition. Cognitive intentions were also at play, as interacting with museum visitors can serve as a litmus test on the public resonance of research issues in society (Bucchi, 2004, 2008; Wynne, 2007). Awareness of other knowledge regimes, such as social judgements of value, trust, and usefulness intertwined with research issues, can increase the researcher’s –​or museum’s –​chances of mobilising engagement, interest and support for what they do (Wynne, 1995; Bucchi, 2008). This chapter is therefore not about the participating museum visitors’ experiences, but reflections on the knowledge generating processes that took place inside the museum institution when working out “The Laboratory”. What was in it for us? “The Laboratory” lasted for six months in 2014. During this time, four different workshops were arranged, where eight different visitor groups met with the museum staff –​both researchers, museum teachers and designers –​for dialogic activities.1 One of these workshops will be outlined here. A “Laboratory Room” also came into being, offering a taste of the exhibition to come and regular weekend activities for families. “The Laboratory” was rounded up with a Family Sunday-​arrangement in October 2014. All of the experimental activities related to the core issue of “The Colonisation Project”, namely, processes of colonisation in nature and culture in a long-​term perspective. The different events of “The Laboratory” clearly served educational purposes, but as museum/​visitor dialogues, they were also supposed to give the museum staff something in return. However, approaching the processes of dialogic science communication as research challenged the established ways of doing dissemination and exhibition work at the museum and revealed organisational obstacles. Some of these can be related to the broader context of science in society and the way most of us tend to look upon research and mediated research (mass media, museum exhibitions, schools) as practices performed by different groups of people belonging to different knowledge spheres, and where elitist and “pure” science is always positioned on

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top in an imagined hierarchy of knowledge (e.g., Hilgartner, 1990; Wynne, 2007; Bucchi, 2008; Plesner, 2009). The theoretical backdrop in this chapter is therefore inspired from what Bucchi (2008) refers to as the sociological turn of science communication studies, which seeks to overcome such tendencies to draw demarcation lines, and rather view science communication –​both as museum practices and as a research object –​as relational matters of science in society and society in science. I use the term science communication to refer to public communication of scientific knowledge or research, by scientists or others, through processes that do not seek to directly inform policy (Davies et al., 2009; Davies, 2015). Such practices take place in various arenas in connection to informal education or leisure activities, such as for instance museums. Before I go on, a note on the organisation of “The Colonisation Project” in Trondheim is needed, because it will explain some missing parts of the present story. The project lasted for over three years (2012–​2015) and was conducted in three phases: first, project planning, then “The Laboratory” phase and last, the work with the final exhibition (which opened in November 2015). During this time, different staff at the museum were involved, and there were three different project leaders. I participated in the first staff workshops in 2012, where the concept, “colonisation”, and ideas of interdisciplinary dissemination alternatives were discussed. After that, I did not take part in the working out of the local project plan, but was hired as a coordinator for “The Laboratory” phase in March 2014, as part of my duties in connection with my ongoing PhD in museology. When this project phase finished in October, I went back to my other tasks, while another project manager and a project group consisting of some old and some new members worked on the production of the final exhibition. That is the reason why I leave the agents, discussions, priorities and compromises of the exhibition production phase in a black box in this narrative. Nevertheless, I will comment on traces of “The Laboratory” work in the finished exhibition.2 The methods I have used in the process of describing “The Laboratory” phase have been participant observation and conversations during this work process, and after. Reference documents used are field diary notes, minutes of meetings of the project group, and workshop reports.3

A backdrop: the sociological turn of science communication studies The Norwegian University Museums have a specific obligation to disseminate scientific knowledge.4 The strong relation with the universities ascribes these museums with an indisputable identity and authority as significant research institutions, cultural institutions and educational institutions. They belong to a long-​standing tradition of practicing one-​way communication of reliable knowledge of nature and culture through time, resting on a diffusionist conception of public communication of science. This conception and the practicing of it, stem from a disposition to take the exceptionality of science for granted, which in turn relates to deeply intransigent, tacit structures of power embedded within cultures of science and technology and their policy circles (Wynne, 2007, p. 100). The principal idea of diffusionist or deficit models of science communication is that science and society are two different spheres, and that it is important and useful for everyone belonging to the society outside academia to acquire some kind of scientific information to cover a knowledge deficit (Hilgartner, 1990; Wynne, 2007; Bucchi, 2008; Plesner, 2009).5 According to several science communication researchers, there is a widespread tendency to think about people involved in science communication practices, namely researchers, journalists/​museum workers, and audiences/​museum visitors, as making up three distinct groups, governed by fundamentally different rationales (Wynne, 2007; Bucchi, 2008; Plesner, 2009, pp. 6–​7). The sociological turn of science communication studies challenges this established way of thinking about “science” and “society”

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in terms of difference and demarcation, and emphasises relational perspectives and investigations of the social conditions that make different forms of science communication come into being (Bucchi, 2008, p. 70). Rather than focusing on how research results are simplified, made sensational and perhaps even misinterpreted through processes of popularisation for target groups outside academic spheres, science communication practices are investigated as something that unfolds in social networks where different realities are constantly negotiated and translated into new contexts (e.g., Callon, 1999; Latour, 2005; Plesner, 2009; Macdonald, 2002). There is a possibility that we fail to release the full potential of exhibition work as knowledge generating practice, if we do not question this fixed image of a linear, top-​ down communication process involving people with non-​comparable sets of knowledge. In line with Bucchi (2008) and Plesner (2009), I will therefore emphasise the need to acknowledge the complexity of positions and practices in the mass mediation of research –​including those relating to museums. Rather than an add-​on in the end of the process of knowledge production, science communication is a key dynamics at the core of current processes working towards a redefining of the meaning of the interface between science and the public within the knowledge society.6 The university systems in Western societies face a current demand for more relevant and inclusive science communication. This is seen in documents central to the knowledge society, such as the Norwegian act relating to universities and college universities, white papers from the Ministry of Education and Research, and NTNU’s strategy documents. A Norwegian white paper on museums from 1996 portrayed museums as dialogue institutions and social space (Kulturdepartementet, 1996, p. 7), and the current white paper on university museums from the Ministry of Education and Research (2006), states that: Museums shall invite visitors to participate in dialogues, create curiosity, welcome astonishment and wonder, and be open for debates. They shall encourage visitors to ask questions rather than provide them with readymade answers. (Kunnskapsdepartementet, 2006, p. 15. My translation) This passage represents a move away from lecturing about objective truths, and a turn towards dialogue and public participation as keywords for science communication. Several authors describe a redefining of the science-​society relationship as a transgression of ideals, from reliable knowledge to socially robust knowledge, which is contextual, entangled and performed in social networks and should be openly discussed and contradicted outside academic spheres (e.g., Latour, 1987, 2005; Gibbons et al., 1994; Callon, 1999; Gibbons, 1999; Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons, 2001, 2003; Nowotny, 2003). In pedagogic theory, the dialogue approach to education emphasises the role of the learners as active participants and subjects in dialogues that leads to learning, and honours central principles such as mutual respect for different opinions and open communication (Dysthe et al., 2012). As such, dialogue as a pedagogic implement exceeds the notion of a conversation. According to educational researcher Olga Dysthe, all forms of education can function in a dialogic or monologic way, as it will either open up or close the space and potential for astonishment, contradictions and improved thinking skills for the involved parties (ibid., p. 6). In line with this, Massimiano Bucchi, who works on public communication of science, defines public participation in science as –​unlike deficit-​configurations –​multidirectional, open-​ended and potentially subject to conflict (Bucchi, 2008, p. 70). However, negotiating the ideals of dialogues and participation in museums and other social arenas can be challenging and confusing, and difficult questions arise along the way. Although the history of science communication is often told in a narrative of movement from deficit to dialogue models of communication, several researchers discuss how this story does not always map

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the actual terrain it is supposed to describe (e.g., Bucchi, 2004, 2008; Wilsdon, Wynne and Stilgoe, 2005; Wynne, 2007; Plesner, 2009; Davies, 2015). The case of “The Laboratory” at the NTNU University Museum can serve as one example of such an indefinite terrain, as it revealed disparities in how different experts within the institution think about practices like “research” and “science communication”, and of “experts” and “practitioners”. Organisational challenges entered into the encounter between ambiguous visions of dialogic and participative museum communication leading to new knowledge, and the established ways of organising instructional exhibitions about nature and prehistoric life.

The case of “The Laboratory” “The Colonising Project” at NTNU –​project plan and project organisation Since 2010, The NTNU University Museum in Trondheim has experimented with several ways to achieve dialogue with visitors by trying out alternatives to established one-​way-​communication practices (Jørgensen, 2011). Pedagogic inspiration stems from constructivist theories of learning, and dialogic and problem-​based learning methods (e.g., Savery and Duffy, 1996; Hein, 2005; Simon, 2010; Dysthe et al., 2012; Falk and Dierking, 2013). “The Laboratory” in “The Colonisation Project”, adds to this list. As opposed to earlier visitor-​dialogue projects, “The Laboratory” was not aiming only to engage the visitors, but also proposed a focus on the potential of institutional benefits and challenges affiliated with researcher engagement in museum communication practice. The local project plan (NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet, 2013) was a result of inputs and discussions from several workshops and meetings with various groups of employees, the first ones arranged in the autumn of 2012. Archaeologists, biologists, PhD candidates, exhibition architect, designers and museum teachers took part. However, the initial discussions never properly addressed the main call in the national project plan of “Research in Collaboration” (Bjerregaard, 2013), about investigating the museum work as an internal knowledge generating practice. Instead, the consensus of the group turned on different interpretations of “colonisation”, and how this could best be displayed in an interdisciplinary biology-​ archaeology narrative. The archaeologists pointed to the political implications of the concept within their research discipline, as linked to phenomena such as abuse of power, unwanted immigration or migration of peoples, and displacement of cultural traditions. The biologists, on the other hand, used the same word as an objective description of the immigration and establishment of a new population of organisms, a mechanism that maintains changes in communities and ecosystems. In the local project plan, this contradiction was focused on as having potential for sparking interest-​provoking public discussions: We believe that by showing how culture and nature have changed through a long-​term perspective, the visitors are given opportunities to reflect on what we perceive as perhaps static and unchangeable states of being in our surroundings today. (NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet, 2013, p. 1. My translation) Although it did not arise from a strong consensus among the museum staff, the local project plan maintained an explicit reference to the national project plan of “Research in Collaboration”, emphasising “The Laboratory” phase as the core of the project, aiming at developing more knowledge about museum dissemination through, it was proposed, focus group interviews. The interviews were supposed to encourage reflection on what the public, the museum teachers and the museum researchers could learn from each other, and thus provide us with data to derive new knowledge from (ibid., p. 4). However, when the project work started it became obvious that the proposal of extensive data collecting was not

