I first thought of the connection of museums and bedrooms through the comments my friends made on my room. I've been in my room since I was 15 years old. There's art, notes, drawings, tickets, and memorabilia dating back throughout those five years. Everything is curated without order, and every object had some gravity of significance to me at some point. Afterwards, I conceived of this concept more universally. As an intern at the Jewish Museum's Summer Institute, I developed the idea to become a creative project. At first it was to be a zine, with a podcast corollary. However, I had some mental health difficulties that impeded the completion of the project. My interest in it has risen, and fallen, my motivation faltering and doubly bolstering. At times, I did doubt the strength of my hypothesis, as I tried to make it more academic and fit it within a certain paradigm. The biggest difficulty, paradoxically, was even defining what a museum was. The definition I found, developed through deep consideration by the International Council of Museums, is, "Museums are democratising, inclusive, polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and future. Acknowledging and addressing the conflicts and challenges of the present, they hold artefacts and specimens in trust for society, safeguard diverse memories for future generations, and guarantee equal rights and equal access to heritage for all people(1)." The correlation between the space of bedrooms and museums is through the alteration of the definition to apply to a private space. A bedroom is an exclusive, space for critical dialogue on the past and future. Addressing the present attitude, and personhood of the resider of the bedroom, from conflicts to achievements, bedrooms contain artefacts in trust of the resident, holding and shaping memories, for the resident themselves, and for those who have access to the resident's intimacy. I believe this definition will be articulated through the episodes of interviews. Everyone of them is different, and relate to different components of the definition. I hope through this, you're able to gain an altered relationship to your space, as holding who you've been, who you are, and who you will be. For the rest of the introduction, I will be talking about the history of bedrooms, and museums, so that you may have the background knowledge to approach this project.
To better understand bedrooms, I found a brief summation of the origin of beds first. Beds have been noted as existing 77,000 years, which were built from plant bedding. The existence of bedrooms themselves was a product of the dissolution of nomadic lives, and into settled villages (2). Bedrooms also have multiple typologies, with varied consequences. The Overnight Bed: An Analytical Study on Bedroom Types (3) identified such types:
Residence hall/ Camp bedrooms: which are often formalized, and built for efficiency more than comfort.
Private bedrooms: marketed towards a diverse clientele, often include co-working and co-living environments
Hospitality bedrooms: the identity of the location is proliferated widely throughout the room, giving the room a branded character
Healthcare bedrooms: it's an environment conducive to health, wellness, and recovery, allows for daylight, and curtains for privacy when desired
Additionally, I also looked at two studies. The first one is titled Online Journals as Virtual Space. Like my project, it draws parallels between two different spaces in order to draw correlations between them. The study was able to confirm that private spaces like the bedroom, give bedroom space an assigned territory of safety and contemplation. Bedrooms become respites, as well as a location of cogitation. A summary quote that describes the point made states, "The evolution of the arrangement and decoration of bedroom space can relate closely to transitions and rites of passage for young people. The uncertainties and changes of youth are negotiated and marked out through the arrangement and rearrangement of bedroom space, enabling young people to place and replace themselves with respect to interests, affiliations, networks of friends and a range of other factors (4) "
Another study I looked into is, "I’ve Stamped My Personality All Over It”: The Meaning of Objects in Teenage Bedroom Space. In the study the author looks into how teenagers form significance within the objects they own. She acknowledges that significance is built out of personalization, historical significance, influence of public experiences projected into private space. The author summarized the ethnographic study through the following quote, "Teenage bedrooms are fluid, evolving spaces, the meaning of which is essentially made through the things contained in it. Through their possessions and housed in their bedrooms, young people able to articulate their place in culture as well as their emerging and evolving identities (5)."
Now looking into museums and how they have evolved into existence, I used Museums: A History (6) by John E. Simmons. Museums began through the human need to preserve a collection of affinal objects as a micro representation of the macro, the world. Furthermore, artifact is defined as something made or modified by human beings. The objects in people's bedroom are artifacts, from posters, to tables. Museums have also become locales of cultural production. In containing the preserved objects and artifacts from people's collections, and arranging them within a particular context of time, an historical narrative is established. I also pooled more information from Claire Bishop's Radical Museology. She criticizes certain museums for being guilty of presentism, the obsession with novelty, and present value, rather than forming a dialogue of the past and future. What I find worth noting about this, is that the bedrooms described within these interviews avoid such presentism, and honor her critique of creating a timeline of events that is honest to one's chronology, rather than focusing solely on the now.
As I wrap up the introduction, I want to thank everyone involved, and the encouragement I received as I developed this project. I'm really proud of it, and I hope all involved and those not are able to gather a new perspective and experience of their space.