Experiencing the familiar in new ways

In the spirit of this weekend’s workshop It’s Not What You Think in Copenhagen, I am posting a few observations from my visit to the Medical Museion last April. The trip originated from a discussion about a contemporary museum for the blind in Kaunus, Lithuania and what we (the sighted) could learn from an institution that devoted all its energies towards such a radical shift in visitor experience. One of the high-lights of my April visit, therefore, was a tour by Jan Eric Olsén and Emma Peterson to the former Danish Museum of Blind History. The blind collection was once part of a historic teaching and therapy collection for blind students dating back to 1811. The Medical Museion acquired the entire collection in 2011, and it has just been moved from the basement of the current Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired in Hellerup (just outside Copenhagen) to the museum’s new storage facilities. Touch murals in the hallway of the Danish Institute for the Blind and Visually Impaired The Blind Institute is a low, sprawling building with long corridors lined with playful, multi-layered touch murals. We experimented with the walls and slowly made our way into a basement museum (now closed), and then we passed an entrance hallway with fairly traditional historical labels and some curious artifacts. We then entered what could only be called the Pompeii of blind pedagogy – rooms of objects and instruments that had been part of a creative and ambitio...
Source: Biomedicine on Display - Category: Medical Scientists Authors: Tags: aesthetics of biomedicine collections Experiences of Ageing university museums Source Type: blogs