The Mobile Museums – Interview with Hans J. Wiegner

Interview with the Berlin-based artist Hans J. Wiegner, initiator of the Mobile Museums, a travelling artists museum, together with Susa Pop, cultural manager in Berlin.

A Travelling Artists Museum
The Mobile Museums, supported by the European Commission / Culture 2000 programme, challenged the traditional notion of a museum as a continuous memory institution with a permanent residence.
The Mobile Museums tour from Berlin over Vienna to Barcelona was conceived as a Travelling Artists Museum. Public Art Lab Berlin, an interdisciplinary platform for intercultural exchange, invited artists to design their individual museum.

Modular Space Structure
Each artist received a construction kit consisting of modular recycled sheets with which to build an individual museum whose floor area could measure a maximum of 10 square meters. The three Mobile Museums were designed by German artists Hans J. Wiegner and Franka Hoernschemeyer, together with Austrian artists Gilbert Bretterbauer and Hans Joachim Roedelius. The three individually designed museums were accompanied by the Mobile Museum Studio.

Mobile Museum Studio
The Mobile Museum Studio’s programme was curated by the cooperation partners in each city, and were located centrally due to the programme, which included artists living in each city. These urban interventions have so far been characterized by an inclusive, open art process that allows for an intense dialogue between local visitors, the artists and the adjacent institutions.

When I asked Hans J. Wiegner how the concept of the Mobile Studios evolved he refered to Mark Rothko first. „He did not like big museums“ explains Wiegner, “he would have rather prefered a number of small museums, spread all over the country, each of them devoted to one particular artist.“
Wiegner also likes the idea of the museum as a small, accessible cultural space where people quickly check in and out while roaming the streets of a city. „I think that our cities need more museums as perception cells, which are placed in the middle of the streets. You just enter them and you experience a different atmosphere from the world outside. This is an instant way to mediate art and culture – and it happens right there where the people are: in the streets.”
Usually, people visit museums on Sundays or during vacation. Those small Mobile Museums provide immediate access to culture in the midst of the urban sprawl. The Mobile Museums are also a site for artistic interventions in the public space, thus enabling manyfold experiences about the living culture of a particular place. And it seems to be a good instrument to showcase what you call intangible cultural heritage also. A mobile structure definitely offers a broader array of opportunities than a permanent residence, because you can always keep track with developments in a city and go to where the people are.