A museum experiment in addressing a sensitive topic.
What’s your favourite word? I’ll start.
Kalsarikännit:
[Finnish] “feeling when you are going to get drunk home alone in your underwear — with no intention of going out”
Tsundoku:
[Japanese] “people who buy more books than they can actually read”
Broflake:
[English] “white male offended by any feminist or ethnic activity which is not directly designed for him”
Trump in American Sign Language:
Yes, Movember is here again! The Nobel Peace Center has a fantastic collection of Nobel moustaches. Who said peace couldn’t be fun?
Movember — a month to celebrate moustaches around the world and promote awareness on men’s health issues, especially prostate and testicular cancer. But also a gratuitous opportunity to look at facial hair among Nobel laureates.
Despite the invention of the disposable razor in 1901, Nobel Laureates persisted with impressive moustaches well into the 1900s. Here are a few favourites of mine.
There I was. Outside a Muslim shrine in Cape Town, South Africa. I had walked all the way uphill in the scorching heat. I was about to enter when I realised I had made a mistake. I had forgotten to bring something to cover up with, as required to get in.
Taking the museum out of the museum
Eight portraits. One thing in common: people who made huge sacrifices for free speech. A German journalist imprisoned by the Nazis. A Kurdish journalist imprisoned in Iran. A young poet from Bahrain. A human rights lawyer from Mexico. An opposition politician from Rwanda. But how many others we know nothing about? Unknown Numbers.
It started as a building fence, to hide the construction site behind the Nobel Peace Center. The new National Museum is slowly taking shape, but it won’t open before 2020. In the meantime, why not turn the building fence into an arena for contemporary art?
Between 1901 and 1960, 45 men were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. 25 of them had a moustache. In the same period of time, three women were awarded the prize. None of them had a moustache, and only one of them received the prize on her own. The two others had to share the prize with a man.
There is one thing you should know about me: I love nerdy statistics. These past years, I’ve collected all kind of numbers about the Nobel Peace Prize, and these numbers speak for themselves.
Without further ado, I give you the Nobel Peace Prize laureates in numbers: 23 organisations, 86 men and… 16 women.
Of all five Nobel prizes, the Nobel Peace Prize actually scores best when it comes to gender. Only two women have received the Nobel Prize in physics, four women have received the Nobel Prize in chemistry.
As many women were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize between 1901 and 1991, as between 1991 and 2014. …
I left the ship and took to the left, following the instructions Google Maps was giving me. Everybody else took the opposite direction, towards the fortress they had been advised to visit. The weather was foggy, the village seemed deserted, and I was all by myself for the first time in a week. As I reached the church, I looked behind me. Not a soul in sight, and something else… proper silence. I knew very little about the place I was heading to. If it hadn’t been for Bjarne recommending it, who knows, I might have stayed on the ship…
Adeline Cuvelier
Museum Nerd since 2009
