Virtual exhibitions — an example

“10 Stories from Mujejärvi” by University of Eastern Finland and art educator Miia Rosenius

In University of Eastern Finland’s pilot for the HEART project, an exhibition (both in a physical space and a virtual space) was built to display the intangible cultural heritage theme. In the exhibition a connection between tangible and intangible was made in the framework of villages and villagehood in a small village of Mujejärvi which today has only 16 residents.

The stories used in the pilot exhibition were collected in workshops where we worked with old photographs and the people from the village association. This was to bring forth the stories and later connect them in the exhibition with photography: we built our final exhibition concept around old objects, new and old photographs, and the collected stories from the villagers, thus making intangible cultural heritage aspects of villagehood not only easier to get a grasp on for the participants of the pilot but also for all of the visitors of the exhibition. We also showed through the exhibition what kind of things intangible cultural heritage consists of, especially regarding Finnish villagehood.

To build an exhibition about villagehood we first went to the village, spoke to the people there, went with their ideas all the while trusting the process and them as the true experts of their own intangible cultural heritage as that was the best way to showcase the cultural heritage aspects in a realistic way. The stories used in our pilot exhibition were collected in workshops where we worked with old photographs and the people from the village association to bring forth the stories. Information on the exercises we used in the pilot workshops can be found in these toolkit units: Photo exercise: Pairing old and new photos and Photo exercise: Dialogue with old photos.

We wanted to put together the collected material in the following way:

Old photograph + Intangible heritage -related story from workshop discussions + New photograph from present day + Object connected to the intangible cultural heritage element.

For example, we had an old photo of mowing hay with a horse, a new photo of beautiful flower meadows from a window of an old blacksmith’s forge and as an object connected to these photos we had an old and rusty scythe blade from the forge. These three things were chosen to portray intangible cultural heritage because they portray the persistence of traditions and the transferring of them as both skills and stories alike. The blacksmith's skill, forging scythes, is a heritage and expertise that is always passed down to the next generations along with haymaking. Beautiful flower meadows were regularly scythed and the mowing skills in general were always passed on. The significance of these skills for traditional landscapes and the importance of tradition for the inheritors of these skills and future generations are all things that connect the intangible and tangible in the context of cultural heritage of villages.

The old and new photographs were placed side by side with the texts and stories describing the photographs beside them. The related objects were placed near them in the physical space and viewable as an image or a 3D object in the virtual exhibition.