Objects first – thoughts on a deeper engagement with materiality

A few months ago, I gave a small talk at an internal seminar here at Museion where I presented some thoughts about how to further our engagement with objects and how to take materiality more seriously. Here is the talk: Not just a museum with things, but a museum about thingness – possible strategies for a deepened engagement with materiality At the “It’s Not What You Think”-workshop, we sat an eclectic mix of 40 museum professionals, philosophers, artists, historians, STS scholars, social scientists, science communicators and much more, down at 4 tables with 4 groups of objects – a collection of human remains, the Carlsberg collection, a group of various metal objects and selected objects from the blind historical collections. We gave them only the most minimal of prompts: What would you do with these objects? Practically before we had stopped talking, they converged on the objects. They talked and laughed and were frightened and took the things apart and played with them and came up with innovative exhibition design ideas and wild science fiction plans for future exhibitions and talked about digital labels that would change in front of the visitors and about surgical exhibitions that you could only see while carrying either a scalpel in your hand or a delicate flesh-like object and they talked about the origins and uses of the objects, where they were designed, who used them, their ethical implications, they talked about how to make the visitor feel what it wo...
Source: Biomedicine on Display - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Tags: artefacts collections INWYT material studies museum studies Source Type: blogs