‘A museum must never be seen as a dead space where old things are stored’

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He has designed a state-of-the-art display for a 2,000-year-old Egyptian mummy in Hyderabad; equipped a new museum in Kerala with a hologram that lets visitors “talk” to late CM EK Nayanar; and created an environmental monitoring system to help researchers track the condition of a rudimentary research station in Antarctica set up by an Australian explorer in 1912.

Vinod Daniel, 60, is a museologist, chair of AusHeritage (a network of cultural heritage management organisations established by the Australian government) and member of the Board of the International Council of Museums.

In February, he moderated a global summit titled Reimagining Museums in India, hosted by the government of India, with representatives from around the world. So, what does the future look like? What needs to change, and what are the risks associated with some of that change? Excerpts from an interview.

Museums are changing, quite dramatically. What do you think is driving this shift?

It’s a result of the pandemic. Museums had a fantastic model in the West where a certain core income came from the government or the city and the rest was raised from tourists and visitors, but all of that has been challenged. It is possible that this will change in the coming years, but for the time being, international visitors will be limited. Even internationally renowned institutions will now need to cater to local communities rather than international communities, so it needs a bit of a rethink on how to do that.

If they can compensate by taking the museum to where the people are — the malls, the parks — they may be able to double their audience, even when the world eventually returns to normalcy.

A state museum could, for instance, operate through arms… an arm at the railway station. A small rotating exhibition, nothing too grand. But there is definitely a need to change the way museums reach out to the general public.

Where does India stand, when it comes to reaching out differently?

In the 1960s and 1970s, the general approach to museology in India was to collect a large number of objects, label them and display them. Indian museums continue to do that to a large extent. As a result, despite fantastic collections, the experience people get out of them is where the difficulty lies.

Now, planners are seeing that it’s all about how well you can tell the story and evoke a sense of awe that stays with the visitor after they have left. In this regard, technology plays a key role. Where everything was once a one-way street, at the most basic level, something like a social media feed now allows for two-way interaction.

The one mistake many people make is that they jump right into technology. If technology is assisting in communication, we must first ensure that the message is well-framed.

Could we overdo it? Is there such a thing as too much technology?

Museums have certain core functions, and if you can use technology to help with those functions — whether it’s taking a living version of history into classrooms, interpreting history, demonstrating history — that’s fantastic. Think of a museum of natural history with modules on biodiversity and climate change. That would be so relevant to contemporary times.

The tools are plentiful now. One can look at ancient objects in 3D, zoom in and out or rotate them, on a website. While nothing can replace the physical experience, I would say that any experience is preferable to none at all.

You’ve said that something like a café can be crucial. Why?

The 15-to-35 age group is one that most museums have lost out on. With that age group, if you make it more exciting for them to come, bring their peers, sit and have a coffee, that could help. The average college student shouldn’t look at it as a dead space where old things are stored. Museums could also stay open for longer, to accommodate the office-goer after work.

I recall sitting at a large museum retreat where they discussed how museums could compete with amusement parks. Of course, amusement parks are pure entertainment; museums have collections that can be used to entertain. But you need entertaining activities to entice people to come to you.

What are the things that some of the best-loved museums around the world have got right?

One of the things that’s changing is that museums are becoming their community’s anchor, their cultural centre. Some Pacific countries such as Vanuatu and New Caledonia even call them cultural centres. These institutes have performance spaces, events, meeting places, and they have spaces where ancestral things are housed. The community feels a sense of ownership over it all. The centre keeps adding to contemporary collections. In this way, connections between the local community and museum are fostered.

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