Transforming urban spaces to share refugees’ stories
Ultimum Refugium, a prototype created at The 19 Million Project
Over a hundred participants gathered in Rome last November to explore how Europe’s pressing refugee crisis came to be, and what can be done to best address it. One of the strongest ideas to come out of The 19 Million Project was Ultimum Refugium. The initiative was part hackathon, part workshop aimed “to help participants break from traditional conventions of journalism and communications to develop radical new ways to share the narrative of the [European refugee] crisis.” The team who conceptualised Ultimum Refugium describes the project as a “living museum” that will be filled with experiential storytelling installations related to the refugee crisis. The temporary, modular construction is designed to travel from city-to-city and occupy urban public spaces in regions impacted by the crisis.
Creators Nadia Tromp and Elda Brizuela describe Ultimum Refugium, a Pop-up Living Museum:
The idea for a living museum was conceived as a response to the question “How might we create empathy for refugees?” and the follow up question “How could we start telling different stories on the topic of the refugee crisis in order to change attitudes and create a new narrative?”
We feel that there needs to be a physical disruption of the urban landscape. We created the concept of a temporary, modular, locally fabricated piece of architecture that would transform an environment for a limited period of time and encourage engagement. It is imagined that this living museum would be placed in a historically meaningful urban space in a city, a contested space, to create a forced tension. Our test environment for the prototype is this city, Rome, directly in front of the Pantheon. The Pantheon, which is a structured, precisely designed piece of architecture, is juxtaposed with an almost alien-like structure of our museum. This is a reflection on a society that is orderly and well-structured, being juxtaposed
to the perceived invasion of the refugees. It forces dialogue around issues that are uncomfortable and sometimes difficult to deal with.The modular design means that the museum could be erected quickly and easily. It could be dismantled and loaded on a truck to be transported from one city to the next. The content in the museum could be generated in any number of different ways, including possibly developing projects that came out of The 19 Million Project. We are interested in bringing the human aspect back to the story and giving faces and names to those affected.
The physical transformation of the landscape is temporary, but the transformation of people’s attitudes that witness, contribute and experience the content of the museum, is permanent. Our aim is to create a space where the public can be immersed into the stories of the refugee and where the stories could be experienced through a number of mediums, including virtual reality.
“We chose to honour this project because it completely reimagines
how people engage with news and information,” says Mariana
Santos, founder of The 19 Million Project. “The travelling museum proposal takes news and non-fiction storytelling out of the realm of newspapers, websites and social platforms — and introduces it to urban public spaces. It’s a truly original idea that will keep the Mediterranean migration crisis on the global news agenda.”
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