The Mobile Museum is a Kickstarter project with a unique aim – to create a mobile museum of cultural activity across 11 housing estates across the London Borough of Barking and Dagenham.
Local crowdfunding mission
The idea is pretty simple:
Take a large truck, convert it into a functional museum and travel between these estates to gather photos, words, images and examples of all existing current cultural activities from residents across the area, generating publications, exhibitions and discussions among people who live in the area.
“Contemporary cultural activity across the borough will be documented, mapped and deposited in the collection; from galleries, to photography clubs, reading groups, knitting circles and jigsaw making clubs,” the project team explain.
During the five-month journey across the Barking and Dagenham the museum will create personalized magazines detailing cultural activity across each one of the eleven estates it visits.
Creative community
This is great, because it should galvanize existing creative activity while also evangelizing and encouraging further work in the sector – and creating a record of what is happening now. What’s interesting too is that this is a classic example of crowfunding from within the community to address a local goal.
The project will culminate in a screening and celebration event at Valance House, the home of London Borough of Barking and Dagenham’s archives and a museum.
Another strand to the project is reaching out to the local community to encourage them to use the borough’s existing museums, galleries and archives.
Big society?
The project seems to be an innovative attempt to use crowdfunding to bring communities closer together, to activate creative activity and to break down barriers between communities, while also recording what kind of creative activity is taking place in this part of London today. It seems an interesting example of an innovative project with a clear social and artistic message.
Take a look at the project here.
