The Guardian view on museums and Covid-19: collecting powerful memories

It is not enough, wrote Iorwerth Peate in 1948, “to show and preserve the things that have been; it is necessary to trace their organic continuity with the things that are and the things that shall be”. The Llanbrynmair-born poet and scholar was one of the founders of the St Fagans National Museum of History in Cardiff, which, along with other UK institutions, is calling on the public to document their experiences during the Covid-19 pandemic. The museum is inviting people to describe the lows and anxieties of this unsettling and frightening time. They will also be asked to photograph meaningful objects from their homes and communities for an online gallery. Some artefacts – such as hand-painted signs, the fruits of everyday creativity – will eventually be acquired for the museum’s collection.

The V&A in London has already been building up an online exhibition called Pandemic Objects, with curators exploring the significance of some of the potent physical symbols of lockdown life, such as disposable gloves and homemade face masks. Now, with its remit of graphic design and illustration in mind, it has put out a call for signs

made during the pandemic, with children’s rainbow banners especially earmarked for the V&A Museum of Childhood. Again, a number of objects will end up in the museum’s collection.

When we look back at this strange and transformative period, it is likely that simple handmade items, the folk art of the pandemic, will be at least as eloquent as the official archive. That there is power in the ordinary – that the seemingly commonplace can be transfigured – is obvious from collections across the world. At the Jewish Museum in Berlin, modest and simple objects provide the most vivid records of lived lives. The National Museum of African American History in Washington built up much of its collection through public call-outs; many of its artefacts are apparently humble things, arising from lives lived in poverty, but chart an important, often hidden, history of slavery and its aftermath.

Collecting the ordinary artefacts of extraordinary times is exactly what museums ought to be doing – and indeed have been doing for decades. National Museum Wales is drawing on its own precedent: in the 1930s it sent out its Questionnaire on Welsh Folk Art, aimed at charting responses to life in the aftermath of the Great Depression. Held by the St Fagans museum, the resulting documents form a valuable historical record.

Museums operate on a deep timescale; their purview is the sweep of history. In planning these Covid-19 collections, they are offering the kind of perspective – and hope – that it can be hard to find in the face of daily difficulties. One day, these projects imply, the public will be back in museums. People will gather together to look at displays of artefacts in order to recall and understand the past. The pandemic may change us. But it will eventually slip into history.