{"id":12752,"date":"2023-03-01T10:20:38","date_gmt":"2023-03-01T10:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/?p=12752"},"modified":"2023-03-09T11:57:42","modified_gmt":"2023-03-09T11:57:42","slug":"pop-up-museums-from-cambridge-to-egypt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/2023\/03\/01\/pop-up-museums-from-cambridge-to-egypt\/","title":{"rendered":"Pop-Up Museums: From Cambridge to Egypt"},"content":{"rendered":"

David Farrell-Banks, the Participatory Research and Impact Coordinator at the Fitzwilliam, chats with Sara Hany Abed, a museum and heritage content researcher based in Alexandria Egypt.<\/h2>\n

Since 2019 Sara has worked with Helen Strudwick, Senior Curator, Ancient Nile Valley at the Fitzwilliam Museum, on the Egyptian Coffins project<\/a>, pop-up museums, and more. David lets us listen in on their chat…<\/h2>\n

David: Hi Sara, can you tell us a little bit more about the pop-up museum project and how this ended up in Egypt?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Sara: Working with the Fitzwilliam Museum on the Ancient Coffins project<\/a> has led to new opportunities for collaboration here in Egypt, including with the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the National Museum in Alexandria and the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir. The main development was to explore using pop-up museums.<\/p>\n

These pop-up museums are about taking museum researchers, objects, replicas, and activities out to communities who might not otherwise have access to the work. A mini-museum can then \u2018pop-up\u2019 in unexpected locations. In the work that Helen Strudwick had led in places like Wisbech in 2019<\/a> this included pubs, supermarkets, and food banks.<\/p>\n

\"3
A pop-up museum visit to Wisbech Marketplace<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Using the same model, we\u2019ve been taking research, including the work on the Nespawershefyt coffin<\/a> set that\u2019s displayed at the Fitzwilliam Museum, to the general public in Egypt in new ways. It\u2019s been about exploring different ways of engaging with communities and creating a connection between people and museums. The goal is that museums are not just dry, academic institutions, but something that can go out to people beyond the museum walls.<\/p>\n

David: Sounds interesting! What kind of things have you been getting up to in your sessions? Any unusual venues?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Sara: Well, we have been working with furniture and woodwork designers in the city of Damietta in northern Egypt. Damietta is the hub of woodwork in Egypt; Egyptologists and conservators from the Fitzwilliam Museum and the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir were able to go to a furniture factory here and run a pop-up museum.<\/p>\n

We demonstrated some replicas of ancient Egyptian carpentry tools and had hands-on experiences and discussion about the comparison between the tools that are used now and the tools that were used back then. It was very surprising to know that there are a lot of similarities, that some tools never died out. It\u2019s a living heritage.<\/p>\n

In the end, we were having difficulty finishing the pop-ups because more people kept arriving. Someone stayed for almost 8 hours and one of the children who came along told us that:<\/p>\n

\u201cthis looks like national geographic, but it\u2019s live!\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Hearing something like that is really rewarding.<\/p>\n

The pop-up museums let people see the relevance that things have to their own history. And it\u2019s fun, as well. If someone is curious, it\u2019s fun. If people don\u2019t really have fun and enjoy it, then why would we do it?<\/p>\n

\"Pop
Pop Up Museum in Damietta, at Pinocchio Furniture Factory. Egyptian Museum in Cairo (EMC) curators and Dr Julie Dawson, Dr Geoffrey Killen of the Egyptian Coffins project showing the ancient Egyptian carpentry tools to workers at the factory who enthusiastically tried the tools and discussed similarities and differences to current tools.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

David: What have you learned from the sessions?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Sara: Highlighting the connections between our museum collections and the practices and way of life which still exist in today’s modern Egypt, humanises the whole experience. It makes it closer on a human level.<\/p>\n

The pop-up museums provide us with new forms of knowledge. For example, we can learn more about woodworking practices and incorporate those findings into the galleries in our museums.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s how we want people to feel. You can experience objects in a pop-up museum, then, when you go back to the museum you see it in a completely different way. It\u2019s no longer just an object, and I think that\u2019s what we really want.<\/p>\n

What\u2019s really great about all of this is that it\u2019s quite endless; one door leads to another, then another, then another… It means it\u2019s been a success because it\u2019s opening doors to other possibilities and ideas, which is really interesting.<\/p>\n

David: And what are the next steps for this?<\/strong><\/h4>\n

Sara: At the moment, we are running a new series of pop-up museums in Egypt. We would like to extend this and recreate an ancient Egyptian carpentry workshop in Damietta, because although it\u2019s the hub of Egyptian furniture and woodwork, there is no museum related to ancient Egypt in the city.<\/p>\n

Then, we will be continuing our work in Cambridge over the coming months. We have already shared data with the education team at the Fitzwilliam and started creating a short film for school visits. All the possibilities that are available when you think about collections differently is really interesting. You can connect the collections to what you have today. It\u2019s not just a dead history, it\u2019s very much alive.<\/p>\n

This work was funded through generous grants from the University of Cambridge\u2019s Arts and Humanities Impact Fund and the Global Challenges Research Fund.<\/em>
\nFor further information about the pop-up museum concept, please see the article by Melanie Pitkin et al. \u201cEngaging audiences in areas of low cultural provision: the concept of the \u2018pop-up\u2019 museum experience\u201d, CIPEG Journal no. 4 (2020), 37-53, https:\/\/journals.ub.uni-heidelberg.de\/index.php\/cipeg\/article\/view\/83936<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

Find out more about the Fitzwilliam Egyptian Coffin Project and pop-up museum here<\/a>.<\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Farrell-Banks, the Participatory Research and Impact Coordinator at the Fitzwilliam, chats with Sara Hany Abed, a museum and heritage content researcher based in Alexandria Egypt. Since 2019 Sara has worked with Helen Strudwick, Senior Curator, Ancient Nile Valley at the Fitzwilliam Museum, on the Egyptian Coffins project, pop-up museums, and more. David lets us listen in on their chat…… Read full article<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":22,"featured_media":12775,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165,369,167,156,1],"tags":[221,219,216],"coauthors":[403],"class_list":["post-12752","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-engagement","category-museum-life","category-research-practice","category-the-fitzwilliam-museum","category-uncategorised","tag-access-inclusion","tag-collections-engagement","tag-society"],"acf":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12752","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/22"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12752"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12752\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12776,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12752\/revisions\/12776"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12775"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12752"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12752"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12752"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.museums.cam.ac.uk\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=12752"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}