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accompanied with budget figures that would be commensurate with the time and resources required for preparations, recruitment of informants, facilitating the focus groups, transcription, coding and analysing. In fact, the initial project phase was planned as part-​time work for everyone involved, including myself, as the project coordinator. The lack of enthusiasm for this kind of research among the appointed project group also lent weight to the decision to scale down the ambition of collecting a lot of data, a situation I will address later on. The museum’s Section for Exhibitions and Events was appointed by the museum management to lead the project. Because of some unfortunate circumstances and shortage of staff, three different project managers led the three phases of the project. In retrospect, the project would probably have succeeded better at creating coherent aims and a feeling of ownership to the project among all the involved parties, if a stable project management had been in charge from project plan through dialogue experiments to final exhibition. The project group of “The Laboratory” brought together employees with different positions and expertise from three departments: public outreach, natural history and archaeology.7 According to established practice of dissemination and exhibition-making, the project team members from the researcher departments (archaeologists and biologists) were appointed by their respective Head of Department, approving the researchers’ use of working hours on public outreach. Researchers in permanent positions at the NTNU University Museum are obliged through their contract of employment to use 47 per cent of their working hours on research, 8 per cent on student education, 25 per cent on collection management, 5 per cent on administration work and 15 per cent on public dissemination. Here, public dissemination includes all kinds of public outreach activities, both conducted by the researcher herself (including newspaper articles, radio interviews, science blogging, and briefings for the local community about an archaeological excavation), as well as exhibition work, or other dissemination activities happening at the museum in collaboration with the outreach section. Thus, exhibition work and visitor encounters constitute a rather small part of the everyday tasks for most of the museum’s employees. The staff at the outreach section, on the other hand, has no specified role in research activities. They are employed –​and tend to identify themselves –​as practitioners. The clarification of the project group took one month. Meanwhile, colleagues made suggestions on exhibition issues, and the project got its hands on a recent media celebrity –​a stuffed and mounted wolf killed by authority of the Norwegian Environment Agency, the Agdenes Wolf.8 This wolf was accused of killing both a dog and grazing sheep as it went astray for one year and moved 500 km across the country, in 2012–​2013, and was an object of local dispute between farmers and environmentalists along its way. A room with a central location in the museum’s exhibition area was placed at our disposal, and the wolf became its first inhabitant. Even though it had a rather casual entry to “The Laboratory”, it became an important fellow actor. As soon as it was placed, we had to deal with its empty surroundings, and it inspired us to arrange the visitor workshop on nature management, which will be outlined later on. The first meeting with “The Laboratory” project group was held in late April. I introduced the aims of this initial project phase, inspired by Nina Simon’s book, “The Participatory Museum” (2010), and emphasised that this phase was experimental, and that the work on the final exhibition was not the present agenda. However, the proposal of exploring our museum work as research did not appeal to the group, at least not in a way that caused discussions or negotiations. Maybe some did not prioritise the reading of the two central project plans, and maybe my abilities to communicate across disciplinary interests were inadequate. Nevertheless, in my concluding passage, I argue that this reluctance is also strongly connected to the widespread culture of viewing research and science communication as substantially different practices. The focus of the project group turned on practical tasks by making a list of research subjects related to colonisation, for potential visitor events. Two of the researchers, one archaeologist and one biologist, committed to develop their suggestions into actual visitor workshops.

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From late June to early November 2014, four different workshops with eight different visitor groups were planned and arranged. In addition, “The Laboratory Room” was decorated with informative “news talk” posters on relevant subjects as the project phase progressed. The resources used on preparing the room were seen as potentially recyclable in the project’s next phase; the traces of this work in the final exhibition will be addressed later on. An interactive board game called “Struggle for Survival”, with fantasy creatures colonising different landscapes in a fantasy ecosystem, was launched as a hands-​on/​minds-​ on activity for children, and one Family Sunday event was arranged. I was involved in all of these events, while other members of the project group contributed on a scale from “close to nothing” to “a great deal”.

“The Laboratory Room”: a room but no laboratory “The Laboratory” was never supposed to be an exhibition; it was supposed to be an experimental phase for museum/​visitor dialogues. The fact that we had both a room and the Agdenes Wolf at our disposal, made unintended things happen (Figure 10.1). As it came into being, a space for several options and practices opened up. It all started with the feeling that we needed to support our stuffed wolf with an aesthetic and material context. One of the expert biologists wrote some general information about wolves for a poster on the wall and a leaflet, and the designer created a collage of newspaper articles about this sensational wolf in particular. The wolf had company, from a mink and a boar, a table and chairs, crayons and drawing sheets for children, and some magazines and laminated newspaper articles on colonisation-​ related issues. The empty walls offered a possibility to engage all the members of the project group to prepare short texts with a tabloid title and illustrations about topics of their own choice. In addition, I wrote some concise poster-​texts to relate all the different research topics to the common theme about changes in nature and culture in a long-​term perspective.

FIGURE 10.1 The

Laboratory Room, with the Agdenes wolf in front and the board game “Survival of the fittest” at the back of the picture. Photo: Guro Jørgensen

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A considerable effort was made to hook “colonisation” on to current social references. The title of the room, “Who shall not pass?” referred to a popular Norwegian TV show. The title was presented on a poster with a collage of species that are seen as either native or alien in Norway today. To state the overarching multidisciplinary topic as shown in all the various subjects in the posters on the walls, an introductory text was visible from the front door: We are all immigrants. At least we descend from immigrants. Fifteen thousand years ago, Norway was covered in ice. No humans, animals or plants lived here. (Exhibition text by J. Rosvold, 2014. My translation) In this way, the core issue of “The Colonisation Project” could be associated to Norwegian media debates: invasion of snails in gardens; forced migration; climate change; biodiversity; animal protection; ancient mysteries; technological inventions; livestock farming; and nature management. As the workshops were carried out, posters with information and pictures of our interactions with the children were put up. As time passed, “The Laboratory Room” became a meta-​communicative space, where the museum informed about ongoing museum work and a coming exhibition through this medium that, after a while, turned into a peculiar kind of exhibition itself. Even though it was not planned to be an exhibition, it was contextualising objects and information in a specific way, using the language of an exhibition. We did not aspire to fulfil the visitors’ expectations of experiencing a laboratory zone in a museum. There were no buttons to push, no experiments to take part in or interactive stations to explore on a daily basis. To avoid disappointed visitors, “The Laboratory” remained an internal reference, and the room was presented as a test room for the coming exhibition. Our intentions were expressed on a red sign: “We want you to be critical about what you see as normal in nature and culture”. After launching the interactive board game “Struggle for Survival”, the room became a livelier place, working at its best with a facilitator present on weekends. Her job was to arrange creative workshops where children made specific figures to use in the board game, to assist the players and to be available for questions and conversations. She tried to engage the visitors in the scientific issues at stake, contrasting the fantasy ecosystem with global environmental challenges. She encountered interest in the research issues, and positive feedback on the board game as an introduction to global challenges. However, no contesting voices occurred. Hypothetically, the visitors’ behaviour in the room could serve as an indication of the general interest for the coming exhibition, and the facilitator observed them and wrote an evaluation report.9 The overall impression was that while the children were busy creating fantasy figures to play with, the adults spent their time reading the posters on the wall. In the absence of other interactive offers at the museum at the time, “The Laboratory Room” and the board game workshop existed until March 2015.

“The Laboratory” and its visitor workshops The visitor workshops of “The Laboratory” were aimed at museum education for the museum’s largest target group, young people in different school levels. Through dialogue rather than deficit-​ communication, we wanted to increase the space for our invited participants to articulate their views in their own ways, as litmus tests of the public resonance of the exhibition theme. Our ambitions with these dialogues were twofold. First, the participants were expected to support us with knowledge on how we could make an interesting exhibition out of a rather complex cross-​disciplinary research topic. Second, we hoped both involved researchers and museum communicators might find some new insights and arguments on how and why museum work can have social impact –​or make a difference –​by being more sensitive to the feedback from the people we invite to interact with us, than we normally are.

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Apart from the principal focus on education of young people, issues and activities were differently organised. In the two first workshops, the pertinence of raising issues of “colonisation” among children at the age of 10–​12 was tested, giving insights in how this issue could be communicated in ways that engaged reflections on human-​nature relations and changes in a long-​term perspective. One was about biodiversity and nature management, planned and facilitated together with one of the museum’s expert biologists.10 The other was about prehistoric iron production and the importance of iron and other metals in society today.11 One of the museum’s expert archaeologists participated in this event, part of the time. In the two last workshops, the aim was deliberative engagement, as we wanted the participants’ reasoned arguments, or advice (Davies, 2015). As such, the visitors were perceived of as the experts, and we believed their insights and creativity could support us with useful approaches concerning hands-​on/​ minds-​on activities for the museum’s youngest visitors. I was responsible for planning and facilitating these events, together with one of the museum curators. In the first of these workshops I invited student teachers to a discussion of how “colonisation” could fit in with learning objectives for different subjects in school curricula, with special attention to the enquiry-​based learning programme described as “Budding researchers”12 in the natural science curricula. This workshop functioned as a point of departure for the development of the school programme for the coming exhibition.13 The other workshop was arranged in connection to the interactive board game we developed. For this purpose, I invited a preschool in the museum’s neighbourhood to test the rules and functionality.14 The children’s feedback was implemented, and the board game was launched at the Family Sunday event in October 2014. I will continue with an outlining of the knowledge generating aspects of the workshop on nature management, as this was the event where the most varied collaboration of different museum staff and expertise took place. Afterwards I will comment on traces of “The Laboratory” in the final exhibition, before I end my narrative with some concluding remarks about organisational challenges to the process of acknowledging new knowledge from visitor participation experiments at the NTNU University Museum.

Visitor workshop on nature management as knowledge generating practice The workshop, “Who shall not pass?”, was an enquiry-​based learning project on Norwegian nature management and biodiversity.15 We wanted to problematise the notion that even though nature has always been exposed to change, nature management authorities need static categories and criteria to work from. In short, the year 1800 is used as a historical time limit to categorise native versus non-​native species in Norway. Assessments of the ecological impact associated with species that are non-​native to Norway and an overview of alien species found in Norway, is presented in the “Black List” produced by the Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre (Gederaas et al., 2012). They also produce the “Red List” which classifies species into categories based on an assessment of the risk that a native species might go extinct (Henriksen and Hilmo, 2015). These two documents served as a point of departure for this workshop.16 The workshop lasted for two hours and was arranged two times. The participants were two groups of 18 children between the ages of 10 and 12, attending the museum’s Summer School. To support them with some basic knowledge of Norwegian nature management, the expert biologist in the project held a short introductory lecture (15 minutes). Then the children were divided into smaller groups, each of which chose a folder of resource material about wolf, mink, musk ox, roe deer or boar (Figure 10.2). These animals match the criteria for alien or vulnerable species (although nature management authorities may control them differently), or they are actors in controversial media debates –​like the Agdenes Wolf. Apart from facts about the animals and their introduction to Norwegian nature, the resource material

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FIGURE 10.2  Selfie

with the black listed boar. Photo: Guro Jørgensen

also contained printouts from official Internet sites, newspaper articles and tourist advertisements. We wanted to encourage the children to discuss positions held by stakeholders in society, such as townspeople, environmentalists, the tourist business and governmental nature management, and then agree on a common point of view for the group. As a hands-​on activity, each of the groups made a notice board with pictures and short texts on the animal’s history in Norway, stakeholders’ opinions, and the group’s conclusion about whether or not the animal should be considered as belonging in Norwegian nature. At the end of the workshop, we held plenary presentations, discussions and predicted the fortune of each animal. The event was planned and facilitated by one of the expert biologists in the project group, two museum teachers (one biologist, one archaeologist) and myself. As we were four museum staff available for conversations and questioning, the conditions for museum/​visitor dialogues to arise was thought to be sufficient. In our preparatory meetings, we focused on the need to find animals that challenged the criteria in the red and black lists, as this might add some heat to the discussions and open them up for different opinions. During the workshop, the staff and the children entered into conversations, but no surprisingly new insights or reconditioning questions were raised. The expert biologist was surprised that the children already possessed considerable knowledge on the subject, but the museum/​visitor conversations taking place did not inspire him to ask new research questions. Nevertheless, he admitted that the experience was a reality check on the current interest of this research theme among the target group.17 The atmosphere during the workshop was positive and humorous, and our participants seemed to enjoy the hands-​on/​minds-​on work. This was interpreted as a pointer to the applicability of the issue of alien vs. non-​alien species in the final exhibition, as it seemed easy to mobilise public engagement based on the controversies in related media debates.

