Re-imagining Museums is a pilot project in collaboration with “Semsemia Tours“. The project’s long-term goal is to connect public museums to their contemporary communities and open them as active cultural spaces promoting civil participation. The project aspires to create alternative visiting itineraries and storylines for the same objects currently displayed in 2 museums in Egypt. Those itineraries should be more critical than the current ones and should emphasise on the links between those collections and contemporary reality. We will be using Participatory Action Research (PAR) methods to study the museum’s collections and work with the local communities and stakeholders to produce alternative itineraries. At the end of the pilot phase, the alternative itineraries will be available online for visitors, and they will be included in the regular Semsemia Tours to those museums.
This research project is part of the “Tandem Amwaj programme“, which is a civil society-led project co-designed and implemented by 4 partner organisations (Tandem programme alumni) in the MENA region working on creating safe and creative environments for independent narrative discourses. By supporting culture-led engagement actions and actors, this program aims at promoting civil society participation in local development practices, growing a space for different forms of expression and a sense of belonging to be performed despite the pressuring contexts (political and economic) across Lebanon, Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia.
Shaimaa Atef