'Representing Difficult Pasts within Complex Presents ... - T2M

(although Divall (2008) complains that in the London Transport Museum such approaches become
didactic)?
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One way could be to ensure the public contributed in some way to the museum – as in the District
Six museum where community contributions in the form of comments, memorabilia, voices, photographs
and creations form part of the museum. One idea might be to have, say, a photography competition, with
people taking photos on cellphones while travelling and the best selected for museum display, thus
encouraging more visitors. A way of recording visitor comments and ideas on issues such as environment
and transport, could be a discussion forum on a computer where the best threads and comments are
displayed 40 . The museum could also be a mode of voice for transport issues, to improve conditions,
bearing in mind there is a need for a better and more accessible transport system in Cape Town (Pirie
2009). Meetings could be held, complaints and suggestions for improvement registered.
A museum of this kind could become a vibrant space for integrating the city; people from all
regions making up the community. Even a huge interactive board where one can ‘access’ comments from
people in different areas on what it is like and how it is to live there (with some possible monitoring in-
between) is possible. Large electronic screens could be set up in different stations/places where people
could talk with each other, or images displayed from other parts of the city the same day, showing people
moving perhaps through different stations, or streets, a sense of interwoveness and interconnection
evoked despite divided realities and contexts, to create an awareness of the whole 41 . Visual artists and
performers could contribute and develop this concept. A wall of images of bus stops, stations, taxi ranks
at different sites in Cape Town could also be very interesting and would depict the whole city on the go.
To avoid ‘ethnographic fragmentation’ contemporary understandings of the museum would
require perceptions of its archive as complex and multifaceted, challenging representations of colonial
and apartheid histories in relation to the present. The museum should ideally be an intervention, providing
multiple points of access and interpretation that leave the visitor questioning their own position and hstory
in the world and to walk out the door looking differently at the city, wanting to know more. There might
be ways developed of designing gaps, barriers that represent blockages, also manifest in transport history
- perhaps in a metaphorical or experiential manner assigning routes that could not be taken, where
understandings of ways in which people live and interconnect can be reworked. There is space also for
40 The highly successful Hotel Yeoville 40 in Yeoville library, Johannesburg recently established
collaborative multi-platform public art project works along these lines
41 There is a display panel at the Transport Museum in London which does this between global city
centres. (Visited 2010).