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So then, what kind of learning came out of this experiment? On the practical side, this was a chance to try out dialogic museum education and communication, involving not only visitors and museum teachers, but also researchers in biology and museology. We definitely gained new knowledge about planning and facilitating this kind of science communication event. As earlier experiences from similar activities have shown, “The Laboratory” required more staff and work hours in both the planning process and the implementation of the workshops, than other comparable dissemination methods, such as guided tours or popular science talks, which are usually prepared by a single member of the staff. Besides, all the different workshops were tests of ways to make a rather complex cross-​disciplinary research topic relevant, by connecting it to current media debates or social life experiences. If we succeeded in facilitating communication of the knowledge in ways that engaged the visitors, we considered it as a positive collective feedback to the applicability of the narrative framing chosen for the scientific content. In this way, the workshops proved to be successful. However, as the project as a whole did not have a solid organisational foundation, and members shifted from phase to phase, some of the experiences gained through “The Laboratory” probably disintegrated during the long process towards opening the final exhibition. On the cognitive side, the laboratory work was about learning to think about science-​society relationships. It was the museum teachers’ opinion that participating researchers give an extra dimension to the museum/​ visitor interaction, because the popular image of “the scientist” is associated with a special aura of expertise, credibility and thrilling discoveries. To meet the scientist might be perceived of as a “hearts-​in” experience, which encourages people to be curious about scientific matters not only because it is generally considered as important, but because it matters to them personally. The interaction might be a “hearts-​in” experience for the researchers involved in dialogues with the visitors as well, as they gain insight into the public resonance of their research interests. To be involved with visitors on a more personal level, as a “hearts-​in” experience, demands a sensitivity towards the acknowledgement of different kinds of knowledge. If that happens, the conversation may deserve to be called a museum/​visitor dialogue, or visitor participation in science, as it can open a space for contradictions and new thinking (Bucchi, 2008; Dysthe et al., 2012). In theory, the different workshops were all means to achieve an ideal of socially robust knowledge that can be discussed and disputed in the public sphere (Gibbons et al., 1994; Gibbons, 1999; Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons, 2001). However, as argued by Wynne (2007), there is a substantial difference between participating in science for voluntary reasons, and being invited into a facilitated dissemination project. There is a great chance that the potential for oppositional feedback from our workshop participants crumbled precisely because of the thorough planning and facilitation of the workshops. We, the museum staff, set the frames and organised the freedom of choice, and perhaps restrained the participant’s options of articulating their views in their own ways. We invited the children to participate in discussions of social issues involving biologic and archaeologic knowledge, but not to participate directly in biologic or archaeologic science production (Collins and Evans, 2002, 2003;Wynne, 2007). Still, there are other fields of knowledge where these kinds of practices are salient objects of research, like science communication studies, science of education, and museology or museum studies. For my own part, “The Laboratory” did affect my understanding by adding reflections on the narrative of dialogic science communication in the university museum as a process where different translations of the idea of museum communication were negotiated (e.g., Macdonald, 2002). Before returning to this bumpy road in my concluding passage, I will continue with a comment on the visible traces of the initial experimental work phase in the “The Colonising Project’s” final exhibition.

Experimental footmarks: “The Laboratory” and the final exhibition The exhibition “Continuous Change –​From the Ice Age to the Future. 12,000 Years in Norway”, opened in November 2015 (Figure 10.3). The museum’s webpage presented it like this:

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FIGURE 10.3  Final

exhibition: “Continuous Change –​From the Ice Age to the Future. 12,000 Years in Norway”. Photo: Guro Jørgensen

We present insights into 12,000 years of development, while keeping in mind the present day and future predictions. We display artefacts from the very first human beings in Norway, following the last ice age, and animals that have inhabited our country through different time periods. The exhibition has its own section for budding scientists where children can explore research methods and are encouraged to question how we know what we know.18 On entering, my first impression was that this was a textbook-​exhibition, arranging chapters in a chronological order. A timeline placing important milestones in human history, and a parallel line of climate changes, lead me into the room. The exhibition was designed as climate zone scenarios, presenting landscape types, animals, plants and human-​nature relationships at different times in prehistory. The texts were easy to read, but much longer than the texts used in the posters of “The Laboratory Room”. The narrative technique of leading the visitors’ minds into the world of research by hooking on to current media debates was not present in the main exhibition room. However, in the hallway outside the entrance, some of the poster texts were reused in a new design. The aim of the project plan, of problematising and provoking and engaging reflections on changes in our surroundings today, was perhaps lost to the average visitor who met with a readymade account on climate, nature and human settlements through time. There was not much left to wonder about. The amount of research facts presented and the lack of museum staff present to talk to, did not open a space for astonishment or a museum/​visitor dialogue. Among critical archaeologists, the exhibition might also have been perceived of as a rendezvous with the theoretical trends in archaeology of the 1970s and 1980s, inspired from a functionalist concept of

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FIGURE 10.4  In

the laboratory zone in the final exhibition, you can use dendrochronological method to find the age of old wood samples. Photo: Guro Jørgensen

culture and technology as people’s extra-​somatic means of adaptation to their natural surroundings (e.g., Binford, 1962). Nevertheless, half of the main exhibition area was a laboratory zone, developed in connection with the exhibition’s school programme for different subjects and levels (Figure 10.4). The museum teachers facilitated the laboratory activities, which started with storytelling. Sitting down by an artificial fireplace, the children were invited to wonder about changes in human lives, comparing the present with the past. In the laboratory zone, one could investigate and solve problems, using research methods known to biologists and archaeologists. One wall showed a soil profile from an archaeological excavation, with stratigraphic layers from modern times at the top, and a Stone Age settlement at the bottom. Different layers contained empty holes, where budding researchers could place different archaeological findings, if they figured out the logic. One could also do a dendrochronological research on pieces of wood, DNA-​ barcoding of different species and a survey of changing landscapes from a two-​metre long soil sample from a bog. To give “The Laboratory” work phase the credit for the idea of making this hands-​on/​ minds-​on laboratory zone in the exhibition, will not be fair to the museum teachers, who have waited for an opportunity –​and resources ‒ to do a project like this. Still, in this part of the exhibition, the spirit of “The Laboratory” found its equivalent in the attempt to ground scientific knowledge in current social references, through face-​to-​face interaction, and represented a break from dissemination through instructional texts and objects in case displays. Alas, the laboratory zone did not offer much for the average adult visitor, or families on weekends, as it needed a facilitator to be present to release its potential for museum/​visitor dialogues to happen. There were many crossovers between “The Laboratory” and the final exhibition concerning the research issues presented, but to describe all of these as footmarks of the initial project phase is not

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entirely correct. “The Colonising Project” went on for three years, involving many employees. From the beginning, there was a strong consensus about the research knowledge most suitable for a parallel narrative of biology and archaeology in the final exhibition. Controversies came to a clearer light in discussions of science communication models –​or rather the absence of discussions on this matter. “The Laboratory” process aimed at increasing the involved parties’ understanding of a science-​society relationship contextualising our science communication practices, and not as something that had to do only with education of “the others”. However, it was hard to convert this ideal into museum practice in “The Laboratory” phase of the project, and even harder to trace it in the material output of the exhibition. In my view, a main organising obstacle in the project was connected to the shift of expert knowledge, positions and working routines, which is implicit in the efforts of doing museum work differently from what we are used to. I will address this in my concluding remarks.

Acknowledging new knowledge from a visitor participation experiment Simply put, but almost true, the researchers’ part in exhibition planning at the NTNU University Museum has been about writing a text on an archaeological or biological subject they know well, and suggesting some museum objects to go with it. In addition, researchers will only meet with museum visitors when they hold a popular speech at arrangements like Family Sundays at the museum. This is neither wrong nor old fashioned, but it is probably not the best ways to obtain a knowledge generating process for both parties. “The Laboratory”, however, demanded another type of engagement from the participating staff, as they were expected to play a part in problem based learning activities and themselves be involved in actual dialogues with the participants. This is normally the museum teachers’ job. The museum teachers and the other workers at the outreach department, on the other hand, are not supposed to do research as part of their job. In line with Plesner’s observation of a social stigmatisation of researchers and science journalists (2009), this can be interpreted as a tendency to perceive research in archaeology and biology at the NTNU University Museum as related to a different rationale than the practices of mediating the research content or having a discussion about scientific issues with non-​experts. These ideas are not only something we think about, more or less consciously; they are constantly acted out in the museum networks ‒ in the everyday practices and in the organisational structures of the institution. Both the national project plan and the local project plan emphasised the “Research in Collaboration” project as a dissemination research project (Bjerregaard, 2013; NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet, 2013).Yet, despite distributions of project plans and research goals on e-​mails and in meetings, the idea of doing research on the exhibition work itself was not successfully communicated and did not seem to hit enthusiastic notes among different museum experts. Phrases in these documents like “dissemination as knowledge generating practices”, “in research, exhibitions can be perceived as para-​sites”, “documentation of and reflections on our dissemination practices can give knowledge on the multidisciplinarity of our museum institution”, did perhaps not have deep resonance with the biologists and archaeologist in the project group. The researchers were appointed because they were experts on the subject matter ‒ colonisation in nature or culture through space and time ‒ and not primarily, because they had special interest in exploring museum communication as research. Although the resonance was stronger among the museum teachers, research and scientific publishing is not a part of their job description. While the different experts undoubtedly possess valuable knowledge and skills in so many ways, an interest in how working with knowledge communication also might bring new personal insights or a surplus of knowledge for the whole project group, only grew rather hesitantly. According to one of the biologists who participated in all the different stages of this project, he was never sure of the concept, as to whom it was supposed to be relevant for. He felt that, “this was someone else’s research, not mine”.19

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As an object for museum studies, “The Laboratory” led to reflections about theories and concepts suitable for doing research on science communication at the museum. It also led to a problematising of which methods one can use to do such research and collect feedback from different actors. Overall, the problems faced in this process show a need to be more specific about the agenda in science communication projects involving different experts (e.g., scientists, mediators, designers and visitors). The concept of science communication contains both deficit-​dissemination practices that aim to inform “the scientific illiterate” and interactive dialogic dissemination practises where the public can engage with science in more self-​determined ways (Bucchi, 2008). Therefore, an important lesson learnt is that the different experts involved in museum work need to agree on the concepts used and the aims of specific communication processes. It is also important to plan the science communication research as part of the project from the beginning as a practice that both takes time and needs research expertise, in line with research in archaeology and biology, or other university museum research disciplines. This chapter is a call to involved parties in science communication in museums –​regardless of their job descriptions –​to be reflexive about the complexity of their practices and curious about the implications of the sociological turn of science communication research. This turn lays emphasis on the need to perceive science communication as a fundamental element of the production of scientific knowledge, rather than an add-​on in the end of the process of knowledge production (Bucchi, 2004, 2008). The introduction to this chapter reads as a question, “What’s in it for us?” In retrospect, working with “The Laboratory” revealed weaknesses in the imagining of a homogenous “we” among the museum staff. The attempt to challenge the established idea of research and dissemination as two fundamentally different practices, by doing research on dissemination, collided with the established practices of either doing research or doing exhibition work. As mentioned by several authors (e.g., Wilsdon, Wynne and Stilgoe, 2005; Bucchi, 2008), the change of keywords in science communication, from “deficit” to “dialogue” and “visitor participation”, does not necessarily reflect an actual change in academic and political habits-​of-​thoughts and practices ‒ or as new ways of doing things at the museum. If the NTNU University Museum in Trondheim wants to see its vision of becoming a social space for public discussions of science and society come true, I believe a rethinking of the way exhibition work is usually organised –​ and why –​is a proper place to continue the change.

