MILLENNIUM PROJECT
The Millennium collection is a pilot project from museums preparing special educational collections presented through the medium of travelling exhibitions. The goal of this project was to put together an educational ethnographic collection that can express how the trends have been changing in the last century.
The exhibition Millennium comprises of 13 groups of objects representing basic areas of human life, such as: food, food consumption and storage, medicine, clothing, heating, rubbish, architecture, agriculture, production, entertainment and leisure, drugs. Each group illustrates 3 generations of items: the oldest – from the collection of the National Ethnographic Museum in Warsaw, those from the turn of the 21st century – the Millennium, and finally those designed and used today.
The exhibition depicts a phenomenon of recurring trends. It’s related to our current focus on sustainable development. After a time of delight and excess in consumption (Millennium), we are returning to natural resources, available “close at hand”, easy to process with household methods. Although the modern projects are technologically as advanced as the Millennial ones, enriched by an emotional narrative, they use natural resources while mindful of the environment and social responsibility rules.
Thus constructed exhibition is to encourage a cross-generational discussion on the role that objects play in our lives, about the changes in the designing and production processes, ideas that shaped them, and emotions they invoke in their users. We want the Millennium collection to be the pretext for education around notions such as consumption, advanced technologies, globalisation, but also sustainable production, social responsibility, zero waste, and the various slow movements.
Download the Millennium catalogue here.
Project author: Anna Grunwald
Millennium collection concept: Elżbieta Czyżewska, Anna Grunwald, Aleksander (Bratek) Robotycki, Pawilon – Paweł Lewoc
Content supervision: Dr Adam Czyżewski
