A history of the world in a hundred objects
Victoria Ward, Wednesday, January 20, 2010

In the collections of the British Museum the world can write the new histories that it needs to understand its past and shape its future.

That’s what it says on the website. And now the British Museum are working with the BBC over the whole of this year to tell A history of the world in a hundred objects

This delights me, as objects and collections have always been at the heart of Sparknow’s work with storytelling.

• as place, to dress a room as a different space, say about having people bring objects that hold a message or story and have these objects become an exhibit or wall display
• anthropologically, as ways of witnessing an organisation and piecing together its unspoken histories and testimonies
• they’re a terrific way into reminiscence in narrative and oral history interviews, and to switch people from an analytical and distant recollection to a vivid and immediate presence of the memory they’re fired up by
• we’ve made sounds on them that have passed into a living archive of found story and oral history
• as metaphorical small third spaces spaces that will allow all of us to express, explore and make sense of feelings that are otherwise private or beyond the reach of description
• as surprise, an angle on something, a small gateway into a big and complex story
• to slow people down to. The luminescence of the object, the surprise and intimacy of it, slows people down and changes the flow of encounter.

Most of all I’d say that the theory of Winnicott about transitional objects is what Clive Holtham and I started with about ten years ago and I think the idea of objects as a ‘not me’ thing, a transitional space between person and organisation, is not just a glib appropriation of some handy theory to shore up experimentation.

More recently, Julie and I have been doing some narrative research and in our analysis of objects, we’ve also discovered a category we’re calling ‘object symbols’ which are either small details and objects referred to in a story, which can provide a way into to a complex large subject (rather like Doug’s blog about storytelling and earthquakes that I referred to yesterday), or they are striking turns of phrase that evoke a vivid image where the normal tired language of abstraction has no purchase on the listener. I don’t know yet how far we’ll push this object symbol idea but we’ve found a rich way to tackle part of our sense-making.

I’m going to get stuck in to Neil MacGregor’s objects project and here’s a link to the visual essay of a recent encounter between people and objects, objects as a stimulus for conversations about unlikely collaborations and innovation between businesses and museums.