Artifacts of Our Time: How Museums Tell Future Generations the Story of the Pandemic

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

The rapid spread of the COVID-19 virus has made adjustments to everyday life, and many things have appeared in everyday life that were not so widely used before. At the beginning of 2020, museums and historical societies in different countries began to collect a new collection of things and photographs that in the future will help tell people about the coronavirus pandemic and human attempts to cope with a dangerous disease.

When people started talking about the spread of the coronavirus in New York, hand sanitizer began to disappear from store shelves. Buyers literally swept it off the shelves. New York Historical Society museum director Margie Hofer received a letter announcing a shortage of the most popular preservative, Purell. Many began to view the alcohol-containing product as a kind of talisman, and the museum staff decided to purchase a bottle of Purell for the collection in order to later tell the story of the pandemic.

After many institutions, including museums, closed their doors to visitors to prevent the spread of COVID-19, employees switched to telecommuting and began to collect items that are significant for the current pandemic or make a list of those things that can then enter. to the collection of the history of the pandemic.

Of course, it will definitely include protective face masks and latex gloves. At the same time, all over the world, not medical masks and respirators, but fabric masks, which are sewn most often at home, have become widespread. Indeed, in the United States, there have been repeated calls to leave special protective equipment to those who need them most: the doctors who are on the first line of the fight against a dangerous disease.

In Cologne, in the city museum, the very first exhibit related to the pandemic was a city poster describing measures to prevent and combat coronavirus. In general, many German museums urged fellow citizens not to throw away items related to COVID-19, but to carefully pack them in boxes and send them by mail to museums.

In Germany, the universities of Hamburg, Giesen and Bochum have initiated the launch of the online project Coronarchiv, so far only in the German version. Anyone can take part in it by sending newspapers and magazines covering the pandemic, or simply a quote from a periodical about the coronavirus. Photo and video materials, personal diaries and everyday stories about the pandemic are also accepted. The creators of the project even accept recordings of voice messages, poems and songs on this topic.

The New York Times began publishing photographs under the collective title "The Great Empty". Photographers from all over the world send their pictures of deserted cities, beaches, parks to the editorial office. Satellite images deserve special attention. The sheer scale of the void makes a truly lasting impression.

The Vienna Museum was one of the first to collect its collection of artifacts from the time of the pandemic, and more than a thousand people responded to its call to help employees almost instantly. Museum director Matti Bunzl, an Austrian anthropologist and cultural scientist, proudly posts photos of new exhibits on the Internet, including a completely adorable knitted toy depicting the coronavirus.

The Smithsonian National Museum of American History is still only making lists of their wishes for the collection. Museum employees know for sure: they would certainly like to receive an artificial lung ventilation apparatus and various types of tests for covid-19 as exhibits. Director Benjamin Filen notes: now people urgently need them, but later, when the need for these things disappears, they can be forgotten. Therefore, Benjamin Filen asked the doctors to postpone several samples for them.

The museum will not refuse screenshots of remote lectures that have lost their relevance due to the transfer of educational institutions to distance learning. Or from a photograph of a hastily jotted down with a marker or even a homework scribbled on the kitchen table. Benjamin Filen is confident that there will be many more examples of how people lived during the quarantine.

Museum employees are also working to collect a collection of charlatan methods of treatment offered on the Internet, including samples of "miracle pills" and dietary supplements. With a request to help in this, the director of the museum turned to the Office for Quality Control of Medicines.

In anticipation of the arrival of future exhibits, staff are now happy to accept photographs taken by volunteers on short forays for food or medicine.

He began work on his own collection and the London Museum. Beatrice Belén, senior curator at the London Museum, notes that they want to collect a range of objects, both physical and digital, that could reflect the physical and emotional reactions of Londoners to the pandemic. Therefore, the museum will accept any items, from clothes to photographs of haircuts. All this will later be processed in a special way, systematized and presented in an exhibition that will tell about how London dealt with the emergency.

British museum group Science plans to collect records of medical, scientific and cultural reactions to COVID-19. At the same time, it is planned that the future collection may include a letter from British Prime Minister Boris Johnson about the outbreak of coronavirus and experimental magnets that accidentally got into the scientist's nose while trying to create an antivirus device.

Many museums around the world turn to fellow citizens for help in collecting collections and assure: future generations will be grateful for information about the pandemic and how people experienced this time. And they are asked to preserve and donate to them everything related to COVID-19, be it digital content or physical objects.

Many people are concerned about the situation with the spread of coronavirus, but there are also those who consider this an excellent opportunity for creative implementation. Why not, for example, an ordinary protective mask not become an original addition to a stylish look? Famous designers, and behind them, and simple craftswomen did not miss the opportunity to come up with original models of masks, proving that even this purely protective piece of fabric can be made into a fashion accessory.