A project of Museum Studies students at the University of Guelph

In early 2020, as the impact of COVID-19 began to reverberate globally, a group of students at the University of Guelph were designing a pop-up museum of found and personal artifacts that would bring together the community in public space. As the pandemic accelerated, ideas that were plausible one week suddenly were not the next, affected by changes to how we communicate as well as how we negotiate physical objects and spaces.

While the core intent remained – to create a public conversation about the interplay of past, present, and future through objects and their stories – the project quickly transformed in tandem with the world around us. A “hands-on” approach – the crux of museum engagement strategies – became impossible, and our tools for sharing the museum became wholly virtual as citizens around the world were asked to isolate and shelter in place.

As well as collecting and cataloguing, one of a museum's most important roles is interpretation – providing context to help us understand objects and events. Now there were new questions to consider:

1. What role do objects play as the virus pushes us rapidly into a virtual future?

2. As physical movement is discouraged and, in some cases, prohibited, how do the spaces and objects around us take on new significance?

3. How do these factors change how we think about what a museum does and its contents?

The outcomes of that dialogue are reflected in the museum you see here. Wunderkammer, or cabinets of curiosities, emerged in the mid-sixteenth-century as repositories of wondrous specimens and exotic objects. This project presents a contemporary interpretation of these precursors to museums, created by students who have considered the pull of the extraordinary within everyday phenomena and how value can shift dramatically day to day, moment to moment, when a world is faced with uncertain futures. In light of this, the contents of the wunderkammer are significant because of what they represent – their personal resonance. Connecting objects across time and space, the students use this unique moment as an opportunity to both reflect on the past and look forward to how we conceptualize the present and imagine future change.