Museum für Völkerkunde zu Leipzig: World’s Children!

kleine Boxen mit Figuren und Landschaften drin

World’s Children! Such stories!

The exhibition “World’s Children! Such stories!” at the GRASSI Ethnographical Museum in Leipzig is an experiment: What happens when children and young adults find a room where they can be creative beyond any museum educational activities?

Exhibition Site GRASSI Museum Leipzig

DATES 09/11/2015—03/01/2016

Material is offered that can usually be found in the depot, in the storage and in the educational workshop. Young visitors can climb onto a huge installation in the middle of the room to draw or to write something. In the end, a large synthesis of art is created. A walk-in showcase invites the visitors to declare themselves as the exhibition objects and to have their pictures taken. The exhibition also deals with the question how children approach ethnological questions and how they express their observation artistically. Young refugees, especially, are addressed here to actively participate in the exhibition. How do they get to know the people and the city? What is typical German for them?

There are museum boxes in the exhibition. “Which objects from your life should be preserved and presented in a museum for future humans?” – In the past two years the department of museum education asked this question children and young adults who participated in the program “Kultur macht stark! Bündnisse für Bildung!” organized by the Bundesverband Museumspädagogik e.V. The stated objective was to individually design a museum box. In a preliminary stage over several weeks the children dealt with the museum objects and different life-concepts. Now, the boxes are telling stories of people, of their life-concepts, of their dreams and wishes.