Posts tagged outreach

The Wien Museum (Vienna City Museum) is again offering the tour “African Vienna: Angelo Soliman in Vienna” which seeks to highlight the visible and invisible history of Africans in Vienna. I did the tour last year in a slightly different format when it was offered as part of the accompanying programme events to the Angelo Soliman exhibition (for me report on the exhibition, see here). Led by two men - Walter Sauer and Amadou Lamine-Sarr, both historians at the University of Vienna - who were able to bring different perspectives to the tour. Lamine-Sarr is originally from Senegal and so was able to bring in interesting examples and parallels from his own experience as an African man in Vienna. 

If you are in Vienna and your German is up to it, the tour is on June 29th at 5pm. 

Other tours through the city on offer at the moment include:

• Invisible traces of Klimt in Hietzing and Penzing
• Tour of places involved in the widespread housing protest occupations in the 1980s

and last, but by no means least:

• Public ammenities: a tour of the historical and eccentric public toilets in Vienna in their historical context 

The book liner notes read that ” Letting Go? investigates path-breaking public history practices at a time when the traditional expertise of museums seems challenged at every turn – by the Web and digital media, by community based programming, by new trends in oral history, and by contemporary artists.”   The book is divided into sections or themes, each containing a diverse set of thought pieces (method and theory), case studies, and conversations (application dialogues).  The authors are leading authorities actively engaged in their subject area.  Letting Go? is a very applied presentation.

• The first theme Virtually Breaking Down: Authority and the Web
• The second theme Throwing Open the Doors: Communities as Curators
• The third theme of the volume addresses popular oral history projects such as Story Corps.

Archaeology, Museums and Outreach blog interviews Bamburgh’s Rachael Barnwell and their new outreach projects and initiatives, within Bamburgh and wider still.

I found this question and answer very interesting:

AMO: “What has been your experience in being inclusive of descendant voices in Bamburgh? Is this at all a contested issue in British archaeology?”

RB: “Firstly, descendant voices are not as central an issue in British archaeology as in other parts of the world especially when compared to places like the US and Canada. However, this is not to say that the issue is non-existent. Recent archaeologies of minority communities and groups within the UK have had to engage with descendant voices.

“In addition, the museums into which archaeological collections enter are for the most part very conscious of the collections’ source / originating communities, both in antiquity and in the present day and must navigate the complexities of representation in negotiation with these groups. Having said that, with regards to the Bamburgh area in particular, we’ve had no issues at all to date. The site and the associated human remains from the Bowl Hole have not been at all controversial in terms of descendant voices.”

Ask a Curator was born out of a one day event called ‘Follow a museum’ which took place on the micro-blogging website Twitter on February 1st.

The project looked to increase the number of people following museums on Twitter, and over the course of one day approximately 9,000 messages using the hashtag #followamuseum spread around the world, trending in several countries.

Museums and galleries spoke very positively about this one day event, with many gaining hundreds of followers. Ask a Curator looks to build on this success by once again staging a one day event using social media, but this time we will not just ask people to follow a museum, we want them to engage with participating venues by asking curators questions.

While many venues will already encourage their audiences to ask curators questions, both in the venue and on social media, we believe that by coming together as a sector for a special one day event, we can make more noise and get people who might not be looking to engage with museums to get involved.

You can participate in Ask a Curator by getting a member of your staff to answer questions from the public on September 4th 2010. They could decide to do this through Twitter, Facebook, in your venue or even all three. This website will be transformed in to a hub for those looking for participating museums and galleries.