Acknowledgements I wish to thank all the members in the project group of “The Laboratory”, and other colleagues who kindly helped and gave advice along the way in this initial phase of “The Colonisation Project” at NTNU University Museum. You are all experts whom I have enjoyed working with, and I sincerely hope that none of you read this chapter as a critique of your participation. The stumble blocks I have tried to identify here are organisational. Special thanks go to Peter Bjerregaard, Brita Brenna, Anja Johansen, Insa Müller, Jørgen Rosvold and Morten Sylvester who have kindly commented on earlier drafts of this manuscript. All figures were photographed by the author.

Notes 1 The concept of “workshop” is here defined as a period of discussion and practical work on a particular subject by a group of people. 2 The complex collaboration processes going on in the making of an exhibition at NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet are described by Steffensen (2012, pp. 65‒83) and Rokne (2012, pp. 85‒103) in Maurstad A. and Hauan, M.A. (2012). Museologi på norsk ‒ universitetsmuseenes gjøren. Trondheim: Akademisk forlag.

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3 Apart from my personal field diary notes, these documents are digitally archived as internal institutional documents in connection to “The Colonising Project” at the NTNU University Museum. 4 Traditionally, the Norwegian University Museums manage collections in relation to the research disciplines of archaeology, cultural history, ethnology, geology, paleo geology, natural history and biology. Despite a broad range of collections, the overall research focus at the NTNU University Museum today is within archaeology and biology. Long-​term exhibitions relate to these disciplines, while short-​term exhibitions and travelling exhibitions are more varied. 5 According to M. Bucchi (2008), cornerstones of the conception of diffusionist science communication are first, that science is hard to understand for the general public, but that their deficits, ignorance or hostility to science can be counteracted by appropriate injections of science communication. Second, that science therefore needs mediation to be transferred from the scientists to the general public. The professionals singled out to bridge the gap between experts and lay people and make science democratically available for all are, e.g., science journalists or museum staff. Third, that scientific facts are transferable without significant alterations from the scientific sphere to the popular sphere, if the mediators translate it correctly. This links to the authorisation of scientists to proclaim themselves extraneous to the processes of science communication and free to criticize errors, such as, for instance, sensationalist framing. Fourth, that a deficit model of science communication is a linear process, where the scientific source, context and the popular target context can be sharply separated, with only the former influencing the latter (Bucchi, 2008, pp. 58–​59). 6 According to Ursula Plesner,“the knowledge society” can be described as a field of discursivity, where discourses are constituted through constant articulatory practices. Hegemonic struggles between Humboldtian ideals of pure research and Mode 2 ideals of research (e.g., Nowotny, Scott and Gibbons, 2003) as practices in mutual interplay with society, take place within the knowledge society. These ideals acquire their position in relation to one another and are never fully fixed (Plesner, 2009, p. 233). 7 The four departments at NTNU University Museum are Section for Exhibitions and Events; Department of Archaeology and Cultural History; Department of Natural History, and the National Laboratory of Age Determination. 8 The wolf is red listed as a threatened species in Norway, but is often considered as a problematic intruder in local communities dependant on livestock farming. Official permission to hunt individuals that causes trouble can be approved and the media debates nourish the tension between stakeholders such as environmentalists and local sheep farmers. This was also the case for the Agdenes wolf. Norwegian media followed it day after day, for months, and 300 licensed hunters were chasing it. When it was finally killed, at the border between two municipalities, there was a local dispute over its dead body, as both parties wanted it stuffed and displayed at the municipality building. Instead, it was sent to the University Museum in Trondheim, which is the delegated authority to take care of the game in such cases in mid-​Norway. The taxidermist immediately mounted it, and the museum was obliged to display it, as representatives from both local communities had expressed displeasure over the current situation and were eager to reencounter “their” wolf. 9 See Skavhaug, R.S., 2015: Samlerapport –​Kampen om tilværelsen. (The document is digitally archived as an internal institutional document in connection to “The Colonising Project” at the NTNU University Museum.) 10 See Jørgensen, 2014: Rapport –​Hvem skal ut? En workshop om dyr på rødlista og svartlista. NTNU Vitenskapsmuseets sommerskole, Sommerlarm 2014. (The document is digitally archived as an internal institutional document in connection to “The Colonising Project” at the NTNU University Museum, along with photos and videos from the workshops.) 11 See Jørgensen, 2014: Rapport –​Hva skulle vi gjort uten jern? Workshop med deltakere på NTNU Vitenskapsmuseets sommerskole 2014. (The document is digitally archived as an internal institutional document in connection to “The Colonising Project” at the NTNU University Museum, along with photos, videos and soundtracks, and a summary soundtrack transcript from the workshops.) 12 In Norwegian, “Forskerspiren”. This programme includes a systematic approach to the natural sciences and nature studies throughout primary and lower secondary education. Pupils are inspired to observe nature, ask questions, develop and test hypotheses, make assessments and form arguments about their results and finally, to disseminate their work to others. These skills fit in well with the university museums` practices of both research and research communication. See for example the website: www.naturfag.no/​tema/​ vis.html?tid=1994599.

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13 See Jørgensen, 2014: Rapport –​Workshop med lærerstudenter om hvordan temaet kolonisering av natur og kultur kan gå inn i læreplantilpassede undervisningsopplegg i grunnskolen. (The document is digitally archived as an internal institutional document in connection to “The Colonising Project” at the NTNU University Museum, along with a soundtrack from the plenum discussion and a summary soundtrack transcript.) 14 See Jørgensen, 2014: Rapport –​Kampen for tilværelsen? Et spill om balansen i naturen. Workshop med skolestartere fra Midtbyen Barnehage. (The document is digitally archived as an internal institutional document in connection to “The Colonising Project” at the NTNU University Museum.) 15 The Norwegian title was “Hvem skal ut?” The title referred to a popular TV show, “Nytt på nytt” (NRK). 16 The Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre’s webpage: www.biodiversity.no/​ 17 J. Rosvold, personal communication, 31 May 2016. 18 The exhibition’s webpage is no longer available. 19 J. Rosvold, personal communication, 31 May 2016.

References Binford, L.R. (1962). Archaeology as anthropology. American Antiquity, 28, pp. 217–​225. Bjerregaard, P. (2013). Forskning i fellesskap –​Delprosjekt formidling som kunnskapsgenererende virksomhet. Project Description. Submitted to the Research Council of Norway. Bucchi, M. (2004). Science in society: An introduction to social studies of science. London: Routledge. Bucchi, M. (2008). Of deficits, deviation and dialogues: Theories of public communication of science. In: M. Bucchi and B. Trench, eds., Handbook of public communication of science and technology. London: Routledge, pp. 57–​76. Callon, M. (1999). The role of lay people in the production and dissemination of scientific knowledge. Science, Technology & Society, 4, pp. 81–​94. Collins, H.M., and Evans, R. (2002). The third wave of science studies: Studies of expertise and experience. Social Studies of Science, 32(2), pp. 235–​295. Collins, H.M., and Evans, R. (2003). King Canute meets the Beach Boys: Responses to the Third Wave. Social Studies of Science, 33(3), pp. 435–​452. Davies, S.R. (2015). Deficit, deliberation and delight: STS and science communication. In: S.R. Davies, M. Horst and E. Stengler, eds., Studying science communication. Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen/​Bristol: University of West England, pp. 7–​11. Davies, S.R., McCallie, E., Simonsson, E., Lehr, J.L., and Duensing, S. (2009). Discussing dialogue: Perspectives of the value of science dialogue events that do not inform policy. Public Understanding of Science, 18(3), pp. 338–​353. Dysthe, O., Bernhard, N., and Esbjørn, L. (2012). Dialogbasert undervisning: Kunstmuseet som læringsrom. Bergen: Fagbokforlaget. Falk, J.H., and Dierking, L.D. (2013). The museum experience revisited. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Gederaas, L., Moen,T.L., Skjelseth, S., and Larsen, L.K., eds. (2012). Alien species in Norway –​With the Norwegian Black List 2012. Trondheim: Norwegian Biodiversity Information Centre. Gibbons, M. (1999). Science’s new social contract with society. Nature, 402, pp. 81–​84. Gibbons, M., Limoges, C., Nowotny, H., Schwartzman, S., Scott P., and Trow, M. (1994). The new production of knowledge: The dynamics of science and research in contemporary societies. Los Angeles: Sage. Hein, G.E. (2005). The role of museums in society: Education and social action. Curator: The Museum Journal, 48(4), pp. 357–​363. Henriksen S., and Hilmo O., eds. (2015). Norsk rødliste for arter 2015. Trondheim: Artsdatabanken. Hilgartner, S. (1990). The dominant view of popularization: Conceptual problems, political uses. Social Studies of Science, 20(3), pp. 519–​539. Jørgensen, G. (2011). Den vanskelige dialogen: Om universitetsmuseenes praktiske utfordringer i møtet med web 2.0-​samfunnet. Nordisk Museologi, 1/​2011, pp. 81−97. Kulturdepartementet. (1996). NOU 1996:7. Museum. Mangfald, minne, møtestad. Oslo: Statens forvaltningstjeneste. Kunnskapsdepartementet. (2006). NOU 2006:8: Kunnskap for fellesskapet. Universitetsmuseenes utfordringer. Oslo: Departementenes servicesenter. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-​network-​theory. New York: Oxford University Press. Macdonald, S. (2002). Behind the scenes at the science museum. Oxford: Berg. Nowotny, H. (2003). Dilemma of expertise: Democratising expertise and socially robust knowledge. Science and Public Policy, 30(3), pp. 151–​156. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., and Gibbons, M. (2001). Re-​thinking science: Knowledge and the public in an age of uncertainty. Cambridge: Polity Press. Nowotny, H., Scott, P., and Gibbons, M. (2003). Introduction: “Mode 2” revisited: The new production of knowledge. Minerva, 41(3), pp. 179–​194. NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet. (2013). Formidling som kunnskapsgenererende virksomhet –​“Koloniseringsprosjektet”. Project Description, NTNU Vitenskapsmuseet, December 2013. Internal document. Trondheim: NTNU University Museum. Plesner, U. (2009). Disassembling the mass mediation of research –​A study of the construction of texts, relations and positions in the communication of social science. PhD dissertation, University of Roskilde, Denmark. Savery, J.R., and Duffy, T.M. (1996). Problem based learning: An instructional model and its constructivist framework. In: B.G. Wilson, ed., Constructivist learning environments. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Educational Technology Publications, pp. 135‒148. Simon, N. (2010). The participatory museum. Santa Cruz: Museum 2.0. Wilsdon, J., Wynne, B., and Stilgoe, J. (2005). The public value of science. Or how to ensure that science really matters. London: Demos. Wynne, B. (1995). Public understanding of science. In: S. Jasanoff, G.E. Markle, J.C. Peterson and T. Pinch, eds., Handbook of science and technology studies. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, pp. 361–​389. Wynne, B. (2007). Public participation in science and technology: Performing and obscuring a political–​conceptual category mistake. East Asian Science,Technology and Society: An International Journal, 1, pp. 99–​110.

