Junhui:
Hello my name is Junhui Yang. I work in the United Kingdom and I'm a lecturer in Deaf Studies and Sign Language and I'm working on this project with Miriam Grottanelli in Italy. I'm going to ask a number of questions and I'll hand over to you to introduce yourself and where you work.
Miriam:
Hello, hello, so my name is Miriam Grottanelli and I am the Director of the Siena School for Liberal Arts in Siena, Italy and we are partnering with the University of Central Lancashire and other institutions from other European countries to work on this project about creating Deaf Museums.
Junhui:
Ah, good!
Please, can you explain to me what the Deaf Museums project is about?
Miriam:
Yes. So there are not that many Deaf Museums in Europe. Our intention, together with all of our partners in the network, is to give as much visibility as possible to Deaf Heritage, Deaf History and sign language, in a different format than is usual. By that I mean using as collaborators museums and using as a specific format that of an exhibition. So each partner organization has to create an exhibition about Deaf History, Deaf Heritage or sign language. We all have different focuses.
Junhui:
Excellent. That's really interesting. Can you tell me, how did you come about with choosing your topic and the content?
Miriam:
Yes in a way, for us it was easy because Siena used to have one of the most important residential schools for the Deaf in Europe. It's called the Istituto Pendola, so the Pendola Institute.
It stopped functioning in the 80s, but it is very famous amongst the Italian Deaf community.
So we definitely wanted to have an exhibition that would be physically contained within the space of the Institute and that would focus on the memories that are also contained within the Institute.
Junhui:
Oh, fantastic! Can I ask you: do you have any tips or advice for people who are looking at what you have done and may want to replicate the same?
Miriam:
Yes, I think one interesting aspect of the way we have gone about our exhibition is deciding whether it should be a physical exhibition in a physical space, or an online exhibition.
Of course, we have thought very much about this particularly as a result of this last year, with the pandemic and all the Covid restrictions. So it's been very interesting for us to think what should we do and what can we do.
The solution or the conclusion that we have come at, is that we will we will organize an exhibition within the physical space of the Institute, but we will also have an online version for all those people that might not be able to attend on the days when the exhibition is open and for all those people that will only have the chance to visit our website and want to understand what our work has been about.
So I would say that our tip or our advice is, especially considering what's happened over the last year and a half with Covid, to really think about the the possibility of combining something within a specific location with an online version of that content.
Junhui:
Oh, that's really good advice. Thank you for that, because then people will be able to see it online as well.
Thank you for the information too.
Miriam:
Thank you, Junhui. It was great talking with you.
Junhui:
And thank you to the interpreter as well, who's interpreted from IS.
Miriam:
Thank you, definitely thank you to Eddie as well, and I'm sure that this is going to be very useful, you know, for the users of our website and so on. So thank you Junhui and thank you Eddie.