The Chinese ceramics display and the sort of reinterpretation of that display
is part of the refocusing and rethinking of the World Cultures gallery. One of the key points of
that whole project is to consider what it means to display objects in an Anthropology gallery. So
the way that we see objects and the way that we present them is shaped by colonial stereotypes.
If you go to many museums that display Chinese ceramics you will see this dynastic display.
When I first came to see the World Museum's Chinese ceramics gallery,
I guess we all had this feeling that the original display case was something that
you could walk past quite swiftly. You know, you might take in the objects on a cursory glance,
read some of the historical information in the labels, which was all about you know,
the type of porcelain wear and the colour of the glaze and so on, but maybe didn't clue you
in to some of the more fascinating human aspects of the history of these objects.
Before we knew what we wanted to really do with this gallery, we were contacted by the University
of Liverpool in a research project called TIDE, which was focused on researching
the journeys and sort of the trans-cultural ways that objects moved between one place and another,
and how people also moved between between cultures.
We really wanted to bring out the historical connections between
England and China in this project and more specifically to Liverpool as a port city
and we thought that the museum's Chinese ceramics was a really ideal way to do that.
At that time TIDE had a writer in residence called Sarah Howe and through the TIDE team
we thought it'd be a wonderful project for Sarah to come and work with us
and rethink the interpretation of a small group of objects.
Poetry felt like a logical route in really, poetry being an art form that's so compressed,
but also very much involved with the senses and the sensory realm. I wanted to start almost from
the imagination as a way of of looking at what the objects would have seen, the rooms they would
have been in, the vantage point they would have had. And that was also the place that we began
with the school students when we ran the writing workshops.
What I think makes this project quite distinct is its commitment to public engagement across
all of its strands. We are particularly interested in reviewing curriculum in schools
and how issues of empire are taught
and I think that this allowed us to do that very creatively by bringing on Sarah's work as well.
We wanted to find a way to bring young visitors into the gallery,
so we got in touch with Birkenhead High School and a group of the students came over to the museum,
came to the stores, and came to work with Sarah on both looking closely at objects, but also
imagining what their life stories might have been. They then worked with Sarah on producing their own
poem from that first person perspective about the object. And we had the most amazing responses.
The students were just so talented in that short space of time, it was quite extraordinary
actually, the way that we could give them some historical documents sort of telling them about
the journeys that these porcelains would have made, watch them listening pretty wrapped to this
stuff and then set them off to write their own poems. The prompts that I gave them were about
imagining the voice of the objects. If this thing could speak what would it say,
my eyes were opened actually by the writing that the students produced.
I was sort of heartened by their response because it made me feel like actually maybe this
was something that would be quite exciting for a museum visitor, the students and poems will form a
digital archive on our website of what is possible if you use the gallery for creative writing.
We decided that the John Moores University MA in Immersive Arts program should come and work
on the gallery. In doing that, we've arrived at a point where we have this
really incredible immersive experience.
The World Museum gave us an actual dedicated lab space in the gallery itself and that was
so important for us for this co-design process to be deeply involved and working with the artifacts
themselves, we can playfully design and try out new things very rapidly and we can get feedback
if it's going to work in the space. We can get feedback from the curators if it works for them
and we can try out different configurations of these technologies very, very quickly,
rather than some long design process of weeks and weeks.
The beautiful idea behind the curatorial approach was the idea that these objects
are actually agents that have stories and dreams and so we developed a set of
processes a set of approaches that reflected and told about those dreams in different ways.
What's special about this project for us was how imaginative and how open the curators were.
They weren't just asking us to create some app or some software, they were generally interested in
what were the possibilities beyond what they knew themselves and we were
particularly interested in this idea of going beyond the victorian cabinet of curiosities
towards something that's about imagination and play in the visitors contact with culture, so
we're not just telling them a given story, we're inviting them to imagine their own stories in
relation to these artifacts and it was a perfect combination of this open curatorial process,
this radically different form of storytelling approach to curation, and the playful design
processes and technologies that our students brought so vividly to life for the project.
I'm Catalina from Meaningful Magic, I'm a master's student in Immersive Arts at
Liverpool John Moores University. The course arranged for us to have a collaboration with
National Museums Liverpool and the World Wultures gallery here at the World Museum.
The part that I played was to absorb all of the wonderful work that had been done
right until the point where I came in and to try and weave it into a story,
essentially. It's been wonderful to see how the storyboard translated into
the real display. It aims to provide an experience that connects people through a topic or topics
that we all have in common. Themes such as journeys, survival, transformation, which is,
is life, at the end of the day, so we've got these wonderful objects that are sharing their journeys
with us. I think that would be a very personal thing to each person visiting the display.
When I came on board the project, it was at a storyboard stage and I was able to
then take that storyboard and run with it and start to bring it to life through
motion graphics and animation. Immediately it really, really excited me as a project,
it's fantastic to work with such interesting objects and artifacts and the poetry that had
been put to those was really, really exciting, as well it gave a really exciting palette to
begin to work with from a motion graphics point of view and to really bring to life.
I think this project is really special because it just brings together such a huge collaborative
approach. I hope that audiences walking into the space will have a real magical wow moment and
I really hope as well that it'll enable audiences to see the artifacts in the
display in a completely new light. It's really exciting to see it on the walls
now and actually kind of see it full full scale in real life. It's a really exciting process.
Adlib were mainly brought on board to look after the technical elements and the set construction
and the rigging, working alongside Bec and Catalina and seeing their creative vision
what we have created is a really immersive 360 degree projection space.
I think what's really special about this project is you're not walking into
an exhibition that's full of video, the exhibition on this floor is kind of very
traditional but you walk into this space that we've created which is very digital
and brings the the objects and the poetry to life and that adds a wow and amaze factor to the space.
The stories of transformation and of survival and of the fact that these small brittle
fragile objects can survive hundreds of years and traveling thousands of miles resonates really
deeply with people's own sense of how we move through the world and our own stories of survival.
I think we're all rather astounded by where we've come from this very traditional glass box,
to this place where the objects are truly speaking for themselves.