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11 HOW THE EXHIBITION BECAME CO-​PRODUCED Attunement and participatory ontologies for museums Helen Graham

In 2008 an exhibition titled “In Our Own Words” was held in the Museum of Croydon. The exhibition was made up through different wooden boxes with glass fronts. Some held large images. Some were used as lightboxes illuminating images printed on vinyls. Others held objects and large labels with images. In the middle of the exhibition hung a glitterball, casting specks of light around the gallery. The exhibition’s main panel, a vinyl on a lightbox, read: “Two of Croydon’s large Day Centres have recently closed. Here are the stories of life at the Day Centres and what we think about the changes”. This was the only text in the exhibition that was not in the words of someone with a learning disability. The “In Our Own Words” exhibition emerged from a two-​year project, funded by the UK’s Heritage Lottery Fund, called the “History of Day Centres’ project”. Over the previous two years I had worked collaboratively with the people with learning disabilities who used to attend the day centres, the staff that worked there as well as senior staff responsible for implementing the changes. We collected oral histories, photographs and documents. We ultimately developed an archive, now in Croydon’s Local Studies archive. We also produced the In Our Own Words exhibition (May–​September 2008, see Figure 11.1). Looking back –​more than ten years now since I first turned up with an audio recorder in one of the then new Resource Bases –​I want to use this chapter to draw out the implications of how the project became an exhibition and why traditional forms of interpretation and explanation seemed inappropriate. The term “exhibit” contains within its genealogies the idea of manifesting and of showing clearly. Although histories of curatorial and museum practices have complicated any simple idea of transparent communication between authorial intention and audience reception (Rogoff, 2003; Falk and Dierking, 2013), the practice of curating often includes the process of developing of headlines, “big ideas” as Beverley Serrell puts it, and interpretive hierarchies (Serrell, 2015; Tilden, 1977 [1957]). Understanding of the purpose of exhibitions as, in effect, accessible and clear communication was especially the case for me. Before I came to work on the “History of Day Centres project” my background was working in the kind of pioneering UK local authority museums which have worked hard to create accessible exhibitions through interpretive planning with explanations communicated through straightforward and highly-​ edited language (Devine and Williams, 2011). The duty of the curator, I had come to think, was to stage some form of (however temporary) stability in meaning to enable the direct communication of key ideas.

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FIGURE 11.1 The

introductory panel for the In Our Own Words: Stories of Croydon’s Day Centres exhibition

So this was my problem. We were working towards a form –​the exhibition –​which appeared to demand clarity. Yet we were developing the exhibition in a time and space of powerful ontological instability. Everyone I worked with was in the midst of a complex process of making sense of the past of the Day Centres in the new present of the Resource Bases. In this, tone, texture, intonation, emphasis, facial expression and gesture often seemed more significant than words spoken. To address these curatorial dilemmas, in this article I want to practice a hybrid of reflective practice and retrospective theorizing of the ontologies of both the project and the exhibition. Ontology describes theories of what the world is; of being, of what there is in the world. In recent years the idea of relational ontology has been used to argue that it is the relationships themselves –​the interactions between things and people –​which produce and constantly reproduce the world. While the term has been used in a variety of contexts not least theology (Boersma, 2011), I take the step of thinking of a ‘relational ontology’ as a ‘participatory ontology’ through drawing on ‘participatory worldview’ advocated by action researcher Peter Reason (1998). In thinking of the History of Day Centres project as a ‘participatory ontology’ I seek to recognize it as produced through a series of evolving relationships. Relationships between people, between ideas and everyday life, between things and exhibit cases and between those that made the exhibition and those who came and visited it. Participatory ontology allows us to move beyond simply describing a relational world to, in terms both of research and exhibition development, enacting and cultivating a more participatory ontology in our making and becoming.

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The worlds of the day centres One of the most memorable things about my first weeks –​maybe even months –​in the Resources Bases was how little I understood. As I’ve written elsewhere: Our worlds could not mesh. They spoke of the day centres, but I understood almost nothing: names, connections, memories… this happened, then that, and someone had left and they had seen them recently somewhere I did not know and someone else had said something about something. Nothing could come into meaning for me. Equally, my words –​Project, Archive, Exhibition –​could not come into meaning for them. Slowly, over months and months, one conversation and cup of tea at a time, I was shown that we needed to begin in the middle of where it matters and build a new project both like and unlike the one in the funding bid. I needed to slowly, carefully and gratefully become part of their world first. They needed to engage me and involve me before I could ‘involve them’ in any way the funder would recognise. The “someones” I did not know became specific people; people’s names started to have faces. And places that were only ‘somewhere’ for me at first became places I knew too. (Graham, 2017) I did come to see there were a number of ways of potentially understanding the day centres. There was the policy that led to their closure, the 2001 white paper Valuing People: A New Strategy for Learning Disability for the 21st Century. The Valuing People vision was for “new opportunities for children and adults with learning difficulties and their families to live full and independent lives as part of their local communities” (DH, 2001, p. 2; followed by Valuing People Now (DH, 2009)). Valuing People anticipated a reduction in the number of people using large day centres by 2004 and the development of new services, of which the Resource Bases in Croydon were one possible model (DH, 2001, pp. 50, 78). As a result before I arrived the two of the large Day Centres had been closed and people moved depending on how much support they need either to the last existing large Day Centre to support people with more complex needs or to the Resource Bases which aimed to enable people to go out and use local facilities and to potentially find paid or voluntary work. Another way of was through the history of the day centres, as community-​based replacements for institutions. In 1967 Croydon’s Waylands Craftwork, Social and Training Centre was opened by Enoch Powell, who had in 1961 made a speech criticising the large institutional hospitals as “isolated, majestic, imperious, brooded over by the gigantic watertower and chimney combined” (quoted in Welshman, 2006b, p. 66). With their more community-​focus, Waylands and the other Day Centres were focused on “training” and had lots of different types of work including factory packing work (for airline), paper rounds, running a Garden Centre or an industrial Laundry (see Figures 11.2 and 11.3). A third way was to understand Waylands and its closure through staff and a senior managers accounts. Here one of the key mangers talks –​in an oral history recorded as part of the project –​about why it was necessary to close the Waylands’ Laundry: Built into Waylands was the laundry […] they were working flat out in there and the conditions were … –​but they loved it, they loved it. I was the person who actually phased it out in the end because … if it had been a sheltered workshop and people were being paid for the work that would have been fine. […]I believe in consultation, I believe in choice and getting to a position where people can make informed choices but in that respect I think I felt we had to make a choice for them. We put alternatives in place. So there was a certain amount, a lot of soul searching really but I just felt we had to move on. (quoted in Graham, 2010, p. 138)

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FIGURE 11.2  People

at work in the Waylands Day Centre laundry. The Laundry was closed in an early phase of the transformation project that eventually saw Waylands and another large day centre in Croydon closed

Yet, as I began my time in the Resource Bases there were lots and lots of other ways of knowing the Day Centres too. Here are just some of the ways of knowing about the experience of working –​as service users –​in Wayland’s Laundry: Yeah, laundry. Go out in the mini bus and pick the washing up. Thornton Heath, from old lady places. We done the laundry right up to twenty to four. Then we use to go home then. We used to get £4 and at Christmas time we used to get a bonuses. We use to get £12 bonus at Christmas. They used to have a laundry here, but they didn’t have enough money to keep it running, so they closed it down. So, one day they had to close it all down and those people had to send out their clothes somewhere else to wash, to another laundry. There were sheets, blankets, all sorts, pillow cases and then they used to iron the overalls. We tried to save [the laundry], we had lots of meetings trying to save it, but it went against us, didn’t it?

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FIGURE 11.3 The Garden Centre was another place people worked in the Day Centres. The panel indicates our

approach, mixing short quotes and images. Short oral history clips accompanied each panel

Taken together these different ways of knowing –​from policy, historically, from the perspective of a senior manager responsible for implementing policy and from those who spent so much time there –​ indicate a variety of quite different theories of the world. The policy deals in ambitions and abstractions –​ how can changes in daily life enable people with learning disabilities to be choice-​making, independent and included. The official 1967 account of the Waylands opening shows what the future looked like then, the now-​old new dawn, better than the long-​stay hospitals and with a focus on training and skills. The oral account of the senior manager suggests the enormous complexities and genuine dilemmas of what practically needed to be in place to make this desired mode of choice-​making person possible.

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Then there are the accounts by people with learning disabilities. They are radically specific and of specific places, of what matters (the bonus, the £4, £12), of the specificity of living the life of working in the laundry (sheets, blankets, pillow cases, overalls) and of theories of why the laundry had to be shut (not enough money). As I tried to listen, and as I read more policy and spoke to more senior members of staff who had to make the decision to close the laundry, it became viscerally clear that no single one of these accounts could be usefully treated as the explanatory “key” to the others. It would have been easy to take the reference points I found easiest to deal with –​the written Valuing People policy or the senior managers account –​and use them like tent poles and pegs to create a structure for interpreting the more complex and highly specific accounts from the people who spent their days in the Day Centres. I remember sometimes feeling enormous relief when I spoke to a member of staff who had a strong position on the closures and could offer me a structure to make sense of all that I was trying to understand. Yet perhaps one exchange stands out as helping me develop a sense of caution about explaining anyone’s contribution using the analytical framework offered by policy, “history” or by anyone else. Having learnt over time that I was interested in her old Day Centre, a woman with a learning disability who I used to sometimes have a cup of tea with would say: Too much noise at the day centres. Too much noise. She would say this with deep significance, very slowly and rocking her head slightly. Too. Much. Noise. She wasn’t the only one to say this. This memory recalling the atmospheric shifts and moods of tens and tens of people in a building, some of who would scream or shout to communicate any stress or distress. Too. Much. Noise. Then, often soon afterwards, she would also say, rhythmically, of her packing work at the Day Centres: I liked that work. Kept me going. Kept me going because I liked doing that work. Implying ever so subtly that she was not being kept going quite so much now. For her both things were part of her accounts of being at the Day Centre every weekday for most of her adult life. Too much noise. Kept me going. In us coming together to find a way of “exhibiting” this world, something more than showing and something more than explanation was being called for.

