Museum Archipelago

Thirty-seven years after the collapse of Bulgaria's communist regime, the country still doesn’t have an interpretive museum about the period. But even if one existed, I know Bulgarians who would never visit, confident that a museum of communism would be an endorsement of the regime. Political scientist Louisa Slavkova, founder of the Sofia Platform Foundation, is hoping to solve both problems with Facade, a new museum set to open in Sofia in 2028. The name points to the gap between the regime's promises and its human cost. In this episode, Slavkova describes how her team's work at the former Belene concentration camp gave them the confidence to build a museum, the first version of the museum inside a converted bus in time for Eurovision 2027, and how Facade will make room for a full range of Bulgarian’s memories without treating those memories as a verdict on the regime. Image: The building of the future Facade museum in Sofia, Bulgaria. Topics and Notes 00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago 00:15 Bulgaria's Missing Museum 00:57 Inside the Museum of Socialist Art 02:14 Louisa Slavkova and the Sofia Platform Foundation 03:27 After the Fall of Communism 04:57 Young Bulgarians and Secondhand Nostalgia 06:14 Histories from Belene 08:03 Teaching the History of Communism 08:58 From Belene to Facade 10:37 Making Room for Conflicting Memories 12:09 A Museum on Wheels for Eurovision 13:00 Inside the Museum Bus 15:13 When Museums Become Propaganda 16:36 Facade's Planned Opening 16:52 Outro | Join Club Archipelago DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast about how pop culture reflects the museum world back to us. Each episode is WAY longer than 15 minutes :) ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 114. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above.

Steel from the World Trade Center has spread to every corner of the U.S. When the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks approached, the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey gave away more than 1,800 pieces of steel saved from Ground Zero, and communities in all 50 states built them into memorials. A few were designed by famous architects, but most were welded by volunteers. Artist and researcher Sam Holleran first encountered the steel in a posting for a small-town public art commission. The listing described the steel in almost sacred terms and requested that the material be unaltered. Holleran and his brother Max, a sociologist, spent the next several years figuring out how the distribution of these relics turned the steel from the World Trade Center into a nationally dispersed collection of memorials. Their new book is called Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center. In this episode, Sam Holleran describes how archivists hand-picked the most "charismatic" pieces of bent steel from the pile at Ground Zero, why firefighters became the keepers of 9/11 memory, and what these 1,800 memorials might mean once the towers have been gone longer than they stood. Image: The 9/11 Memorial in Tallahassee, FL Topics and Notes 00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago 00:15 Berlin Wall Everywhere 00:54 Sam Holleran 02:22 WTC Steel After 9/11 03:44 Saving the Shrouds 05:29 Hangar 17 08:00 How Steel Was Distributed 09:47 Civic Spaces and Odd Sites 10:59 Tallahassee Memorial Story 12:37 Firefighters as Memory Keepers 14:03 What We Remember 15:12 25 Years Later 16:07 Visit Your Local Memorial 16:29 Scattered Steel: The Afterlife of the World Trade Center 16:45 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 113. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast about how pop culture reflects the museum world back to us. Each episode is WAY longer than 15 minutes :) ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

