Come closer: Museum projects encourage co-creation

Three innovative museum projects receive a total of DKK 15 million from VELUX FONDEN. Visitors can look forward to participating in finding traces of the past in the signs of the present and creating the narrative of the future.

26.05.2021 l More news

Three innovative museum projects receive a total of DKK 15 million from VELUX FONDEN. Visitors can look forward to participating in finding traces of the past in the signs of the present and creating the narrative of the future.

Programme and process

The Museums Programme has been developed in collaboration with Danish museums. This is the seventh time that VELUX FONDEN allocates grants under the programme. Since 2015, grants amounting to more than DKK 115 million have been allocated to a total of 25 different projects throughout Denmark.  

The foundation received a total of 26 expressions of interest for the programme’s open call in 2020. Of these, ten project proposals have been invited to prepare a full application with a subsequent expert assessment. As something new, this time a total of DKK 1 million had been allocated as project maturation funds for the ten invited applications.

VELUX FONDEN’s Museums Programme aims to strengthen both the Danish museums’ research and the dissemination of their activities to a wider audience. The fulcrum is increased collaboration between the museums’ researchers and communicators and the universities’ humanities researchers:

“Museums play a vital role in the development of our democratic dialogue and citizenship. This year’s three winning projects show what museums can do at their best: Create solid research-based knowledge about the cultural history and art of the past and insert this in the present in involving ways, while opening up for questions and a dialogue with visitors about their own present and future. The results aren’t given in advance, but are created in the meeting between museum and visitors,” says Henrik Tronier, Head of Programme for VELUX FONDEN’s humanities research programme.

From ashes to co-creative art

The three projects each receive a grant of DKK 5 million and involve a total of four museums, three universities and several other partners. A joint feature of the projects is closely integrated research and dissemination components, with the focus being on creating insight and commitment via co-involvement.

In Køge, the ‘The Timeline. Applied Archaeology in Køge Nord’ project will give visitors the opportunity to grapple with the discipline of applied archaeology, which is a new field in Danmark. In connection with the creation of a new sustainable neighbourhood, the project will convert archaeological finds and studies into issues of relevance to urban development and local identity:

“The statutory archaeological excavations are often the very first tangible steps taken in connection with new construction and development projects, but, mostly, they’re done without any further contact with the surrounding world. In reality, they have a great potential as a facilitator of change because they’re right in the middle of things and can ensure the connection between what is and what will be. We’re keen to explore and unfold this aspect in the project,” says Curator Anna Severine Beck, who heads the project from Køge Museum, Museum Sydøstdanmark.

At the Open Air Museum in Lyngby, the ‘Where we live – past, present and future’ project will create installations in and around the houses that strengthen visitors’ sensory and bodily experiences of how wind and weather have shaped life in the historic houses and give them inspiration for sustainable housing forms in the present.

At Trapholt in Kolding, the ‘CraftWorks’ project will develop citizen-involving art projects with hundreds of participants and rethink the institution of the museum as a space for democratic exchanges of views.

The three projects:

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