A participatory ontology: methods of non-​representation and of attunement In contemporary Disability Studies there has been a turn towards methodologies intent on exploring the radical instability, contingency and relational nature of “ability” and “normalcy” (e.g. Goodley, 2014; Goodley, Lawthom and Runswick Cole, 2014a, 2014b). As such the first wave “social model of disability” (UPIAS, 1976) –​which as a core principle emphasized disability as created by the way the world is organised and not as resident in the individual –​has been developed into imaginative complicating of the lived experience of disability which can address pain and difficulties as well as structural barriers (Wendell, 2000; Shakespeare, 2006; Kuppers, 2011). A key idea here is that the model of the independent and rational choice-​making subject –​often framed in the Disability Studies debates as ‘neoliberal ableism’ (Goodley, 2014, p. 34) –​is a fiction for us all and to be human is to be in constant reciprocal relationships with other people and technologies. Or as literary theorist David Mitchell has

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put it, “disability subjectivities create new forms of embodied knowledge and collective consciousness. Queer and disabled people’s interdependencies provide alternative ethical maps for living together outside of, even in opposition to, the dictates of normalcy” (2014, pp. 1–​2). Seeing the world –​both “ability” and life itself –​as relational finds synergies with the participatory modes of “research-​as-​sense-​making” which also seek to fully recognize and build research precisely through these reciprocities (Burns, 2007; Fals-​Borda, 2013 [2007] p. 159; Reason and Heron, 2001; Reason, 2005). In the same period as ontological approaches have become more prominent in Disability Studies they have also inflected other disciplines, not least geography and anthropology. One key reference point in these debates has been Nigel Thrift’s elaboration of non-​representational theory, a “geography of what happens” and of “what is in experience” (2008, p. 2). Thrift characterises non-​representational theory as “going beyond constructivism” (2008, p. 5). Thrift argues that it is not enough to simply note that things we think of as being natural are socially constructed, crucial though this has been and especially in terms of the social model of disability (Kuppers, 2011, p. 101). Instead Thrift proposes methods for ontologically-​orientated research that seeks to “lean-​in” to pay different kinds of attention (2008, p. 219). Through methods of “leaning in” Thrift is interested in “descriptions of the bare bones of actual occasions” asking how “these actual occasions […] might be enlivened –​made more responsive and more active –​by the application of a series of procedures and techniques of expression”: “a permanent supplement to the ordinary” (2008, p. 2). For example, in addressing the lived experience of moving through urban space, Thrift characterizes “cities as oceans of hurt result from the undertow of small battles of everyday life but also of reservoirs of hope result from a generalized desire for a better future” (2008, p. 219). In an anthropological context, a similar ethos of leaning-​in has, by Kathleen Stewart, been termed “attunement”: An attention to the matterings, the complex emergent worlds, happening in everyday life. The rhythms of living that are addictive or shifting. The kinds of agency that might or might not add up to something with some kind of intensity or duration. The enigmas and oblique events and background noises that might be barely sensed and yet are compelling. (Stewart, 2011, p. 445) In describing her research practices, Stewart draws attention to the ways in which theory, explanation and interpretation can have deadening, too-​simple effect of explaining “what-​can-​be-​seen by reference to what cannot” (Poovey, 2002, p. 143). In a similar vein to Thrift, Steward asks: “What happens if we approach worlds not as the dead or reeling effects of distant systems but as lived affects with tempos, sensory knowledges, orientations, transmutations, habits, rogue force fields …?” (2011, p. 446). When I entered the Resource Base at the beginning of the project I was coming in the aftermath of a massive disruption of the “shared fund of meaning” (Scott, 2008, p. 147) that had characterized the daily life of the Day Centres. Not all of the shared meaning was positive –​far from it. There was for some, too much noise, too many people you were stuck with and boring work. Nor was all of it negative –​there were collective joys, liking people, work that kept you going, intense significances of things which might seem small to others, £4, bonuses, pillow cases, the clock coming round every day to “twenty to four”. Somehow in developing a display, the point became to hold open these complexities and ambivalences. Part of this was to see the stories told as “theoretical models in themselves” (Stewart, 1996, p. 80) and through this encourage visitors to “lean-​in” and to attune temporarily to the complexity of what it meant to go everyday to a Day Centre and for them now to have closed.

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The exhibition becoming co-​produced If the Day Centres had to slowly come into meaning for me, to the point where I had some bearings in terms of names, rooms, places and activities, then it was also the case that my job was to create the conditions where the “History of Day Centres project” could come into existence for all of us together. Projects imagined in funding applications always have to be recrafted through being put into practice. The idea of the exhibition needed to be built at the same time as we built the exhibition. In abstract, “do you want to get involved?”/​“tell your story?”/​“participate?” were meaningless questions. To do this we went regularly to visit the Museum of Croydon “Croydon Now” space. To try and make the exhibition more concrete we would look at specific exhibit cases and asked what might go in there. One day when we went in and I asked that question someone said, “nails”! One of the group had worked in the Day Centres packing nails. “Ok, but what kind of nails?” He was not sure he could describe them. So we visited hardwear shops until we found the right size nails. “Lots of nails! In bags”. We’d go to another box. “Discos”. What happened at the discos? “Glitter Ball!” (which we bought on Ebay and hung in the centre of the exhibition). “Dancing!” Then one day a Glitters t-​shirt –​the name of the occasional weekend disco –​appeared: “Look what my Dad found”. Then I’d get a phone call, someone had found an old Virgin airlines pack that some people used to make through working on an assembly line. “Come over and get it”. From this we came up with two themes: Work and, basically, Not Work (called leisure on the online version) and included sport, shows, holidays and discos. As such the exhibition was not produced in the sense that an object is made to a blueprint or to an entirely preconceived plan. Instead it was more like a coming-​forth, happening through the interactions with the display boxes and with the materiality left over from the Day Centres. As such the exhibition came to be through, in terms resonant of Tim Ingold’s (2010) accounts of making, an iterative process between people, things, cases and spaces. It was co-​production in a way that holds together its more common use in museums –​collaborative work with communities –​with its use in Science and Technology Studies where it is used to evoke the intimate connection in our realities between, as Karen Barad puts it, “world and words” (Barad, 2007; see also Graham, 2016). Many interventions in inclusive research with people with learning disabilities have argued for the need to develop collective explanations a bit more strongly than we did here. There has been a big emphasis on shared data analysis as a way of combating concerns that non-​learning disabled researchers end up control the meaning (Nind, Chapman, Seale and Tilley, 2015; Seale, Nind, Tilley and Chapman, 2015). And across the participatory action research literature there has been an interest in trying to build “share understanding” or “common knowledge” (Edwards, 2012). Looking back, I do remember exhibition meetings that were certainly very hard to convene as a space of collective sense making.Yet alongside these meetings, a more network-​y, emergent, nails and t-​shirts approach took over. I work with each individual person and each person who was named came into the museum to install their case, a bit like Orlando Fals-​Borda’s “slow rhythm of reflection and action” (2013 [2007], p. 159) and certainly resonant of Michael Ames’ account of co-​produced exhibitions as an iterative “to-​ing and fro-​ing” (2003, p. 177).

Oral histories: editing and creating conditions for audiences to lean-​in Yet the History of Day Centres project was also an oral history project. By the time we were developing the exhibition, I had recorded interviews with over 80 people. While two interviews had been conducted by people with learning disabilities, this had not been a focus of the project (though it might be if we did it again today). As part of the project –​and before the archive was been donated to the Croydon Local Studies Library –​The Open University held all the interviews and I was going to be responsible

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for editing the oral histories for display. Before doing anything else, I spoke to people about their voices being in the exhibition and people chose the thing they’d most like to be talking about. Before the audio was signed off, I played the clips to people, and sometimes their supporters and family. But it was me that edited the interviews. Each edited excerpt did, on one reading, convey a simply story or memory, as you’ve seen above with the Laundry memories. Yet at the same time, I wanted to make sure that in the selection and editing for display that the tones, textures, pauses were still present. So I did the editing with the hope of conveying something of the intensities of the memories and something of the densities of the social world of the Day Centres. Of course –​and this became very viscerally clear to me as I used software to edit the oral histories to reduce a pause or cut a sentence so a clip could come in under two minutes –​that there was something both very true and very problematic in calling our exhibition, “In Our Own Words”. Not only because I was very much involved. The “our” had, through the project’s participatory ontology, come to very much also include me. But also that the title was in danger of falling into the ideal human subject desired by the Valuing People white paper. The ideal of the independent, choice making, autonomous person that so much recent work in Disability Studies has critiqued as the ideal “neo-​liberal able” subject (Goodley, 2014). I worried about this a lot in what I wrote just after the project ended (Graham, 2009, 2010).Yet it was through the attentiveness precisely to what people, said and how they said it that we could tell the modest and mundane stories which could be read as “there was sport”, “there was work” and, at the same time, allow, for listeners who were prepared to hear it, “vast oceans of uncertainty” to be held open (Latour, 2005, p. 245). Far from either affirming this mode of ideal personhood or only emphasizing its impossibility, the edited oral histories sought to unfold the lived and remembered struggles for agency –​the very stuff of participation’s political ambitions –​as well as its constant negotiations and its unfinished nature. As a direct result of so much change in people’s lives, many people I interviewed were still very much working it all out. As Stewart puts it, “the body has to learn to play itself like a musical instrument in this world’s compositions” (2011, p. 450). Having developed certain ways of being themselves in the Day Centre (whether being loud and being the centre of attention; or hiding, avoiding, finding safe members of staff and safe places), people, in looking back to the Day Centres, were also learning to play themselves within new compositions and social configurations of the Resource Bases. It felt crucial that this came across to audiences too. One of my collaborators did the welcome to the exhibition: Welcome to the Day Centres Exhibition. Talking about our old lives what we used to do at Day Centres work and that lot, discos and the paper round, Christmas shows. We’re talking about there’s been changes. We’ve been decided to go to the Resource Base centres, where we go out to places. Another explained what learning disability means to him: My learning difficulty is you know when you get upset about when people take advantage out of you. I would rather not go against anybody, I’d rather go and tell somebody, that they said, like they call you all different names under the sun. I used to be rather offensive with people but they don’t do that to me. What it is, some think they can get one over on you, that’s the way it is. But some of them like, think that they can do what they have to do but I just take no notice of them, walk off and leave it. I hope in reading these quotes –​even without hearing the intonation and pauses –​something unresolved is suggested, something that is still becoming. The pauses and the changes mid-​way through a sentence

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in who/​what is active and passive; there’s been changes, we’ve been decided to go to the Resource Base centres. The way in which learning disability is a way of being in the world that is not a fix thing, certainly not a number given after an IQ test, but a lived experience which means some think they can get one over on you and that sometimes you just have to walk off and leave it.

A modest politics of potential: participatory ontologies for museums In one of the Resource Bases one man would come up to me as soon as I arrived and say, with a piecing looking, “what are you doing here today?” I always had a practical answer –​to see X or do Y –​but I always laughed too, his interest and seriousness always seemed to invite me to take it as a deeply existential question. As if he suspected that really, deep down, I didn’t know. There is a long tradition in participatory research and for those interested in participatory approaches to museums to hope for a “third space for critical engagement” (Chatterton, Fuller and Routledge, 2007, p. 222). There have been three key modes of expressing this in a museum context: as a “safe” space (Heumann Gurian, 2010); the dialogic “third space” space (Lynch and Alberti, 2010) and as activism (Sandell, 2007). Each imply different roles for the museum in social and political change. Looking back and more than a bit unwittingly, we did not drawn on any of these three notions. In describing the purpose of non-​representational theory as to generate a greater “lean-​in”, Thrift evokes a “political imperative” (2008, p. 19) which comes from attentiveness and attunement, to the world and its potentialities: For in studying practices in detail it became clear to me that what was missing from too many accounts was a sense of mutability; of the moments of inspired improvisation, conflicting but still fertile mimesis, rivalous desires, creative forms of symbiosis, and simple transcription errors which made each moment a new starting point. (2008, p. 21) In every oral account of the day centres –​and in the edited versions for the exhibition –​these mutabilities, improvisations and new starting points were always at play. Yet another connotation suggested by non-​representation is precisely its explicitly political genealogy –​ also drawn on by Participatory Action Research –​of direct democracy, “speaking for yourself ”, as self advocates with learning disabilities have often put it. Charles Scott, as he elaborates his account of attunement as a research method, develops the idea of sensibility and democratic space. He argues: The aspect of democracy that I want to emphasize is its characteristic of valuing the rights and privileges of a wide range of participants without giving any of those participants authority to define the whole. Taken out of a strictly political context, “democratic space” means a region of occurrence in which none of the happenings defines or normalizes the space of their occurrence. (2008, p. 153) Here we could read participatory ontologies generated by our project and its interactions as a democratic form of meaning in the specific sense –​also enabled by Latour’s flat ontology –​that no single account could define the whole. And as it was built one conversation, word, intonation, facial expression, nail, photo and glitter ball at a time it could “never truly be kept within traditional theoretical tramlines” (Thrift, 2008, p. 12). And the nature of memory also meant that little of what was shared, recorded and

