RECYCLING STORIES THROUGH ELECTRONIC DEVICES
Discovery phase activities
Museum visit to Pergamon Museum, Berlin
EXPLORING THE FAMILIAR
IN THE MUSEUM & AT HOME
Objectives
1. Discovering yourself by reconnecting with artefacts of your culture of origin
2. Discovering how your own culture impacts other cultures
3. Getting familiar with the museum landscape in the city you live in
Time frame
240 minutes
Material needed
Cell phones to take pictures and videos
Objects, artefacts, ornements at home
Metro tickets
Museum tickets
Tips
To animate the museum visit, it is useful to have language skills (of participants and of the host country), a previous knowledge of the museum and art history, a knowledge of the artefacts and a knowledge of the cultures that are displayed through artworks.
When living abroad, often we are not aware of all those treasures from our culture of origin that local museums are hiding. So we don‘t know either how much these objects and artworks are appreciated by many of the local people. Discovering them together with the context in which they and showcased can be encouraging to make initiatives ourselves to create dialogue with local people through visual creativity and to dare to use our own cultural references.
In this museum visit, you will explore what is familiar for your target group (Here, the Turkish partimonium).
Ask participants to take pictures and videos of the artefacts that speak to them, that have an interesting pattern or color, or remind them of their own culture or childhood.
While visiting the exhibitions, share ideas about what a
museum can do to preserve artefacts.
Concentrate on the ancient artefacts of the region where the participants come from, to connect with them and to see that the city of Berlin has a part of the museum dedicated to their own cultural background.
Your home as a museum
Objectives
1. Discover yourself in your personal environment, documenting aesthetic elements and symbols from home
2. Rediscovering elements of visual culture of origin
3. Inciting analogical thinking, linking daily patterns to artworks
4. Learning skills in concise verbal expression
Time frame
For this individual exercise you can give to the participants a few days up to one week.
Material needed
Cell phones to take pictures and videos
Objects and artefacts at home
Ask the participants to walk through ones own home as if it was a museum and rediscover what they own and think about where they bought it, why they bought it and if it
has a connection to their culture.
Ask them to collect objects that have pattern or ornaments connected to their home culture and/or to the culture in which they currently live in.
You can also turn the activity into a story-telling exercise by asking the participants to write down in1or 2 sentences (in local language or in language of origin) about:
Where does the picture, objects, ornament come from and how it is related in their view to the photos they previously took at the museum.
Recommendations to combine "Exploring the Familiar" with other activities: