#cumingmuseum

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The Private View

The day has come, 14th of May. When we started this journey, it seemed very far away, but it has come (quite fast as well).  We were all stressed, tired and excited. In the morning we had to finish some last minute things. The Creative Wall was re-arragend again by the Spatial Designer’s tutor and finally it came to life. All looked ready for our opening at 6 pm. We were also going to have to attend a talk about the Cuming Museum future building plans from an Architect which was interesting.  We had a bar, a DJ and lots of visitors!  Yes, we made it. Yes, people liked it a lot. The atmosphere was really good and everyone was happy with our hard work.  I talked with different people to get feedback about the exhibition.  Well done to us, once again!

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Day 10

26/03/2015

Re-inventing the Concept

Today was a very hard day as we have been told to discard the idea of the Fire. Discarding that, we can’t anymore use the past-present-future idea. The council doesn’t want us to talk about the fire.  We were a bit confused on what to do next. Fortunately, Anna Hardnen was helping us and we came up with the idea of an A to Z of the Cuming Museum: we made a list of 26 objects (we had to ask if it was possible to shoot 26 objects instead of 20) and we were going to divide them in alphabetical order, having letters as references.  The Spatial Designers were now working with their tutor to organise the jobs to do over the Easter Break. I have to meet Rosie and Ruby to do the shooting on the 16th.  See you after the Easter Break!

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Day 8

12/03/2015

CRIT DAY!

It was a challenging day for all of us.  Presenting our proposals to the clients was not easy and we were all a bit anxious. It went well and they chose our proposal! It was great and all of us have done a great job. They liked our idea of the past, the present and the future of the Cuming Museum. Now we need to start working on it to make this exhibition happening.  Well done to everyone!

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The First Workshop, curating an exhibition without objects

13th November 2014

We first were introduced to the Cuming Museum project. We had a lecture from the managers who explained us a bit more about the story of the museum and the collection. Richard Cuming started collecting objects in 1782, the first item was a coin. He didn’t travel at all. His son, after Richard died, continued collecting objects but it was mainly cheap stuff that people didn’t want to have. They tried to give the collection to the British Museum but they didn’t want it. It is composed by 26 thousands objects, very various such as: royalty’s objects, toys, fake objects and so on.  They used to do 2 or 3 different exhibition a year. While the fire happened, they were displayed 15 thousands objects. Because of the fire, they don't have a venue to show the collection and they are going to have one only in a couple of years.  From this very first session, we understood that our responsibility was to raise awareness. How can we make the museum popular between young people? How can we bring in a different audience? How can we re-engage with the local community? How do we maintain their public profile?

I thought it was a really challenging task and a different project from all the others I have done before. It was a co-design and live project. How are we going to curate an exhibition? Our main concern was that we could not have objects. How are we going to deal with that?