Green Museums: Narratives of Nature in English Museums

In recent years, growing attention has been paid to the interconnections between environmental issues and museums in England. Initially, much of this attention came from groups protesting the links between certain museums and the fossil fuel industry, most notably, the British Museum’s sponsorship by British Petroleum. The ‘Green Museums’ movement, however, has led to a significant increase in attempts by museums themselves to address environmental problems. The three main avenues of action museums are taking in this regard are engaging in research connected with the environment, considering sustainability in museum policies and practices, and increasing public awareness of environmental issues through museum displays and activities. My talk is concerned with this last initiative, in particular, with the social and sensory dimensions of the narratives about nature currently presented by English museums. Museums have traditionally been places of preservation which foreground the sense of sight and emphasize control over nature. The questions I will address are whether and how the current positioning of museums as sites for environmental action is producing different narratives and perceptions concerning the relationship of humans with the natural world.
Keywords: museums, sponsorship, environmental concerns, 'Green Museums' movement

Erin E. Lynch ∆ (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)

Time Travelling in a Post-Industrial Playground: (Uncommonly) Embodied Encounters with Urban Heritage

The early success of the Museum of London’s Streetmuseum – an augmented reality app that overlayed images from the museum’s collections onto the streets of London – spawned a variety of imitators. The appeal of “taking the museum to the streets” was undeniable: mobile media offered the potential for cities to breathe new life into urban heritage by putting it in conversation with the vibrant streetscape. Users, in turn, were offered a kind of techno-mediated time travel, invited to see and hear the city’s past and walk the streets as they were. These kinds of urban heritage apps offer stories woven together on foot, fleshed out and set in motion by users, and – whether inviting users to get a taste of cosmopolitanism’s delights or sniff for a dead author’s pipe outside his favourite haunt - they enable a particular embodied encounter with the city’s past.
Halfway across the world, at St. Louis’ City Museum, an architectural playground made of the recycled waste matter of urban life turns the city’s history into something touchable - even climbable (visitors are advised to bring kneepads). Taking the museum’s multisensory turn to new heights, the City Museum renders the material heritage of the urban sensible in new ways, reinventing it into a slightly bizarre, labyrinthine love letter to human imagination and the stuff of post-industrial life.
While these may seem like disparate examples, this paper aims to “take the museum to the streets” and back again to consider how these sites provoke embodied encounters with urbanity’s material and cultural heritage – and invite us to imagine new pathways for making sense of the city. Keywords: urban heritage, museum, city, technology, embodiment

Melanie Schnidrig (Centre for Sensory Studies, Concordia University, Canada)

Performing through the Senses: Yoko Ono’s Grapefruit and Contemporary Museum Programming.

Exhibiting interactive artworks carries with it deep curatorial challenges. The exhibition of artworks/artifacts has traditionally resulted in a separation of that object from its intended performative elements, often in the interest of conservation (Gallace and Spence, 2014). However, the contemporary museum has shifted towards offering hands-on exhibitions that “rehabilitate” the senses ( Howes, 2022) and are arguably a result of today’s experience economy (Pine and Gilmore, 1999, Spence, 2022). These methods rely on the senses and visitor participation to offer experiences that appeal to a general audience.As a movement that centers on participation to collapse the spheres of art and life, Fluxus art is a prime candidate for a sensory exhibition. Using a sensory ethnographic approach in this paper, I reanimate three scores from Fluxus artist Yoko Ono’s artist’s book Grapefruit (1964) and examine the sensory dimensions involved in each. In so doing this paper raises the following questions: How can works like Grapefruit be reimagined through a sensory exhibition model? How would this approach appeal to the visitor and achieve the artist's aims? And finally, how can a sensory exhibition of Grapefruit navigate the tension between the art institution and an artwork intended to operate outside of it?

Keywords: Fluxus, Participatory Art, Sensory Studies, Curatorial Practice