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then edited for display could never quite be kept within the tramlines of an ideal (policy-​led) model of personhood. As a result the history of the day centres and their closure could not be easily understood as a story of uncomplicated progress or unremitting loss. Participatory research is often aimed at creating social and political change, whether that is less ambitiously a better design of a social care service or product or, as in the tradition of Paulo Freire (2000 [1968]), radical political transformation. As a result the fields of participatory research are also characterized by a rich variety of “theories of change” and theories of what makes research “actionable” in the terms used by “academic-​activists” Paul Chatterton, Duncan Fuller and Paul Routledge who argue for the ‘A’ over the ‘R’ in the PAR of Participatory Action Research (2007, p. 218). Yet our politics of participatory ontology –​seeking attunement –​can only be considered “actionable” in an oblique sense. A how which sees the path to political transformation through first trying to listen very carefully and then work out where to go from there. If museums are often accused of deadening, of decontextualizing, of too-​simple explanation and of making things clear but also boring (O’Neill, 2002, p. 34), then one potential line of inquiry always lies in a very serious commitment to seeking attunement; to the complexities of that issue, place or experience. How might museums shift attention so they can, to reinvoke Thrift, “become connected to a general theme of more life, boosting aliveness, ontological involvement”. “Too often”, Thrift argues, “we are not open to that pressure, clipping our own wings” (Thrift, 2008, p. 14). Social history practices in museum can often seem to hoover worthily at the top of the interpretive hierarchy, explaining their subjects lives as workers, mothers, campaigners, soldiers … all the while lower down the interpretive hierarchy the quotes, the photos and the oral histories never fail to open up more complex worlds (see Figure 11.4). The cue for my thinking is often Theatres of Memory by Raphael Samuel (1994). You could say Theatre of Memory is deeply ontological (Schwartz, 2012). Resisting the critical voices of the “heritage baiters” who might see heritage as co-​optive and not epistemically valid “History”, Samuel’s bid for its value is

Good thing Waylands was closed because we can get out more. Yeah, I was worried. First time I ever came here I was worried. But I like it here. Get out and about more than ever Lorraine Murphy

place, g that nd y losin for years. Fo pset b s. To A bit u I was there e disco d an th se becau s of the fun re now, more e e ri h o it t tha mem refer est I p ies and be hon d more facilit n room a Stokoe n a Jonath

Too many people, that’s why they closed Heavers. The noise upset me sometimes, I get headaches sometimes. I don ’t like noise, I like to go a quie t place. I like Whitehorse Road, good, good place Sharon Phillips

FIGURE 11.4 The

The other thing is that they were trying to save up money. I thing the govenment should come down here and see the staff and members and listen to what they have to say Simon Flute

I like it here better than at Cherry Orchard and Waylands. Don’t know why I just do. I just fancied the change. You know what they say a change is as good as a rest John Card

That’s Why people came here, because it was Tony Blair’s idea for people not to stay in Day Centres. He thought Resource Bases were better for people. Tony Blair was right because people don’t want to stay in them all their lives, do they? They get bored. It’s better to get outside Pat Hall

History of Day Centres project and exhibition took place in the wake of quite radical change in people’s lives. A lot of the work we did together was to reflect on what this meant. As this panel suggests, there were quite a variety of responses and theories about why the day centres were closed

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composed of an account of life and excess, of a proliferation practices, elaborations of many examples of the past with the present, of experience as knowing. The political worth of these practices emerging, not only cognitively or through clarity or critical distance, but from action and from experimenting together. If what we did together as part of the History of Day Centres project was research, then it was in the most ambitious and in the most modest and everyday sense –​we were just trying to work out, at times together but always in relationship to each other, what it means to be alive in the 21st century. Although we can never exactly know, the exhibition was an expression of the hope that a visitor or two, as they listened, might also lean-​in a bit closer.

Acknowledgements The exhibition would not have been possible without the support of the Museum of Croydon and especially curatorial advice and technical support of Rob Shakespeare. Finally, enormous thanks to all I worked with during the History of Day Centres project. You were all dealing with a transformation in your everyday life in the wake of the day centre closures. Through the exploration of the impact of these changes together my approaches to work, collaboration and participation were also challenged and transformed.

References Ames, M. (2003). How to decorate a house: The renegotiation of cultural representation at the University of British Columbia Museum of Anthropology. In: L. Peers and A. K. Brown, eds., Museums and source communities: A Routledge reader. London: Routledge, pp. 171–​180. Barad, K. (2007). Meeting the universe halfway: Quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Barad, K., R. Dolphijn and I. van der Tuin. (2012). “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”: Interview with Karen Barad. In: R Dolphijn and I van der Tuin, eds., New materialism: Interviews & cartographies. Ann Arbor: Michigan Publishing, University of Michigan Library, Open Humanities Press. Available at: http://​ dx.doi.org/​10.3998/​ohp.11515701.0001.001 [Accessed 9 January 2016]. Boersma, H. (2011). Heavenly participation: The weaving of a sacramental tapestry. Grand Rapids, MI:William B. Eerdmans. Burns, D. (2007). Systemic action research: A strategy for whole systems change. Bristol: Policy Press. Burton, M., and C. Kagan. (2006). Decoding valuing people. Disability & Society, 21(4), pp. 299–​313. Chatterton, P., D. Fuller and P. Routledge. (2007). Relating action to activism: Theoretical and methodological reflections. In: S Kindon, R. Pain and M. Kesby, eds, Participatory action research approaches and methods: Connecting people, participation and place. London: Routledge, pp. 216–​222. Croydon Advertiser. (1967). Centre will cost 1d. rate –​but let’s not count the cost. Croydon Advertiser, 19 May, p. 1. Department of Health. (2001). Valuing people: A new strategy for learning disability for the 21st century. London: HMSO. —​—​—​. (2009). Valuing people now: A new 3-​year strategy for people with learning disabilities. London: HMSO. Devine, K., and R. Williams. (2011). Storytelling at Riverside. Museum Practice, 17 November. Available at: www.museumsassociation.org/​museum-​practice/​exhibition-​labels/​17102011-​r iverside-​storytelling [Accessed 9 January 2016]. Edwards, A. (2012). The role of common knowledge in achieving collaboration across practices. Learning, Culture and Social Interaction, 1(1), pp. 22–​32. Falk, J.H., and L.D. Dierking. (2013). The museum experience revisited. Walnut Creek, CA: Left Coast Press. Fals-​Borda, O. (2013 [2007]). Action research in the convergence of disciplines. International Journal of Action Research, 9(2), pp. 155–​167. Freire, P. (2000 [1968]). Pedagogy of the oppressed. Translated by M. Ramos, with an introduction by D. Macedo. New York: Continuum. Goodley, D. (2014). Dis/​ability studies: Theorizing disablism and ableism. London: Routledge.

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Goodley, D., R. Lawthom and K. Runswick Cole. (2014a). Posthuman disability studies. Subjectivity, 7, pp. 342–​361. —​—​—​. (2014b). Dis/​ability and austerity: Beyond work and slow death. Disability & Society, 29(6), pp. 980–​984. Graham, H. (2009). Oral history, “learning disability” and pedagogies of self. Oral History, 37(1), pp. 85–​94. —​—​—​. (2010). How the tea is made; or, the scaling of “everyday life” in changing services for people with learning disabilities. British Journal of Learning Disabilities, 82(2), pp. 133–​143. —​—​—​. (2016). The ‘co’ in co-​production: Museums, community participation and science and technology studies. Science Museum Group Journal, 5. DOI: 10.15180/​160502. —​—​—​. (2017). Horizontality: Tactical politics for participation and museums. In: B. Onciul, M.L. Stefano and S. Hawke, eds., Engaging heritage: Engaging communities. Suffolk: Boydell and Brewer. Heritage Lottery Fund. (2010). Thinking about…Community Participation. Available at: www.hlf.org.uk/​ community-​participation [Accessed 9 January 2016]. Heumann Gurian, E. (2010). A civically-​minded contemporary art museum. A speech given at the invitation of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago under the direction of Madeleine Grynsztejn in Autumn, 2010. Ingold, T. (2010). The textility of making. Cambridge Journal of Economics, 34, pp. 91–​102. Kuppers, P. (2011). Disability culture and community performance: Find a strange and twisted shape. London: Routledge. Latour, B. (2005). Reassembling the social: An introduction to actor-​network-​theory. London: Routledge. Lynch, B., and Alberti, S. (2010). Legacies of prejudice: racism, co-​production and radical trust in the museum. Museum Management and Curatorship, 25(1), pp. 13–​35. Mitchell, D.T. (2014). Gay pasts and disability future(s) tense: Heteronormative trauma and parasitism in ‘Midnight Cowboy’. Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8 (1), pp. 1–​16. Nind, M., R. Chapman, J. Seale and L. Tilley. (2015). The conundrum of training and capacity building for people with learning disabilities doing research. Journal of Applied Research in Intellectual Disabilities, 29(6), pp. 542–​551. O’Neill, M. (2002). The good enough visitor. In: R. Sandell, ed., Museums, society, inequality. London: Routledge. In Our Own Words: Stories of Croydon’s Day Centres, Museum of Croydon, Croydon Now, May-​September 2008. An overview of the exhibition is available at: www.open.ac.uk/​hsc/​research/​living-​with-​disability/​history-​day-​ centres/​exhibitions-​ioow/​ioow-​introduction.php. Exhibition content available at:www7.open.ac.uk/​shsw/​ DaysGoneBy/​ioow_​a7_​k5/​a7_​k5_​menu.htm. [Accessed 9 January 2016] Poovey, M. (2002). The liberal civil subject and the social in eighteenth-​century British moral philosophy. Public Culture, 14(1), pp. 125–​145. Reason, P. (1998). A participatory world. Resurgence, 168, pp. 42–​44. —​—​—​. (2005). Living as part of the whole: The implications of participation. Journal of Curriculum and Pedagogy, 2(2), pp. 35–​41. Reason, P., and J. Heron. (2001). The practice of co-​operative inquiry: Research with rather than on people. In: P. Reason and H. Bradbury, eds., Handbook of action research: Participative inquiry and practice. London: Sage, pp. 179–​188. Rogoff, I. (2003). From criticism to critique to criticality. Transversal Texts. Available at: http://​eipcp.net/​transversal/​ 0806/​rogoff1/​en [Accessed 9 January 2016]. Samuel, R., ed. (1994). Theatres of memory: Past and present in contemporary culture, volume 1. London: Verso. Sandell, R. (2007). Museums, prejudice and the reframing of difference. London: Routledge. Schwartz, B. (2012). Foreward. In: R. Samuel, ed. Theatres of memory: Past and present in contemporary culture, volume 1. London: Verso. Scott, C.E. (2008). Sensibility and democratic space. Research in Phenomenology, 38, pp. 145–​156. Seale, J., M. Nind, L. Tilley and R. Chapman. (2015). Negotiating a third space for participatory research with people with learning disabilities: An examination of boundaries and spatial practices. Innovation: The European Journal of Social Science Research, 28(4), pp. 483–​497. DOI: 10.1080/​13511610.2015.1081558. Serrell, B. (2015). Exhibit labels: An interpretive approach, 2nd edn. London: Rowman and Littlefield. Shakespeare, T. (2006). Disability rights and wrongs. London: Routledge. Stewart, K. (1996). A space on the side of the road. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. —​—​—​. (2011). Atmospheric attunements. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 29, pp. 445–​453. Thrift, N. (2008). Non-​representational theory. London: Routledge. Tilden, F. (1977 [1957]). Interpreting our heritage, 3rd edn. Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press.

