QUESTIONING MUSEUMS One architectural practice is helping museums and exhibitions to transform and become more inclusive Nabeel Essa
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FFICE 24|7 ARCHITECTURE was established in 2002 and has worked on over 35 museum and exhibition projects. The practice has unique curatorial and design skills in combining spatial understanding with new ways of interpretation. The practice critically and spatially reimagines museums, exhibitions and architectural projects, and curates and designs to engage, empower and, in the making, to transform. Through experience in working with museums, we see the need for museums to shift from housing problematic and exclusionary displays of collections to become spaces of inclusion and engagement. This shift away from the notion of museum as archive
1. All from One, PAST OFFICE 24|7 Architecture and Trace @papercut_za
allows for the experience of embodied narratives. Museums need to offer spaces where we can imagine transformations. The new museum must be a space of unmaking and unbinding history. In the local museum space of paleo-science, the task of engaging the content is complex as explained by Professor Esterhuysen: “Resistance to human evolution in South Africa has resulted from a long and complex history of racism and inequality buttressed by both science and religion”1.
TACTILE AND INTERACTIVE DISCOVERY
At the Experience Lab in Maropeng, the usual body to exhibit relationship is literally and performatively destabilised. The visitor is given agency and can directly interact with the content. This is a conscious design strategy to start to unbind the constructs of problematic historic narratives. Experience Lab is a playful and abstract reconstruction of a generic cave formation of the kind found below ground at the Cradle of Humankind. The innovative architectural abstraction allows this creative artifice to become an edutainment experience where the science laboratory meets and conflates with the nearby sites of paleo-science discoveries. Breccia, casts of well-known fossils, objects from a cave wash-in are all embedded in the landscape with discreet prompts and labels inset into the floor panels allowing for an explorative experience where the visitor finds, collates and forms a narrative understanding of
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ARCHITECTURE SA
J U N E / J U LY / A U G U S T
2021
