Does the future have a place in museums?

Museums are typically places with their gazes fixed firmly on the past. They provide visitors with the history of specific places and events related to their community. In the case of the Canadian Museum of History the community is made up of the Canadian population and it presents a history of events related to those people. But the Museum of Vancouver’s inherent community, Vancouverites, requires a different approach. The Museum of Vancouver’s recent exhibition, Your Future Home: Creating the New Vancouver, co-presented with Vancouver Urbanarium Society asks visitors to ponder what is in store for the city’s future. While this may seem like a misplaced topic, Director of Curatorial and Engagement at the Museum of Vancouver, Gregory Dreicer assures us it’s not.

“The Museum of Vancouver’s vision—to inspire a socially connected, civically engaged city—is all about making Vancouver a place that people understand, care about, and want to live in or visit. People’s experience of the city and its future potential is very much dependent on how connected they feel. By inviting Vancouverites to come together to encounter, make, and share stories, the museum is encouraging them to create a common vision of the past, present, and future,” says Dreicer. “When we speak about the future, we’re really speaking about current conditions. The massive change going on in Vancouver makes ‘the future’ a primary concern here. In order to engage with community, the museum must connect with what people care about now.”

The museum’s awareness of its community’s focus on the future speaks volumes to its involvement and connectedness to Vancouverites. Museums need to build relationships with their communities, and be aware of their target audiences’ likes and dislikes.

Should the Vancouver museum’s forward-thinking inspire other museums to include “the future” in their exhibitions and programming? Dreicer thinks they already are. “Conversation about the past and future comes from current perspectives,” he says, “The present is a moment that is always slipping away. In this sense, all museums are about the past and future. The ideas and emotions embedded in any exhibition project will help determine if and how people engage with it. But it seems that a museum that focuses on community would be speaking to the future.”

If it makes such great sense to incorporate the future in museum programming, why does it still feel so odd?

“There is a misconception that there is a border between past and future, and that the past is not shaping our experience every second of every day. People may have an idea about history being irrelevant; this may be related to how history is presented in the media or to their experiences in uninspiring classes or exhibitions” Dreicer says.

Museums inspire visitors to think about past events with new perspectives in a variety of ways and sometimes this comes in the form of changing the direction we are looking from. It is easy to explain progress as a straight line forward, to think that society has only ever advanced, rather than explaining the many shifts and layers that contribute to progress. In this exhibition the Museum of Vancouver is showing its visitors twenty options submitted by leading architects, urban planners, and visionaries for a way forward, and including them in on the conversation about the potential changes in their society and that’s progress.

The Museum of Vancouver’s Your Future Home: Creating the New Vancouver will be on display from January 21 through May 15, 2016. New link: https://museumofvancouver.ca/your-future-home