Reuse the muse : the museum as a transcultural negotiator of national identity

Abstract

The project proposes a museum that acts as public infrastructure, situated across the boundary between east and west Oslo. The architecture of the museum is a continuous linear element that acts as a bridge through the different urban conditions from one side of the Aker River to the other, becoming the primary circulation path, reinventing the public street and positioning the cultural value of the exhibits alongside the daily life of the city where it infiltrates the exhibition spine of the museum. The imposition of this system questions contemporary definitions of Norwegian identity through the relationships developed between the historic narrative of the museum and the slices of city life that it presents at the intersections. Several registers of content pull through the museum - exhibition, production and public space. The collections explore what it means to be Norwegian, through the art of Edvard Munch and artifacts from Norway's viking past presented in a timeline of development, all consistently bracketed by visible processes of restoration and production needed to keep the museum operational - undermining through process the traditional modes of cultural legitimation of the museum and allowing for an imposition of a alternate kind of user driven identity for the city.