MUSEUMS AS PLATFORMS IN A POST COVID WORLD

 Beyond Tradition | Erika Serodio

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The many closures and lockdowns of this past year have forced museums to literally think outside their boxes. Museums have long been considered containers for the many artifacts and objects that tell stories about culture. As museums lost access to those containers this year, their storehouses became just that – places for objects, not people. There is mounting pressure to rethink the ways that these institutions engage with culture. A shift from object-based collections to visitor-centred programming is not a new idea in museums. However, a shift from the museum container to museum as platform has become an essential idea for a post-covid world.

Platforms can take us many places | Sources

Earlier this week I attended a zoom panel that was part of the Bihar Museum Biennale. The title of the panel was “Container vs Platform: Museum as an open space for conversation.” The panelists spoke of the importance of this idea in visitor research studies and how not so long ago, the idea of museums being for people was radical. The shift in thinking throughout the last few decades has been gradually moving in this direction, but the pandemic has heightened the need for urgent change in the museum sector.

The Cooper Hewitt responded to this critical moment for museums by convening with over a dozen museum professionals to create a toolkit titled “Tools and Approaches for Transforming Museum Experience.” In the toolkit, the authors describe the necessity and direction for change as follows:

“The rapidly shifting conditions of this past year have disrupted the sense of safety and familiarity offered by the creation and re-creation of formulaic museum experiences, but have not yet resulted in the kind of self-aware examination necessary for museums to break out of the hierarchical paradigms reinforced by those formulas. How might we interrogate the idea that expertise should be seated squarely in the hands of museum experts, or that audiences should learn from us instead of the other way around?”

Museums all over the world are finally asking their communities, their visitors, what they want to engage with and how. The Bentway has recently released a new initiative for its community called Digital and/as Public Space. The project, still in its development phase, invites anyone to contribute ideas on what it could and should be through a digital platform called Are.na. (You need to make an account to access it, but it’s free and easy and I highly recommend checking it out.)

Many museums have been transitioning to the platform mentality long before physical institutions were forced to close their doors. And some museums have formed without any building at all. Myseum of Toronto, Toronto’s museum without walls, creates programming and exhibits that incorporate the community at every step. Everyone is invited to share ideas, stories, art, music, and artifacts with the museum for its future programming. The Myseum website claims that "the more you get involved, the better the experience of Myseum will be." 

Places for people Source

The future of museums is unclear right now but it's exciting. The pandemic has created an opportunity for a wild reimagining of cultural institutions that will centre on visitors like never before. And we certainly aren't short on ideas.