Power of Authenticity: Memory-Making & Performative Visitor Experiences at Melbourne’s Immigration Museum

Moya McFadzean, with sewing baskets, Photographer: Jon Augier. Source: Museums Victoria

Melbourne’s Immigration Museum is in a constant process of personal story production, collaborating with diverse storytellers in order to create engaging exhibitions. Deeply personal memories can be significant deliverers of exhibition content in a variety of creative ways and provide powerful visitor interactions. Audience research has demonstrated the efficacy of authentic voices, whose finished stories are the result of close and extensive collaboration, in producing affecting and empathetic visitor experiences. A key challenge for museums is the eliciting, editing and crafting of these deeply personal stories in order to deliver the content and visitor experiences needed, while maintaining authenticity and avoiding manipulation – of both the memories of the storytellers, and the emotions of the visitors. 

This presentation will draw on the three most recent exhibition projects at the Immigration Museum to raise some key ideas and issues relating to memory in the public sphere. Each exhibition positioned personal, first-person voices, created specifically for exhibition, at the centre of both the content delivery and the visitor experience. The exhibitions demanded that the museum engage with notions of authenticity, trust, as well as methodologies of deep community engagement, and very different forms of visitor interactivity and immersion.

https://museumsvictoria.com.au/immigrationmuseum/