Biomedicine on Display

In the middle of April I attended the annual Museums and the Web conference, this year held in Montreal, Canada. It was 5 days of highly interesting sessions and I got back home loaded with information and inspiration that should hopefully be put into work in the near future.

One of the great things about such a conference is the opportunity to be presented with new excellent initiatives. A webpage I could hardly wait to tell my colleagues about is www.exhibitfiles.org. It’s a community site for exhibit designers and developers and seems to me to be a brilliant idea! 

The site was founded by the Association of Science-Technology Centers about a year ago. At present it has 723 members and seems to be growing fast. The site is user-generated and will thereby develop according to the members’ interests. The team behind the site wants to create a resource that collects information on exhibitions. You can enter what they call a case study of a particular exhibition or write an actual review of an exhibition. Of course there is also a blog where members can discuss whatever topic they like.

Camilla and I just signed up as members. What immediately caught our attention was a recent blog-discussion headlined “Unexhibitable?”. As we are currently making an exhibition proposal on obesity we are facing the problem. At first glance this topic seems easy enough to come around, but the more we think about it the more insecure we get. Can we actually make an exhibition that will be appealing and not offend people? Is obesity one of these unexhibitable topics? We have made our contribution to the discussion on the blog of exhibitfiles.org.

 About a hundred years ago (or more precisely in October 2007) we opened the temporary exhibition Oldetopia here at Medical Museion. The exhibition is fully texted in two languages, both Danish and English, and last week the catalogue also arrived in an English version. Better late than never… and luckily just in time for the tourist season. The exhibition is on show until December 14 so there should be plenty of time to visit it, if you still haven’t been around Bredgade 62 in Copenhagen.
The catalogue consists of a bunch of well writing articles on age and ageing. It covers the very broad field of the subject with contributions by some of finest researchers within the field:
Camilla Mordhorst’s article Oldetopia is about the making of the exhibition and the ideas behind it. Bente Klarlund Pedersen’s article Those Who Think They Have No Time for Bodily Exercise, Will Sooner or Later Have to Find Time for Illness is concerned with the importance of physical activity. Mette Sørensen, Tinna Stevnsner and Vilhelm A. Bohr write about The Molecular Biology of Ageing and Bernard Jeune contributes with an article on Centenarians and the Long Life. Lene Otto takes an ethnological approach in her contribution We All Want to Live Longer and Nobody Wants to be Called Old and last but not least Eva Smith writes very personally on Ageing Gracefully.

The catalogue also contains the unique series of images of 100 year old men and women by Liv Carlé Mortensen and a series of pictures from De Gamles By (Old People’s Town) in Copenhagen taken around year 1900.

The catalogue is on sale at the entrance to the exhibition, but if any reader of the blog is interested, please contact me and I will happily distribute a copy.