Your Object Story: First activity
Yarn is a participatory platform for making stories. It can be a powerful tool to give voice to objects and promote a personal and sensorial engagement with museum collections. Choose a museum object that can represent your relationship with Indonesian heritage and create a Yarn story exploring its hidden connections.
Shadow puppet of the male character 'Secamuka'. Made of hide, horn and gold leaf. Carved, painted and gilded.
Late 1700s - early 1800s (Before 1816)
Made in: Cirebon, West Java, Indonesia
British Museum, Field Collection by Sir Thomas Stamford Raffles
https://congruenceengine.yarncommunity.org/storage/Shadow_puppet_BM_head_1679506630.png
There are various ways to develop a narrative around an object. You can start from its story and ask some questions. Where does it come from? Who created, discovered, and owned it? Is it displayed in the museum, or has it been in the past? What feelings does it evoke to you?
Museum items often have very thin records in the cataloguing system, so developing an 'object biography' is a way to enrich and expand the knowledge about collections.
A video of a shadow puppet theater published on YouTube.
https://youtu.be/ivNTjE53VsI
You can also imagine to be the object, and describe the material you are made of, what sounds do you hear, what do you see in front of you, what are your hopes and desires.
Audio and video links can have an evocative power but also be a way to reconnect the object with its sonic nature, like in the case of the shadow puppet above, hosted in the British Museum Collection.
This is a story of a Harris Tweed cap and the unexpected connections discovered while researching its history...
https://congruenceengine.yarncommunity.org/stories/28
Use Yarn to draw these elements together. You can include images, music, sounds, video, links to reveal its context, significance, and meanings. Read the stories below to get some inspiration!
The Thackray Birth Stories project has been working with parents to tell a range of stories about childbirth.
http://yarncommunity.com/projects/2
To draft your story, upload the image of your object on Yarn and create a Word document that you can collaborative edit. After the group discussion in the breakout rooms, start from the title and the introduction.