BERLIN | 2013 – 2016
A Museums Development Project
Working in collaboration with artists Jovanna Komnenic and Dirk Sorge and Berlin based non-profit Förderband eV., we developed and co-organized neue Perspektiven gewinnen (Gain New Perspectives), a project inspired by the idea of the “inclusive museum”. This meant the development of museums and their exhibitions so that all persons, whether they have a disability or not, can use them.
In 2009, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities entered into force in Germany. Since then, the topic of inclusion has enjoyed great prominence in general as well as in the field of arts and culture. Against the backdrop of scarce budgets and human resources, however, museums find themselves often entering new territory. The result is a lack of access to arts and culture for people with disabilities, as well as a lack of communication within this sector about experiences and knowledge of the needs of people with disabilities.
Supported by one of the few disability arts funders Aktion Mensch e.V., we initiated and carried out a series of 25 museum-specific workshops of varying orientation and intensity in addition to a kick-off event and a closing conference.
Our goals were to:
- Sensitize museum employees to different needs
- Learn more, playfully experiment and learn from each other
- Network with stakeholders and strengthen existing relationships between museums and publics
- provide practical learning opportunities for people with and without disabilities
- Better anchor inclusion within the museum
- Inspire museum workers with other perceptual worlds and thus make their cultural offering more interesting
My role in neue Perspectiven gewinnen was focused on contemporary art and inclusion. Together with Jovanna, I developed and led a a series of multisensorial mediation and masterplan workshops for Berlinische Galerie employees from the fields of mediation, marketing, curation, exhibition design, technical design.
The workshops switched between theoretical approaches and practical exercises. The participants were also mixed: employees were joined by guests with mobility, visual and hearing impairments and guests with learning disabilities.
You can find further details about the project on the neue Perspektiven gewinnen website.