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Union of the Physically Impaired Against Segregation. (1976). Founding Statement. https://​disability-​ studies.leeds.ac.uk/​wp-​content/​uploads/​sites/​40/​library/​UPIAS-​UPIAS.pdf [Accessed 9 January 2016]. Welshman, J. (2006). Ideology, ideas and care in the community, 1948–​1971. In: J. Welshman and J. Walmsley, eds., Community care in perspective: Care, control and citizenship. Basingstoke: Palgrave, pp. 17–​37. Wendell, S. (2000). The rejected body. London: Routledge.

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INDEX

“Alien Phenomenology” 67–​74, 77 amulets video project: interviews 58–​61; origins of 56–​57; remaking of objects in conversation 61, 62; under-​definition of amulets 61; see also ethnography anthropology: attunement 187; concept of “object” scrutinized 111–​112; postcolonial 63; representation debates 54–​55, 56; rise of experimental practices 110 archaeology: experimental 49; functionalist 175–​176; past and present perspectives 148–​149; relevance to society 151; see also Guerilla Archaeology; Museum of Archaeology outreach artist–​museum collaboration 4–​5, 30, 75, 135, 139 ArtScience Museum (Singapore) 119 “Assembling Bodies” 21 attunement 187, 190 audience collaboration 10–​11 Beacons for Engagement 132, 144 BEVARES 149–​150 “Body Worlds”  112 Bogost, Ian 67–​74, 77 Botanical Garden of the University of Oslo see Viking Garden Cardiff University 136, 137, 141, 144 “COLLAPSE”: “collapse” as generative concept 97–​99; and cross-​disciplinarity  97–​98; hands-​on workshop approach 100–​105; institutional background to 96–​97;Venn diagram structure 101; workshops vs. meetings 99; see also collapsology collapsology 95, 105–​107; see also “COLLAPSE” Colonization Project 2, 7, 11, 12, 97, 148, 149, 158, 164, 165, 170 “Continuous Change” 164, 173–​176; see also “Laboratory”

critique of museological authority 3 cross-​disciplinarity  7–​8; challenge of balancing participant voices 32; “COLLAPSE” 97–​98; expertise divides in museums 7; “Future Animals” 135; LAB-​method  27; Museum of Archaeology 150, 161–​162; traditional all-​round curator 7, 8;Viking Garden exhibit 42, 43, 47 Cultural Heritage Act (Norway) 149 curatorial work: curiosity 27; departure from theoretical frameworks 6; discovery, captioning, juxtaposition 5–​6, 26; display vs. “discovery” of collection objects 113, 117; increasing specialized division of 7; traditional breadth of 7, 8 democracy: audience collaboration 10; democratic space 190; LAB-​method  23; museological authority 3; participatory museums 93, 190 “Designing Bodies”: accessibility 115; archival research 117; audience participation 117–​118; exhibiting ongoing processes 113–​114, 116–​117, 119; MARTYN 115–​117; object/​subject boundaries 119; organism/​artefact boundaries  115; structure of 114; tactile experience 116 Disability Studies: collective explanations 188; neoliberal ableism 186, 189; participatory ontology 186–​187 ethnography: abandoning representational ambitions 55–​56, 61–​63; collaboration with source communities 55–​56; continuous dialectical creation of meaning 57–​58, 62, 63; materiality/​spirituality divide 57; neutral hegemonic epistemology 54–​55; open-​endedness  109; postcolonial moment 62; radical “undisciplined” cross-​disciplinarity 53–​54, 56, 62, 63; thinking through things 57; see also amulets video project

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196 Index

exhibitions as research: breakout from conventional research frameworks 11; creative unpredictability 117; efficiency vs. exploration 12; enrichment of other research 11, 13, 107; experimental practices increasing 109, 112–​113; institutional resistance to 11–​12; laboratory concept 4; ontographical experimentation 74–​77; origins in critique 3; playfulness of 11, 13, 100–​105; products vs. processes 11; space for testing theories 6–​7; see also collapsology; curatorial work; museum research Frazer, James George 57 “Future Animals” 131–​132; artistic creativity 135; “Back to the Future” 137; engaging with young adults 135–​137; interdisciplinary working 135; origins of 132; participant evaluation 134–​135; structure of 133 “Gifts to Soviet Leaders” 6 “Grossraum” 28–​32; Eirik Audunson Skaar’s installation 31; Hakekorsets profitører film 31; “Hitler stone” 28–​29; Ministry of Transport and Communication 31; Nazi planning practices 29; Nazi politics of space 30; outside engagement 30–​31; Part I 30; Part II 31–​32; scenography of 31–​32; see also LAB-​method Guerilla Archaeology 131–​132, 150; artistic creativity 139; engaging with young adults 140–​141; establishment of 137; guiding principles 138–​139; provocation and play 139; “Shamanic Street Preachers” 141–​144; stimulating new research 141, 143–​144; teamwork 139 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 57 Historic Voodoo Museum  113 History of Day Centres project: attunement 187; institutional hospitals 183; leaning in 187; oral history interviews 188–​190; participatory ontology 182, 186–​187, 189, 191; Resource Bases 181, 183, 184, 187, 189, 190; Valuing People white papers 183, 186, 189; Waylands Day Centre 183–​184; work at the centres 183–​186; see also “In Our Own Words” Hunterian Museum see “Designing Bodies” “Imageries from the Colonies” 85–​87, 89 imagined hierarchy of knowledge 165–​166, 191 “In Our Own Words” 181–​182; co-​production of 188 interdisciplinarity see cross-​disciplinarity LAB-​method: academic interdisciplinary input 27; artist perspectives 30; balancing multi-​disciplinary voices 32; descriptive intent 23; experimentality of exhibitions 23; management challenges of 33–​34; methodological rigour 23; objects as entry points 25–​27; openness to outside contributions 31, 33; physical layout of 24–​25; resource

intensiveness of 32–​33; scenography 27, 30; “thing” as relational concept 23; see also “Grossraum” “Laboratory”: background to 167–​168; current social relevance 170, 173; focus group interviews 167–​168; influence on final exhibition 174–​176; Laboratory Room 169–​170; lack of oppositional feedback 170, 173; member turnover problems 173, 176; nature management workshop 171–​173; proposed institutional benefits 167; workshop structure 170–​171; see also “Continuous Change”; NTNU University Museum Landscape Epithelia 75–​77 Latour, Bruno 73, 74, 110, 190 “leaning in” 187, 190 Lévi-​Strauss, Claude 95, 96, 105, 106 “Making Things Public” 6–​7, 74 Marischal College, University of Aberdeen see “Rooms Experiment” Medical Museion 74, 111 Melbourne Museum (Forest Gallery) 113 “Mind the Gut” 74–​77 Mudac 113 Musée d’ethnographie de Neuchâtel 113 Musée de la main 113 Museum of Archaeology outreach: analysing success of 157–​159; conventional structures as obstacle 159; creative management 150–​151; dialogue with public 151–​153, 157; funding constraints 159; in/​outbox 157, 158, 159; interdisciplinary teams 150, 161–​162; “Meet the Researchers” 150, 157; “mind map” scrolls 151, 159; Museotek 149, 150, 151, 153; Open Museum 149, 150, 159; participation of public 153–​154; research-​based outreach 155–​157; “story plate” 156; thirdspace environment 148, 149 160, 161, 162; “Where people walk” 151, 157, 159, 160, 161 Museum of Croydon see “In Our Own Words” Museum of Cultural History (KHM) 96; see also “COLLAPSE”;Viking Garden exhibit Museum of the Future (Dubai) 119–​120 museum research: collection limitations as spur to creativity 106; communication/​research culture divide 168, 176, 177; comparable to artwork 22; different from strictly academic research 19, 21, 22, 95; funding cuts 21; inevitability of collaboration 33; objects as point of departure 22–​23; rational vs. aesthetic or mythological systematization 96–​97, 105–​107; squeezed by public role 19, 20, 21; uncertain expectations of 19; understanding vs. knowledge 22; see also curatorial work; exhibitions as research N8/​Nacht  140 National Co-​ordinating Centre for Public Engagement 134 National Museum Wales see “Future Animals”

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Index  197

Natural History Museum (NHM) see Viking Garden exhibit New Museology 54–​55, 149 non-​representational theory 187, 190 Norwegian Museum of Science and Technology see LAB-​method NTNU University Museum: communication/​ research culture divide 168, 176, 177; researcher contracts 168; strategy documents 166; see also “Continuous Change”; “Laboratory” objects: “black noise” 70, 72; complexity theory 75; correlationism 70, 73; created by exhibiting 113; distributed art objects 112; exhibitions as ontographic experiments 74–​77; Latour litany 73; object-​oriented ontology  69; object–​subject interactions 111–​112; ontography 73–​74, 76–​77; ontological equivalence 70; philosophical carpentry 72; revival of philosophical interest in 67–​69, 111; virtual digital versions of 112; “world without objects” 112 participatory ontology 182, 186–​187, 189, 191 Perec, Georges 121 “Pop-​up 2015–​2018”: background to 80–​81; commercial vs. heritage value 90–​91; cultural vs. natural history 90; design of 84–​85; disparagement 89; “experience economy” 83–​84, 93; market histories of museum objects 89; materiality 89–​90; mediation vs. facilitation 93; monitoring of 88; museum worker roles and public roles 93; “non-​space”  83; physicality vs. narrative 86–​88; planning 82; purposes of 83 Postgraduate Environmental Archaeology and Community Engagement 136–​137 public engagement 20; Beacons for Engagement 132; collaborating with audiences 10–​11; Colonization Project 2; “Designing Bodies” 113, 117; digital technologies 112; “Gifts to Soviet Leaders” 6; interactive 109; LAB-​method 25, 29; “Pop-​up 2015–​2018” 84, 93; recent British focus on 132;

young adults underengaged 140; see also “Future Animals”; Guerilla Archaeology; Museum of Archaeology outreach research surplus 1–​2, 95 “Return to Angola” 113 Rijksmuseum Schiphol 83 “Rooms Experiment”: fast intervention approach 121–​122; history of the space 120; project design 121–​122; sensory engagement 122–​124 Royal College of Surgeons see “Designing Bodies” science communication studies: current demand for relevance 166; dialogue models 166, 177; diffusionist/​deficit models 165, 177; social networks 166; sociological turn of 165–​167, 177 “Shamanic Street Preachers” 141–​144 space: analysis of museum spaces 119; interrelation of museum spaces 124; opening out of museum spaces 119–​120; see also “Rooms Experiment” “Thing –​Technology and Democracy” 23 thirdspace environment 148, 149 160, 161, 162, 190 “Touch” 113 University Museum of Bergen see “Imageries from the Colonies”; “Pop-​up 2015–​2018” Victoria and Albert Museum 119 Viking Garden exhibit: collaboration with genetic resource centres 47; collaboration with re-​enactment groups 49; consultation with other museums 49; design of 43–​48; education 47, 49; interactive nature of 47; inter-​department tensions 47; low-​technology approach 47, 51; multi-​disciplinarity of 43, 44, 47; origins of 41–​45; outreach 47, 51; physical challenges 47; public feedback 51; rationale for 47–​48; research in conjunction with 49–​51 Wellcome Collection 22, 111; see also amulets video project