Bringing Dark History to Light

In the past few months, I had two interconnected experiences related to Belene, a forced labor camp in Bulgaria.

Belene was a prison camp in northern Bulgaria on an island in the Danube River that was active from approximately 1949 to 1987.  Belene was one of the places where the Bulgarian regime would send dissidents or just about anyone who disagreed publicly with the policies of Bulgaria's socialist state.

This past March, I had the opportunity to tour with a local volunteer guide the site of the former Belene camp, a remote natural area filled with decaying buildings that are slowly being interpreted and restored.  It's a bit of a strange experience since a penitentiary still operates in the western part of the island, while the eastern part is a managed natural reserve filled with pelicans and other wildlife.

Of course, being in a place where so much human tragedy occurred is a deeply moving experience. But how do you interpret the stories from such a remote place? And how do you push against many people's reluctance to bring up such painful memories from Bulgaria's past?

Enter the Sofia Platform Foundation, a non-governmental organization. One part of the Foundation's mission is focused on "promoting remembrance and dealing with the communist past through historical dialogue and education."

To that end, I recently visited a pop-up exhibition entitled “Belene—A Bulgarian Resistance Story” in Washington, D.C. The exhibition drew upon hours of video interviews with Nikola Daskalov, a Belene camp survivor. The exhibit experience provided visitors with the unique opportunity to have a "conversation" with Mr. Daskalov through an interactive AI-driven video system.

The exhibition is one part of the Belene Camp project < www.belene.camp >, an effort of the Sofia Platform Foundation, with the support of the America for Bulgaria Foundation, to preserve the memory of Bulgaria's totalitarian past using state-of-the-art technology.

And isn't bringing the past, even the painful and uncomfortable past, into the light of the present in new and engaging ways an essential part of our museum work?  

I urge you to visit all of the organizations' websites linked above to learn more about their important work, including opportunities to "converse" with Belene survivors via a Web interface.

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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Being Braver

I have been studying Bulgarian for the last year or so with an excellent (and extremely patient) tutor based in Sofia, named Billyana.  The other day, during our Zoom lesson, Billyana reminded me to "Be Brave!"

For me, learning a new language as an adult is paradoxical.  You need to acknowledge, right upfront, that you will be making mistakes -- even if you don't want to make those mistakes.  It may be that to really learn a new language, you need to make LOTS of mistakes! And it is important to learn from those mistakes.

So, when Billyana tells me to "Be Brave," it's a shorthand way of encouraging me to dive in and do my best and make mistakes. можело!

Being "braver' carries over to other aspects of life, of course, including museum work. Your first attempt at creating an exhibition or museum program is unlikely to be "perfect." You'll likely need to encounter a few setbacks before you end up with a really great program or exhibit.

Maybe that's why I enjoy doing exhibit prototyping so much. Prototyping actually gives you permission to make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, and bring "brave" ideas and energy to your work.

I hope this post encourages you to be "braver" this week in your own creative work!

 

Благодаря Биляна!

 

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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Don't Forget Your Workshop Suitcase!

I recently helped present a workshop on prototyping and exhibit development at the annual InterActivity conference organized by the Association of Children’s Museums.

Ably assisted by my co-presenters, Joe Cook and Blake Wigdahl, the three of us touched on how to move from basic exhibit ideas to testing and evaluation to the creation of the finished products. I even got to reveal the connection between ELVIS and museum exhibit prototyping! (Check out this related post here.)

A great workshop not only requires careful planning, but you also need some “stuff “to help take your stories out of a PowerPoint presentation on the screen and into the real world. I always bring a suitcase full of prototype examples and exhibit pieces to pass around and to help illustrate my main talking points. That combination of "stories" and "stuff" really creates a memorable social learning experience for your workshop participants.

So, the next time you are thinking about how to share your stories during a workshop or presentation, don’t forget to pack some extra ‘stuff” for the road!