It's 2099, and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high-security museum in Europe. One of the targets: the Kabwe skull, a roughly 300,000-year-old early human skull found in present-day Zambia in 1921. This is Relooted, a new video game from South African game studio Nyamakop, where your job is to steal back looted artifacts by mapping entrances and exits, positioning your crew, and making it past robot security using your parkour skills. Several things about this are unrealistic. For one, the actual Kabwe skull, currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might not need such an elaborate plan. But there is a damningly realistic fact at the heart of the game: every single one of the roughly 70 objects you steal was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western museum or private collection. And the way museums in the game wiggle out of a fictional treaty to return stolen artifacts doesn't sound fictional at all. It mirrors the real-world tactics that have kept the Kabwe skull in London for over a century, despite Zambia's repeated requests for its return. In this episode, Ben Myers, CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and Mohale Mashigo, the studio's narrative director, talk about why heists are the perfect genre for a game about repatriation, what they found when they visited the real artifacts in person, and why their video game often does a much better job telling the story of these objects than the museums that hold them. Image: The Kabwe skull as it appears in a Relooted heist briefing. Topics and Notes 00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago 00:15 Relooted 01:30 "We overstated the security capabilities on museums" 01:45 Meet Ben Myers 02:50 Meet Mohale Mashigo 03:04 The Kabwe Skull 04:45 Labels and Missing Context in Museums 06:08 A Digital Museum 06:53 Treaties and Red Tape 09:37 Prosperous Future Africa 12:05 Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum on Episode 39 12:16 Museum of Black Civilizations 14:50 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 112. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast about how pop culture reflects the museum world back to us. Each episode is WAY longer than 15 minutes :) ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

Museums today are filled with software, yet they've largely avoided being "eaten" by the tech industry. Unlike music or movies, exhibitions can't be downloaded or scaled infinitely. There's only one Mona Lisa. But if the wrong platform finds the right leverage, that immunity may not last. Which is why the kind of software museums choose matters. TilBuci is a free, open-source tool used by museums to build touchscreens, kiosks, and projections. It was created by Brazilian software developer Lucas Junqueira after watching too many digital exhibitions quietly break down once the opening buzz faded. Designed to be usable by museum staff long after developers leave, TilBuci treats software not as a product, but as infrastructure. In this episode, Lucas Junqueira talks about what it takes to build museum software that lasts. Through the story of a projection still running on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum in Belo Horizonte over a decade after it opened, we explore how open, locally controlled tools extend the life of museum systems, and what's at stake if a tech platform ever inserts itself between museums and their audiences. Image: A projection animates the façade of the Espaço do Conhecimento (Space of Knowledge) museum at Praça da Liberdade (Liberty Square) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Lucas Junqueira's software Managana, a previous version of TilBuci is running the projection. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Rise of Software in Museums 00:56 Software Eating the World 02:19 Why Are Museums Different? 03:16 Lucas Junqueira and TilBuci 05:09 Challenges and Innovations 08:09 The Flash Apocalypse 10:12 What's at Stake 11:48 Jurassic Park on Club Archipelago 13:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 111. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.

For the 50th anniversary of the end of World War II, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum planned to display the Enola Gay, the Boeing B-29 that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The plane was restored to be part of a full exhibit, presented alongside context about the atomic bombing's mass civilian casualties. But that exhibit never opened. Instead, after years of script revisions and intense pressure from veterans' groups and Congress, the museum displayed the restored bomber's fuselage with minimal interpretation. The exhibit was primarily dedicated to the technical process of restoring the aircraft; as one visitor noted, "I learned a lot about how to polish aluminum, but I did not learn very much about the decision to drop the atomic bomb." In this episode, historian Gregg Herken, who served as Chairman of the museum's Space History Division during the controversy, recounts how the exhibit went from reckoning with the bomb's full impact to re-enforcing a patriotic narrative. He recalls the specific moments that led up to one of the museum industry's cautionary tales, like when the director agreed to remove evocative artifacts like a schoolgirl's carbonized lunchbox from Hiroshima from the exhibition plans, and how the Air Force Association demanded the exhibit say the bombing saved 1 million American lives and other assertions that have been challenged by generations of historians. Today, a new presidential executive order dictates how the Smithsonian interprets American history. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Enola Gay in the 1980s 01:07 Gregg Herken 02:21 Initial Planning 02:40 Martin Harwit 03:48 Herken's Visit to Hiroshima 04:39 'The Lunchbox' 05:32 Initial Exhibit Script 06:26 Opposition and Controversy 07:15 Revisions and Criticisms 10:49 Air Force Association's Demands 11:59 Exhibit Cancellation 13:37 "Pale Shadow" 14:10 Reflecting on History and Censorship 20:55 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 Transcript Here is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 110. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible.