“To be silent is not neutral”: Curating collective action at The Climate Museum

Anais Reyes and Dilshanie Perera in conversation with Katharina Anzengruber and Elke Zobl

You mentioned the importance of public space in bringing about a cultural shift, but what about the digital space? We’ve had our own difficulties in implementing the digital space in our work. How do you use digital platforms such as Instagram or your blog? How significant is digital space for you?

DP: Digital space is very significant, and it’s something we’ve had to get creative with during Covid as well. In a very short time, we had to understand how to engage the public and how to continue programming through different digital platforms. For example, what does it mean to host an event in online space, like we do with the Talking Climate discussion series? How can we pace the events, encourage interaction, and foster a sense of openness that prepares them for a conversation or event? With Talking Climate, one answer to this question was to begin each panel discussion with a poetry reading to offer an emotionally resonant opening into the conversation. We’ve found that this works wonderfully.

One of the things that surprised me initially was that people were tuning into our online events from all around the world. That got us thinking about the different kinds of improved access that’s possible through online space, whether it’s because we can reach across time zones and continents, or because we can include accessibility features like asynchronous viewing, closed captions, and sign language interpretation. This learning is something we want to carry into future programming. We want to create something that feels really special that people can access, join in, and share with others. We have the full archive of the events that we’ve hosted over the past year and a half on our YouTube page. This is part of an ongoing conversation at the museum: How do we extend all the lessons learned over the past 18 months online into the next phase of our programming?

AR: There’s a back and forth: what did we learn from in-person programming to inform the digital space and what did we learn from online programming to inform our physical spaces? It’s all centered around building a sense of community. We also have a very active comment section when we livestream panel discussions to YouTube. We start by asking people where they are watching from or what questions they have for the speakers, but we’ll also insert questions just for the audience members, such as “What do you think about x? How do you feel in response to y?” We work very purposefully to create welcoming spaces, even though it is digital.

Our project is called “Spaces of Cultural Democracy.” You mentioned the cultural shift and civic engagement that’s all part of how we want to shape and live the concept of democracy. What is cultural democracy for you? Do you work with this term?

AR: This term reminds me of the idea that museums should remain neutral, apolitical spaces— that not talking about things like climate change and justice maintains museum neutrality or preserves formality and authority. Museums are turning away from that more and more, but it’s still a question many face. We consider ourselves an activist museum not just because we connect people to action, but because we see it as our civic duty as a public institution to use our platform, our knowledge, and our access to experts toward social betterment. We must employ that public trust toward justice for the communities we serve. It’s a question of integrity. To be silent is not neutral. Remaining neutral only serves to preserve the status quo—and as we all know, that isn’t working anymore. I think because we’re a smaller and newer museum, we have a lot of space to decide for ourselves what needs to be said, how we want to say it, and how we facilitate those dialogues. As we’ve said, we aim to be accessible, to uplift diverse voices, and welcome all perspectives from wherever they are coming from. We believe that civic engagement, activism, and cultural growth are all part of the same infinite loop propelling people towards a just cultural democracy. Everything we do is in an effort to show our visitors how culture and democracy are tied together and how they have a valuable role in that.

DP: It’s an honor to participate in this conversation about cultural democracy, this new field that you all are building and theorizing. It makes me think of one of our advisors, Edward Maibach, who is the Director of the George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communications and an expert on climate communications and public health. One of the things he says about contributing to the cultural shift on climate is having consistent messages delivered by trusted sources and repeated often. We’re really taking that to heart, especially because museums enjoy a high level of public trust. Because of this, we have a responsibility to our audiences. Being a cultural institution and having people look to us for particular kinds of information, leadership, or programming resources gives us a platform for creating consistent messages about taking action—working to transform people’s understanding of the self, the collective, belonging to larger systems of democratic engagement, and thinking deeply about what justice can look like in practice. It’s fantastic for us to have this new term to think with, too.

Interviewed on August 4, 2021

Dilshanie Perera, Anais Reyes, Katharina Anzengruber, Elke Zobl ( 2021): “To be silent is not neutral”: Curating collective action at The Climate Museum. Anais Reyes and Dilshanie Perera in conversation with Katharina Anzengruber and Elke Zobl. In: p/art/icipate – Kultur aktiv gestalten # 12 , https://www.p-art-icipate.net/to-be-silent-is-not-neutral-curating-collective-action-at-the-climate-museum/