By Youssef Kanjou
Most people frequently visit museums as places for education, culture and leisure. Usually, a large number of visitors come at the same time. But because of the corona pandemic, museums cannot receive visitors at the moment. How are museums coping with this pandemic? And how do they reach their audience?
Museums around the world have increased their online activities. These offerings have increased through the use of modern technologies. There are a number of wonderful opportunities that museums offer as an alternative to a live visit. For example, Berlin museums have a number of virtual tours and online exhibitions prepared specifically because of corona:
https://artsandculture.google.com/partner/pergamonmuseum-staatliche-museen-zu-berlin
In Tübingen, for example, you can visit the website of the University Museum in Tübingen Castle, which shows hundreds of 3D artifacts. The artifacts capture attention even through the screen, including those made of ivory from prehistoric times, about 40,000 years ago. They are considered to be the oldest works of art in the world, such as the wild horse, which is a symbol of the museum and of the era when modern humans came to Central Europe:
https://www.unimuseum.uni-tuebingen.de/en/collections/3d-museum.html
The museums in Syria, especially the museums in Damascus and Aleppo, are partially open to the public. The museums can be visited. There a number of wonderful YouTube videos of Syrian antiquities, especially Palmyra:
The museums, just like other areas of life, are very much affected at the moment, especially in economic terms, as they depend heavily on visitors and donations to carry out their plans. Currently, many exhibitions are threatened with closure, especially in the near future, as the situation remains dire.
Currently, the museum staff feels isolated. They were used to seeing a large number of people in the museum. This is a difficult situation, but at the same time it allows more freedom in working at the museum. Before the corona crisis, it was difficult for museum staff to study and conserve the objects that were in the museum because visitors were moving around and they could not work with the artifacts.
We will all continue to wait for corona to end so we can visit museums, and until then, the virtual visits are the closes we can come to walking through the museums we want to visit in the future. Corona and its consequences for us will then be a topic in museums in the future.
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Impressionen zum Leben in Zeiten der Corona-Pandemie. Foto: tünews INTERNATIONAL; Mostafa Elyasian 25.02.2021.
