Across the 2023–2025 academic years, the Public Programmes team in UCL Museums & Cultural Programmes are creatively exploring building common and equitable futures from past traces.

Taking a multi-perspective, cross-disciplinary and subject-led approach to this central question, we are considering what it means, and the tools required to realise equitable futures through collaborative programmes.

The collections and physical spaces of UCL Museums are central to this, as are partnerships with UCL teaching and research departments, UCL professional services staff, students, families and groups who we share localities and interests with.

Thematic explorations

Each term of the academic year has an overarching theme for exploration, stretching across the three Bloomsbury-based museums: Grant Museum of Zoology, Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology, and UCL Art Museum.

Term 1: People and Cultures

How have people’s cultures across different geographies represented in UCL Museum Collections come to be understood through time? What role do curators as custodians have in carrying the stories across time? How do the peoples these cultural belongings come from, and their descendants, take ownership of object histories to tell stories of indigenous knowledges?

Museum in Focus: Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology

Term 2: Habitats and Environments

How can we better understand the impact of our planet’s rapidly changing environments through climate change? What role do we as humans have to stem further habitat loss for animal species? Why? What actions can we take to increase the biodiversity of our local environments? Do we need to work harder to address this in urban areas? What does hopeful visioning of habitats and environments look like?

Museum in Focus: Grant Museum of Zoology

Term 3: Imaginary Worlds (Dreamings)

How do we maintain the capacity to dream, to hope for an alternative future different to the trajectory predicted for us through dominant, powerful voices? Can we embrace speculative imaginings of “what if?” to question current social and cultural norms? Are there art forms that can be utilised as tools for imagining new possibilities for world building? How can UCL Collections be part of inspiring hopeful futurity?

Museum in Focus: UCL Art Museum

Collaborative student projects

As part of our exploration of Architecting Futures from Past Traces, Public Programmes is collaborating with UCL teaching and research departments to creatively interrogate UCL Museums’ Collections. Topics include how we navigate physical and metaphysical space through the remnants of ancient deities, how we examine historically revered figures and the contentious legacies we’re left to grapple with, and ways of enabling better access to collections through groundbreaking digital technologies.

Otherlands (October 2023 - January 2024)

‘Otherlands: Museum for a Museum’ is a collaboration between the Bartlett School of Architecture’s Year 1 students and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology’s collection displays. The playful exploration of the interplay between ancient deities in their material forms, museum space and empiricism are realised through six otherworldly installations which form a spectacular transformation of space.

• Exhibition listing
• Student Review: Otherlands

Reimagining Flinderella (January – May 2024)

‘Reimagining Flinderella’ is a three-event series humorously and critically interrogating the legacy of the father of modern archaeology Flinders Petrie and the practice of contemporary public archaeology.

• Reimagining Flinderella project page
• News story: Call for participants (deadline has now passed)
• News story: Call for roundtable case studies (deadline 7 April 2024)

Family audiences

Every month we run intergenerational workshops suitable for family audiences in the Grant Museum of Zoology and the Petrie Museum of Egyptian and Sudanese Archaeology. Often these are developed in partnership with artists, educators and cultural producers.

Term 1 workshops

• September: Collage Club with Steph Hartman at the Petrie Museum
• September: Fossil Hunting with Dr Ruth Siddall across UCL Bloomsbury Campus
• October: Customise your Amulet with Francesca Chinnery at the Petrie Museum
• October: Bring a Fossil Back to Life in the Object Based Learning Lab, UCL
• November: Play Senet with Jaquie Feldman at the Petrie Museum
• December: Origami Gifts with Dr Lizzie Burns at the Petrie Museum

Term 2 workshops

• February: Paper Basketry and Weaving with Clare Sams at the Petrie Museum
• February: Wild – A Biodiversity Story with Joseph Bolt at the Grant Museum
• February Half Term: Imaginary Habitats with Steph Hartman at the Grant Museum
• February Half Term: Model Boat Making with Rosie Fuller at the Petrie Museum
• March: Tombs of Tarkhan with Joseph Bolt at the Petrie Museum
• March: Reimagining Coral Reefs (VR experience) at the Grant Museum

Term 3 workshops

Details TBC

Partnerships formed by shared localities and interests

Global Generation

Public Programmes are partnering with Global Generation based at Story Garden, Somers Town to respond to matters of water-based life. The Grant Museum of Zoology’s new interpretative displays dealing with biodiversity loss and the importance of invertebrate life will form a content showcase for Global Generation’s Fellows to engage with on their terms.

Helen Bamber Foundation

Public Programmes are continuing their relationship with the Camden-based photo collective Fotonomads at the human rights charity Helen Bamber Foundation to photographically explore themes of movement, homelands, language and culture through UCL Museums’ collections and spaces, and the city of London.

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