Museums want people to share their pandemic experiences
The Museum of Vancouver wants people to share their experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic — and so does the Royal B.C. Museum in Victoria.
The two institutions launched separate projects this week to document how people are working their way through the crisis.
The Museum of Vancouver’s #isolatingTogetherMOV is a “crowdsourcing and narrative collection campaign” that looks to collect and share “videos, writings, hobbies and more on Instagram and Twitter.”
The Royal B.C. Museum’s COVID-19, Collecting For Our Time is “preparing to collect perspectives, photos and objects that will help tell the story of this moment for future generations.”
The Museum of Vancouver’s Lorenzo Schober said MOV is doing “more of a social campaign” than a traditional exhibition.
“We’re looking for a glimpse of day-to-day life in isolation,” said Schober. “People’s lives have changed dramatically within the last month — we want to collect stories so we can tell an informed history of what was happening at this time,” he said.
This could mean most anything, including “anyone that posts a new skill that they’re learning, an object that they’ve reconnected with, cooking that they’ve been doing while they’re in isolation, feelings that they’ve been having.
“There’s already groups out there (doing this), people are already posting. We’re asking them to include a hashtag, #isolatingtogethermov, and it will be included in a social wall within the MOV website, which is a central hub where we’re collecting stories.”
The Royal B.C. Museum said its project “reflects the evolving nature of museums as spaces for reflection and commentary about significant social and environmental changes.”
The Royal B.C. Museum’s CEO, Jack Lohman, said “The pandemic and the resulting directives from government and health authorities have changed much of what we experience in our daily lives, from the outdoors, to technology, to even something as simple as grocery shopping.
“By providing their insights, B.C. citizens will have the opportunity to describe how they feel history should be written.”
The #isolatingTogetherMOV project is already up on Instagram and Twitter, and also has a Facebook page. Posts include a photo at Kits Beach where someone “found my perfect social distance reading spot,” and a photo of the Burrard Bridge that’s completely devoid of cars.
The bad news for museums is that they’ve been closed by the pandemic and have no idea when they will be allowed to reopen.
The Museum of Vancouver is looking to do an online version of its Acts of Resistance exhibition, which opened in February.
“It was a collection of the seven banners from the Trans Mountain pipeline protests that hung underneath the Second Narrows Bridge, the Ironworkers Memorial Bridge,” explains Schober.
“We accessioned all of them and hung them up in the gallery space. It was put on with Greenpeace Canada, and is a focus on the artists who were involved. They’re all Indigenous artists.”
The COVID-19 crisis also means the museum may delay its next show, A Seat at the Table. Schober said it will look at Chinese Canadian immigration “through a really unique lens of food culture.”
It sounds intriguing: Each room in the exhibition will be designed like a different Chinese restaurant. But construction of the exhibition has been put on hold during the COVID-19 crisis.