People Movement Stories
Live and online exhibition
The purpose of this exhibition is to make a combined live and online experience and make these two strengthen each other. In our view, the two forms of the exhibition serve different purposes. At the live exhibition, people can closely interact with the information about migrants that is displayed in a live ambiance. The size of the images and texts and the order of presentation in a concentrated space can tell the stories of these twelve migrants from both the Netherlands and Australia, showing both their similarities and the differences. The confinements of space there are restrictions on the amount of material that can be shown and it is also not practical to change an exhibition over time. And of course only a limited amount of people can visit the live exhibition, because of its fixed location.
The online exhibition does not offer the physical experiences of the live exhibition, but it has much more possibilities to link and extend archive materials and other resources, provided they are digitally and online available. In particular, the online exhibition grew out of our intent to connect cultural heritage collections that are distributed over different institutions, but in the case of migration heritage also over different countries. In this case they are (mainly) the Netherlands and Australia.
In this (limited) exposition we have explored the possibilities of collection linking. The stories of our interviewees are exposed on a banner in the live exhibition. Online they have their own page with a personal fact summary and a life line on which events from their lives are shown. If possible, we have linked to online information directly related to the event. Of course, migration related events feature prominently. Where possible, we have included comments on the events from the interviews with the migrants. The online exhibition also has a section about the background of migration in the form of government and policy documents that also link to other more extensive material.
The number of life lines online is currently confined to the limited number of examples we could exhibit in the exhibition. We intend to extend this number over the course of time, working closely together with the National Archives, The Hague and the National Archives Australia.
