"museum4punkt0": Sub-project Migration Museum 4.0
Press release from 05/08/2017
"museum4punkt0 - Digital Strategies for the Museum of the Future" starts today. The Auswandererhaus Bremerhaven is involved with the sub-project "Migration Museum 4.0".
The German Emigration Centre Bremerhaven is Germany's only migration museum: it presents both the history of German overseas migration and that of European immigration to Germany. It collects biographical collections of emigrant and immigrant families, supplemented by oral history interviews. The centre is in close contact with the migrants. It also teaches intercultural communication skills for living together in an immigration society.
As a "Migration Museum 4.0", the German Emigration Centre aims to communicate with its real and virtual visitors in person and/or digitally before, during and after their visit to the museum. It is a place that conveys migration not only in the traditional way, but also through personal and digital communication. The dialogue with visitors therefore plays a central role in the project: opinions in the integration debate are just as interesting as family stories of migrants. In addition, the willingness to engage with the topic of migration is to be increased by addressing visitors intellectually, emotionally and also in a playful way.
An online communication portal will enable visitors to post their own family stories in a protected environment. These will be edited by scientists in dialogue with the family so that they can be published. The portal will also be used to conduct surveys on current migration and integration issues. Mixed reality biography stations are planned for the permanent exhibition. There, (auto-)biographical testimonies of emigrants and immigrants will be virtually related to historical and current migration movements. In this way, individual fates and biographies are placed in a larger social context. Finally, visitors can familiarise themselves with the irrational elements of migration and integration debates at "Mixed Reality Emotions Stations". They can take on the perspective of migrants and thus empathise with certain aspects of foreignness, or take on the viewpoint of members of the so-called majority society. This enables a multi-perspective perception of opinion-forming. Visitors are closely supervised by museum staff.