Göteborgs födelse - Göteborgs stadsmuseum

Poster of Göteborgs födelse

During my stay in Göteborg recently, I had time to visit Göteborgs stadsmuseum's (Gothenburg City Museum) new exhibition Göteborgs födelse (The Birth of Gothenburg) about life in the new town Göteborg during the 17th century.

Already when I first arrived by train, the day before my museum visit, I saw the poster (seen here to the left) and thought it looked interesting and cool. However, I was a bit sceptical since the museum could have put all the money into the marketing, but I decided to try it out anyway and I was not disappointed.

The symbol of the exhibition is a heart-shaped pendant made out of silver was found in a female grave dating to the first half of the 16th century in one of Göteborg's predecessors, Nya Lödöse. The town is situated in the district today known as Gamlestaden and has been the subject of a massive archaeological excavation in the last couple of years (The project has its own web site which can be found here. The site is in Swedish, but you can use Google translate in the upper left corner.). The excavation has revealed a lot of burials (many more than expected and what the written sources say should be there), but this one particular grave was excavated in 1916 and the skeleton reburied at Östra kyrkogården in Göteborg.

The exhibition catalogue

The heart-pendant has an interesting story which is told in the exhibition and also in the exhibition catalogue. It is decorated with symbols and letters and a coat of arms that might belong to a Dutch family. Inside it was a small packet of several layers of fabric wrapped around parts of plants. Pollen analyses showed that cornflowers and heather were at least part of the packet.

I just love it when museums really emphasizes one or more artefacts from their collections in their exhibitions. Yes, this might be because I am an archaeologist and my main focus is the material culture. We are most of the time unaware of how we are affected by materialities. How symbolical they can be, how we interact with other living beings (even they materialities mostly) through them and how we basically keep ourselves grounded in reality with the help of them. (This is really a subject that deserves its own entry some day, but I cannot help talking a little about it here as well.) Artefacts also often make history come alive in an extremely physical way. It can over-bridge time and both geographical and cultural space and can have us reflect on life both in the past, the present and the future. Emphasizing on one or more objects in an exhibition puts the focus on that particular object and it encourage you to reflect. This is really the case with the heart pendant in the Göteborgsfödelse exhibition.

The first thing that meets you when you walk into the exhibition is the sound of heart beats. It engages you and makes you curious. In the rest of the exhibition, I miss this engaging of other senses than sight. I really have nothing negative to say about the visual aspect of the exhibition. It really is great. The texts are mostly not too long and it is interesting when they tell stories about different inhabitants of the town.

The exhibition stands in stark contrast to the one about the 18th century. It is obvious that they have thought a little about making the material and information fun. Some attempts at interactivities have been made, but it really does not work nearly as well as the new exhibition. This is particularly sad because the material from 18th century Göteborg is just amazing. This was the time of the Swedish East India Trading Company and the museum is even lodged into its house so there are real potentials in the material of the time period. Did you know that the biggest collection of Chinese 18th century china that is known from outside of China is in Göteborg? I cannot find my notes from the lecture about it now, but there are tens of thousands only from the museum's courtyard and than from the East Indiaman Götheborg who sank as it ran aground in the Göteborg archipelago on its way home from its third journey to China 12 September 1745. Based on the knowledge of this and all the other amazing things the museum has in its collections, I do hope they make an exhibition just as amazing as Göteborgs födelse about that century too soon.

Tutankhamun. The tomb and the Treasure

Carnarvon: "Can you see anything?" 
Carter: "Yes, wonderful things!"

On Tuesday, I visited the travelling exhibition about the Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun in Stockholm. It was all made up of replicas and as someone working in the heritage sector, I think it is a great idea. Not everyone has the money to travel to Egypt, but is still in love with its history and the amazing artefacts I think we can safely say that everyone has seen at least once in a book or on TV.

I really enjoyed the exhibition. They really had tried to put all the artefacts into a context, which was a pleasant surprise. I thought it was going to be, like it often is with travelling exhibitions like this. Especially when it comes to really famous objects. But it is important for the understanding of the objects to have a context to place them in.

The objects are of course amazing in themselves, but there is much to be learned from them as well. Ancient Egypt is really a very different culture (even from today's Egypt) and to create an understanding of it, we much put all those treasures into a context to really understand it.

Even though I have had an interest in Ancient Egypt for years (I have also studied Egyptology at the university for a year.), I still think I have lots to learn. This also became pretty obvious at the exhibition. For the first time, I really understood what a so called corn Osiris looked like. (See picture bellow.)

Corn Osiris

It is really a frame shaped like the god Osiris (He is a god connected to the dead king.) with lots of corn inside and here I have always thought of it like one of those dolls which you are supposed to grow hair on.

The first part of the exhibition was a short introduction to ancient Egypt and Tutankhamun and had a glass (or some kind of see-through-plastic) model of the tomb and how it was situated in the Valley of the Kings. You got an audio guide which you could use to listen to people talking about the objects. This could be used throughout the exhibition. There was a film about Howard Carter and how he discovered the tomb in 1922 and afterwards they had put all artefacts together like they were placed in the tomb when Carter got there. It was a great way to sort of set up a scene for the part where you got a closer look at the artefacts themselves. Especially good was the fact that there were no talks about aliens or curses. Just a mention about the Egyptian workers who worked for Carter during the excavation getting scared when Carter's canary was killed by a cobra which was a symbol of the protection of the kings of Ancient Egypt.

I missed a mummy, even though I totally understand why it was not possible to have one. The had a wall explaining research that has been done on the mummy and different theories of how he might have died. Underneath had they placed a table with a picture of the mummy. This was actually quite a good way to sudstitute, even though I do prefer real mummies. (Yes, I am somewhat obsessed with death and burials!)

While you walked around among the artefacts after this view of the tomb itself you could choose if you wanted to listen to more or just walk around and I was really amazed by it all. It had me thinking a lot. For example how the outer chapel of the coffins were built. The replica was placed on a podium the size of the burial chamber and the builders can not have had much space to move around as they built it for sure. And how do you actually move coffins of solid gold that weigh over 1 000 kilos?! Because I refuse to say aliens, I am going for a lot of block and tackles and hard working workers (No, Ancient Egypt did not keep slaves! In fact the first known strike in history is of Egyptian tomb workers who fought for higher salary.).

To sum it all up: I loved the exhibition. More should be made like this.

Playground, Etnografiska museet

Today I visited Etnografiska museet in Stockholm with a friend. They have a new temporary exhibition called Playground which was about norms and about questioning them. I had been looking forward to it. I was at the museum only a couple of days before it opened and it looked promising. Therefore I have to admit that I was somewhat disappointed. Not that it was a bad exhibition per see. It was just that I had expected a little bit more.

So, what was good about it? I really liked that it explained what a norm is and how it is used in society both in the past and present. I liked how it showed that not everyone will be able to live up to the norms and that it is nothing wrong with that. I also enjoyed how it got you to question norms and asked you how privileged you are. It was also good that they had made signs telling about norms and norm breakers in their permanent exhibitions.

Despite all this I never got engaged in the exhibition for real. It was interesting, not least to read about HBTQ people in Vietnam and see the photos of the colour scheme of people's skin and everything. However, there were just so many longer texts. I would have loved to read people's stories and all that, but there were just so many of them. I think it would have been better if they had made shorter texts and refered to a website for more studies. Some of the interactive "tests" were also a little hard to understand.

The exhibition was not bad. I think I just had hoped it would be more. I love questioning norms and my own worldview! Maybe it was because I had read the opening sign (shown in the photo above) beforehand or maybe it was because I liked the Vodou exhibition they had a couple of years ago so much. I just got the feeling that the exhibition could have been so much more.