CECA 2009 - Day 1

5 October 2009

I’m taking a break from our honeymoon to attend the ICOM-CECA Conference this week, which, as mentioned, is taking place in Reykjavík. For those of you unable to join us, I will try to give a day to day account of the conference proceedings, which started with an opening reception at the National Museum of Iceland.

I liked their approach to interpretation - the text panels in their main exhibitions were all bilingual (Icelandic/English) but without the text being overwhelming. The text itself was ‘newspaper style’, i.e. a lead paragraph summarising the main points in each section, followed by a couple of paragraphs of more ‘fleshed out’ text with further details, so if you’re not much of a reader you can just read the beginning without losing out on any crucial info.

They also had a very interesting temporary photography exhibition entitled ‘Unknown Moments’, exhibiting images from six photographers in their photographic collection. Visitors where encouraged to contribute any information they had about the photos, e.g. where it was taken or who the people depicted where, so each photo was displayed with a card for visitors to write on.