SHORT PORTRAITPOLYRAMA – Museum für Lebensgeschichten collects life experiences of Berliners from different backgrounds on central life themes. With the idea of shaping cultural heritage in multiple voices, it brings marginalised perspectives into focus. As an “oral history museum”, POLYRAMA establishes a growing audio archive of contemporary narratives and experiments with museum forms of presentation and representation. In this way, life experiences of the present become accessible as knowledge and are stored for the future.
“This project, which is anti-educational in the best sense of the word, allows diverse themes and voices to stand side by side in equal dignity and consistently follows the idea: people are allowed to tell stories about themselves. With this basic idea, this special museum does not need any classical curation, but organises itself in the simultaneity of phenomena, themes and challenges that a diverse society faces. Polyphony is the principle in this pioneering approach, which exemplarily transfers the oral history tradition into contemporary cultural creation”, says the jury.
3 Questions to… Anna Chrusciel and Sadaf Farahani, initiators and project leaders of POLYRAMA – Museum für Lebensgeschichten
POLYRAMA is a museum that collects life stories of people from different backgrounds. In personal insights, they tell of the life experiences of a polyphonic society.
POLYRAMA has had its own premises since September 2021. We will use the funding to furnish the rooms and realise a first exhibition, which will enable people to immerse themselves in the life stories of others with all their senses.
… that we finally get over the concepts of integration and tolerance and find our way to an equal coexistence. That we recognise our different realities of life, listen to each other and fight together against racism, rejectionism and other forms of discrimination because they affect us all.
