The Museum Night changed the format and went online this year. In Norilsk, the event took place on May 16 from 9 to 11 p.m. on all the information resources of the city museum in social networks simultaneously.
It has been counted from the first expeditions of Alexander Sotnikov and Nikolai Urvantsev to our places in 1919, and from the First House of Norilsk being constructed in 1921.
The chronicle of the discovery and development of the northern lands is a story of human achievement, deprivation and difficulty in combating the harsh force of nature, long wintering of expedition members in cramped circumstances. The experience of the Norilsk pioneers’ autonomy and their ability to survive in difficult conditions can be useful in the modern world.
“As an answer to what is happening in the world, the Norilsk Museum changed the theme of its participation, now it sounds like “A hundred years of isolation. Stories of the closed city,” says Natalya Fedyanina, the museum’s head. “We talked about the long experience of Norilsk isolation. Diaries and travel notes, and now digital marks of people – this is the main way to fix time. The historical experience is conveyed by diary entries and manuscripts of the first Norilsk expeditions’ participants, which the city museum keeps in its collection. The modern experience is represented by the diaries of our time – blogs and posts of Norilsk residents on social networks, creative projects that help to understand what is happening.”
Over the past century, Norilsk has become the largest metropolis in the Arctic, but has not lost its sense of isolation – isolation from the outside world.
“Norilsk is called a closed city because it’s a restricted territory,” the museum notes. – Not only by the regulations. Geography and climate are its natural keepers. Norilsk in its distance and loneliness on the map is like a space station – its lights shine brightly on the endless tundra, thousands of kilometers separate it from other cities. It is usual for Norilsk people to wait for a flight for days in harsh weather. Sometimes, for many days in a row, a city does not have a physical connection with the mainland. Therefore, isolation is still normal for Norilsk today.”
The program of the Museum Night included reading selected fragments from diaries and manuscripts of Norilsk pioneers and builders, a zoom game of family teams, a review of social media publications and interviews with the residents of modern Norilsk, creative online projects of Norilsk people on self-isolation, virtual walks around the night museum. All events of the action took place on the Facebook, VKontakte and Instagram pages of the museum.