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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Ouch! Dealing with the Unexpected

I'm on my way to present at the Association of Children's Museums annual InterActivity Conference in Madison, Wisconsin.  

Of course, I've done a lot of preparation for both my presentation and trip, but one thing I didn't anticipate was falling and breaking my shoulder the day before my departure. OUCH!

How can we best deal with the unexpected in our museum work and in the rest of our lives? Two main things stand out, I think.

1) FLEXIBILITY It's okay to acknowledge that you may have to shift from your original intentions. It's good to come up with a workable "Plan B" ( or C or D). 

2) SUPPORT SYSTEMS  The people around you (whether coworkers, project partners, or family members) are there to support you.  Don't be afraid or too proud to ask for their help.

Here's hoping you get to show your flexibility and flourish with support when the unexpected arises -- and in a less dramatic way than a broken bone!

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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Is Your Museum In A Rut?

Why is there such a desire to touch things in an art museum? Does all that concentrated looking create a pent-up demand to use our other senses? Or do we long to get a better sense of how an artist created something and the materials they used? 

I was thinking about these things after a recent Art Museum visit.  But then I took a step back and wondered why so many Art Museums and galleries are so often composed of repeating "white boxes" for their displays.

I don't mean to pick on the Art Museum in question, but the galleries there (and in many other art-oriented museums) often seem to lose track of the intellectual and design values of variety in their exhibit environments. Visitors to Art Museums are often faced with the classic "pure white box" style gallery repeated over and over. Within each pure white space, artworks are arranged linearly or in grid patterns on the walls or floors. Couldn't an occasional gallery wall be painted red or blue? 

Different genres of museums tend to get into these stylistic and design "ruts."

My children once remarked on a History Museum exhibition as being a "bunch of old brown things" because the furniture, textiles, and documents on display were all old and brown! The visual rhythm of "brown" and "old" became a sort of unvarying rut that overwhelmed the designers' ultimate content goals. Each object in every glass case was also set on sepia or earth-toned backgrounds.

Have some museum genres become like particular radio stations for both exhibition designers and visitors?  Tune into pristine white spaces on the Art Museum channel and the dimly lit galleries full of "old brown stuff" on the History Museum station?

Are the typical design "ruts" of many science centers -- filled with bright colors and wildly varying architectural forms really conducive to thinking deeply about scientific content?

How can we, as exhibition creators, push ourselves out of the ruts and vary our exhibition design approaches to create more interesting museum spaces and content-driven experiences for our visitors?

Please share your own experiences or examples of "rut-breaking" exhibition spaces in the "Comments" section below!

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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On the Road Exhibit Inspiration

I'm currently on the road in the Bay Area of California, but wanted to give a quick tip of the hat to the California Academy of Sciences in San Francisco for a super interactive element in their "Color of Life" exhibition.

Sets of colored strings are strung in front of video monitors. When you pluck one (or more) strings, you immediately get a visual burst of colored dots on the screen behind the strings accompanied by some musical tones.  Shortly after that, a graphic with a brief text message shares some interesting information about how the single color (or color combination) you created by twanging the correspondingly-colored string shows up in Nature. 

(See the image below and check out this YouTube video link of my wife playing with the exhibit .)

Frankly, I loved everything about this interactive.  It created an unusual interface with tactile, visual, and auditory feedback.  It was intuitive and inspired experimentation (what if I pluck more than one string simultaneously?)  It offered a phygital (physical+digital) interactive component that actually made sense in the context of the exhibition theme.  It also offered bite-sized and interesting pieces of content, and it was FUN!

What more can you ask for from an interactive museum experience?

So, BRAVO Cal Academy!  If you'd like to find out more about the "Color of Life" exhibition, check out the exhibition webpage and this "Creating a Colorful Exhibit video.

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Paul Orselli writes the posts on ExhibiTricks. Paul likes to combine interesting people, ideas, and materials to make exhibits (and entire museums!) with his company POW! (Paul Orselli Workshop, Inc.) Let's work on a project together!

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