So for our second museum visit, I decided to think about the Natural History Museum in Toulouse, France which I visited a couple weeks ago. This museum was FULL of various types of technologies and was a ton of fun (even though my French is terrible and therefore I couldn’t read most of the posted information). First off, the lighting was FANTASTIC. I am quite often disappointed in the way that museums light their exhibits–excellent lighting is really hard, but bad lighting is pretty easy to avoid, but is also the major pitfall for most exhibits, in my experience. However, this museum was varied and playful. For example, they put together a full-size dinosaur skeleton replication and lighted it so that it was SO Jurassic Park! This is the picture I took and it does not do justice to coming around the corner and seeing that shadow loom ahead.
But, this museum was far more complex than just good lighting. It had a whole section on the history of earth’s geology and was largely educational through the use of videos showing movement of tectonic plates through the millennia and other areas of scientific interest. It made the information accessible and fun, without overwhelming visitors of all ages, but more information was available on the walls and plaques if someone cared for more info. Looking around, there were adult groups, couples, teenagers, and families with children of all ages moving through the museum. It was very inviting to everyone and had little information booths in several areas which allowed for as much engagement with the material as any group could want or was interested in.
People were very drawn to the videos, plus the walls were often screens of various sizes that had images functioning as exhibits in themselves. Sometimes even the floor was part of these videos. Unlike The Louvre, there were no handheld devices available, except for the hard of hearing, but they were not really necessary.
Finally, one of the last exhibits was on human cultures and I was deeply curious as to how they would deal with the more anthropological side of their collection since we have been talking about the many ways museums can screw it up. I was very surprised. The room was large, maybe half a football field and very dark. But there were spotlights throughout the room that were motion activated as people moved through the space. There were also five screen about 5 feet wide that stretched from floor to ceiling in 5 different colors–they were labeled “communication” and had a shadowy figure dancing, or “survival” and had a figure with a weapon of some kind moving through the imaginary space. They were trying to capture the essential elements of human existence and then broke the room and the collection up according to these categories. The categories were by necessity quite vague and not all the objects fit perfectly into one category or another, but they were set up to show how they could be thought about. A canoe, a headdress, a replica of a cave painting, and many other objects were highlighted each in turn by the spotlight, not to try to tell a story or create a narrative, but to show how various cultures had attempted to fulfill the essential needs of humanity. Food, communication, connection, belief–all these ideas or needs were highlighted through the artifacts and art. It may not have been a perfect set up, but I think it was deeply attentive to how easily people can be exploited and how human nature has consistent elements through time and space.