#ARCTIC. #SIBERIA. THIS IS TAIMYR. This year, the Norilsk museum became one of the nominees for the first national museum competition, Museum Olympus, and even managed to receive the professional audience award in its category. But the official results have not yet been announced. The competition co-founders are the St. Petersburg committee for culture and the Russian committee of the international council of museums. Of the 189 applications from 127 museums, only 23 projects in five nominations and four museums vying for the title of Museum of Russia 2024 made it onto the shortlist.
To determine the winners, Museum Olympus brought together all the shortlist nominees and longlist team members for a professional forum – with discussions, presentations, and defense of shortlist projects on the board ship. The museum ship hosted almost 200 people.
On the forum’s first day, in the Museum Event category, the Norilsk museum director Natalia Fedyanina presented to colleagues the project Forever New City, which was the theme of the Museum Night 2024, and the event itself was dedicated to large-scale city renovation and the Norilsk museum’s 85th anniversary. The museum turned into a total construction site, where each participant could try himself in the new life and new museum exhibition creator role.
“Norilsk is a city that seems to constantly reinvent itself, every now and then returning to unfinished or unrealized projects such as all-weather space, streets under a dome, an arctic garden city. People leave here, come here, and newcomers often look for solutions that have already been found by their predecessors”, Natalia Fedyanina explained the idea.
Forever New City is a collection of stories drawn from local history sources, storerooms, a scientific library and an archive of site-specific contemporary art of the museum’s Polar Art Residence. According to the creators, the ‘global construction’ will become a multi-part ‘history of stories’ and will last forever, updating, developing, filling with new stories. Gradually, a mythical city will grow on the scaffolding – an image of Norilsk, which is eternally designing itself.
Natalia Fedyanina also acted as one of the forum experts and spoke about RE-Museum – the three-day museum design laboratory. The laboratory’s goal was to collect and generalize experience, identify inspiring developments and implementation of development strategies among Russian museums. For this, professionals from all over the country gathered in Norilsk, who have experience of large-scale transformations, when museums have the courage to create fundamentally new concepts, rethink and even design museums from scratch.
The topical conversation got a great response and interest among colleagues. In fact, that is why the Norilsk debates results were brought out in a separate session of the all-Russian forum.
“The most important thing in any museum strategy is its very existence”, Natalia Fedyanina summed up the session. “If you do not have a clear idea of yourself in the future, everything turns into meaningless circling and chaos. Only a team that sees the goal and understands how to go about it can radically change the situation, the attitude towards the museum, accelerate its development and promotion. The changes are definitely not in the infrastructure, but primarily in the minds.”
The meaning of events that bring together museum innovations, such as the professional forum Museum Olympus and the Norilsk laboratory RE-Museum, is to “reflect on the experience and discoveries that exist in the museum business, to see and describe something new in them, to find the language, the words that will make us move forward”, says museum expert and curator Leonid Kopylov.
During four days of a busy business program and defense of competition projects, from October 14 to 18, the ship traveled from Moscow to Moscow via Tver, Yaroslavl and Uglich, visiting museums in these cities.
The jury will announce the Museum Olympus winners in November.
Earlier, the all-Russian museum design laboratory RE-Museum was held in Norilsk.
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Text: Anzhelika Stepanova, Photo: Norilsk museum
