Project Value

African people have continued to show that tradition and technology can coexist alongside one another and go hand-in-hand on a daily basis. Social media and the internet have allowed and provided deeper first-person connections that move these static objects beyond the eyes.

Re-Contextualization of Historical Narration

Globally, museums are increasingly tasked with re-contextualizing themselves and their historical entanglements with racism, colonialism, homophobia, and other forms of oppression. As museums try to craft new narratives, they must wrestle with the question: What happens when the museum itself becomes an artifact? How can problematic histories be made visible, and how might justice be served? What new narratives can be crafted, and to what ends? What could they be? What forms do they take? This project partners with the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to explore these questions. Focusing on the existing "Man in Africa" Hall, which opened to the public in 1968, we will prototype ways to contextualize and understand the hall. How might visitors to this now 60-year-old space participate in a range of questions and narratives about the people and places that created the hall, those who the hall depicts, and larger questions about museums more generally? Moving beyond typical questions of exhibition design, this studio will draw from archival documents, current collections, and the hall itself, to explore design techniques of the "meta:" re-contextualizing existing material by adding visual layers, leveraging technology, crafting commentary, and curating slices, rather than starting from scratch.

And our project is adding to the Pokot Diorama experience by bringing the flat diorama to life through the addition of two side screens as well as a projection with an audio experience. We are focusing on showing the blend of technology and how it can add new experiences to the diorama.

Disclosure

We would like to create co-curated content with the local community to show the peoples' perspectives about what Pokot in Kenya looks like today. Those co-curations will be featured in the filtered social media experience. We are collaborating with the famous Pokot athlete Tegla Loroupe as well as the Pokot Community Center. And the experience will be shown alongside in our designs.

Design Details