108. The Museum of Utopia and Daily Life
Welcome to Museum Archipelago in Your Inbox, which does exactly what it says on the tin. Museum Archipelago, your audio guide to the rocky landscape of museums, is hosted by me, Ian Elsner.
The tension is right there in the name of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life. It sits inside a 1953 kindergarten building in Eisenhüttenstadt, Germany, a city that was born from utopian socialist ideals. After World War II left Germany in ruins, the newly formed German Democratic Republic (GDR) saw an opportunity to build an ideal socialist society from scratch. This city – originally called Stalinstadt or Stalin’s city – was part of this project, rising out of the forest near a giant steel plant.
The museum's home in a former kindergarten feels fitting – the building's original Socialist Realist stained glass windows by Walter Womacka still depict children learning and playing with an almost religious dignity. But museum director Andrea Wieloch isn't as interested in the utopian promises as she is in the "blood and flesh kind of reality" of life in the GDR. The museum's collection of 170,000 objects, many donated by local residents who wanted to preserve their history, tells the story of the GDR through the lens of how people actually lived during the country's 40-year existence.
The approach of the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life is to treat the history of the GDR as contested, full of stories and memories that resist simple narratives. In this episode, Wieloch describes how her approach sets the museum apart from other GDR museums in Germany including ones that cater to more western audiences.
Gallery Continues 🎒
Visiting the Museum of Utopia and Daily Life in Germany, I could see instantly that such a space is still missing from the Bulgarian museum landscape. That doesn't mean there's no progress: one of the projects is to turn the Bulgarian Communist Party Meeting House, Buzludzha, into a storytelling platform.
This episode explores the process of creating a space where Bulgaria can collectively reflect on its past and future--a space vast enough to accommodate diverse experiences and multiple visions of what lies ahead.
Archipelago at the Movies🍿 Museum Town
Museum Town is documentary about North Adams, Massachusetts and the story of how the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art came to be there. Anya van Wagtendonk, Wisconsin Public Radio's state Capitol reporter and a native of the Berkshires, joins me to discuss this documentary and the promise of museums as engines of economic development.
