Museum Solidarity Lobby

Description

Museum Solidarity Lobby [MSL] is an interactive installation, framing a discursive space for thinking about the future of national museums in post-national societies. The project links the museum crisis in the Balkans to the closing of cultural institutions in other places across the world. I propose the notion of “lobbying” as an artistic strategy to reclaim the museum for its constituency, making it a site where we can begin to reclaim the lost notion of public virtue. MSL consists of physical installations, hosting activist interventions and reflections. The physical installation is a hybrid of a barricade and a display system that can be assembled in different places in site-specific ways. Exterior installations include barricade elements that obstruct access to the host institutions’ entrance while emitting sound. The interior installation simulates a museum lobby assembled out of recycled museum shipping crates. Each shipping box can be transformed into modular furniture. One module in this system is the Sound Chair, featuring interviews with various experts about the politics of cultural memory and the dynamics of heritage in different contexts