Programme: EU Culture of European Union
Duration: November 2013 – October 2016
The ‘EuroVision – Museums Exhibiting Europe’ (EMEE) project explored an innovative interdisciplinary approach for national and regional museums to re-interpret their objects in a broader context of European and transnational history. The necessary theoretical and practical framework was developed, put into practice and evaluated by an international, trans-sectoral consortium bringing together the creative excellence of museums and cultural workers in a project based on the scientific expertise of History Didactics in mediating culture. The ambitious aim of the EMEE is to make museums more accessible in many ways. With around 2 million euros, the Culture Programme of the European Union supported this museum project to be implemented between November 2012 and October 2016.
EMEE is a European museum development project for national and regional museums. It explored an innovative interdisciplinary approach that enables museums to re-interpret their objects in a broader context of European and trans-national history.
Objects were presented to visitors not only on a regionally and nationally determined level of meaning, but in a way that invited visitors to discover transnational and European perspectives using new means of presentation, performances, and possibilities for participation.
At the same time, the project developed creative concepts for audience development. Particularly by involving and activating visitors, the project tries to attract the rather large number of infrequent museum-goers to the museums.
Experimental exhibition EuroVision Lab. is the result of work started in 2012 when the National Museum of Contemporary History became a part of the European project EMEE – Eurovision: Museums Exhibiting Europe. EuroVision Lab. was an experiment comprised of four parts, the purpose of which was making museums more accessible to public and interconnected. It included the traveling exhibition of the EMEE contest for young scenographers, a photo exhibition of museum experts and EMEE partners involved in the project, artistic intervention, and a central exhibition – The Time Capsule. In March 2015, we invited 15 young adults and 15 museum experts from Slovenia and broad to collaborate on the project. We turned the familiar roles of the public and the museum upside down and defined the new ones. We asked the museum workers to show their favourite museum objects and assigned the young the task of museum curators. In the manner of museum speed dating, the new museum curators selected objects from those that museum workers presented as the chief selection of national heritage with European references and therefore worthy of becoming objects of the exhibition.