Museum projects
Coming Out Museum (COME) is a collaborative project between the Ethnographic Museum of Istria and Proces, an association for the promotion of queer culture and LGBTIQ+ rights. The project is realized within the museum program Contact Zone. The aim of the program is active involvement in policies and initiatives addressing the topic of social inclusion, discussing issues of inequality, social and cultural equality through socially engaged museum practice.
The project authors began researching the milestones in the process of understanding and accepting one's own identity within the LGBTQ+ community, focusing on transitional phases through the personal experiences of research participants. Coming out is a long-lasting, lifelong process. From the first coming out to oneself, through friends, family, schoolmates, colleagues, to moments of acceptance, and living one's own identity truthfully, the coming out journey is marked by significant moments and turning points.
The idea is to connect these important moments in understanding and accepting one's own identity: acceptance from the environment, and connection with the broader LGBTIQ+ community with specific objects serving as "memory triggers" for lived experiences. These objects and participants' stories would ultimately become part of the exhibition setup. From the initial idea of the exhibition, the concept of a virtual museum has developed, showcasing the collected objects and their biographies. Members of the LGBTIQ+ community are invited to participate. COME as a virtual platform allows everyone to become part of the collaborative process, enriching the collection with their objects and stories, becoming part of the material LGBTIQ+ culture, getting to know other stories and lives, and represents the first step in creating a traveling exhibition.
Project authors and coordination: Mario Buletić, Ethnographic Museum of Istria i Jan Franjul, Process - Association for the Promotion of Queer Culture and LGBTIQ+ Rights
Identity on the Line (I-ON) Identity on the Line (I-ON) is a large-scale cooperation project between six cultural history museums and one university, working together to explore the long-term consequences of different migration processes, forced or voluntary, which took place in Europe over the last 100 years. The project is a broad cooperation between museums in Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Poland, Lithuania, Slovenia and Croatia. Starting with similar approaches and using the same methods, each museum will work on one important migration process in its country by collecting and facilitating sensitive narratives in local exhibitions and uncovering challenges which have not been addressed before. The main findings and common features will be summarized and made available as a joint travel exhibition within Europe and a digital package for education.
Leading partners: Muzej Vest-Agder; voditelj projekta: Dr. Kathrin Pabst
Istrian Traditional instruments Online (ITI-Online) is a virtual platform dedicated to Istrian traditional instruments and the traditional music of Istria. This web edition is the continuation of the project of the Ethnographic Museum of Istria which resulted in the publication of the catalogue Istrian traditional instruments from the collection of the Ethnographic Museum of Istria. The idea for the ITI is to come alive as a platform to create a virtual database of open access dedicated to traditional instruments of Istria, no matter where these instruments are physically located. In addition to presenting the collection of instruments from the EMI, the online database includes also information on the instruments from other collections.
Project manager: Mario Buletić
ETNOFILm Festival was born in 2009 and organised since then by the Ethnographic museum of Istria- Croatia as a platform for documenting, interpreting, sharing, (re)discovering and promoting living heritage by means of visual anthropology as a methodological frame. The methodology implies visual narrative instruments which question power relations between ‘professionals’ and ‘public and/or film subjects’ and promote innovative solutions in ethical representations of living heritage through film..
Project manager: Tamara Nikolić-Đerić