A Wilder Museum

Climate Museum UK actively reimagines museums for climate action. We are a team of creative people making a mobile and digital museum to stir and collect responses to the Earth crisis.

Through a Wilder Museum, our vision is to grow wilder and more decentralised, issuing spores of regenerative change.

In turn, we will embolden all museums to put climate action at their heart.

An activist museum with no venue, our activations happen wherever our members are based. We work in partnerships and meet people in their communities using art, games and objects to stimulate talk, connections and action. By being transparent and responsive as we evolve, we shake up notions about what museums can be in these times. We hope to be a resilient organisation with members and collections distributed in many places held by shared ethos and resources; and that museums everywhere will see their relevance to the climate story.

This wilder, more distributed, future incarnation of our museum is inspired by the mutual exchanges of mycorrhizal fungi with plants, evoking each of these functions:

Strength: gives structure to soil so plants resist extreme weather

The museum will give courage, help communities adapt and resist climate impacts

Anticipation of threats: transports chemical messages to trigger disease resistance

The museum will educate, anticipate threats, and promote wellbeing

Nurturing: carries resources to weaker/younger plants

The museum will promote compassionate, inclusive practice and justice for all

Distributed: extends reach wider and deeper into soil, drawing in nutrients beyond the plant’s own

The museum will spread with activations by members and local practitioners anywhere.

This new museum would feel organic and curious, with woven basket pods and seats, trails of hyphae and spores. Artist-created objects and interactives will encourage exploration of nature-based solutions such as rewilding, biomimicry and agro-forestry, and other multi-solving ideas for eco-social justice, tackling the goals of Agenda 2030.

Museums in a time of Earth crisis must be animated by people - artists, citizens, educators, scientists - to be rich with learning, co-creation, compassion and direct action.

Project Team

Climate Museum UK: Bridget McKenzie, Victoria Burns, Lucy Carruthers, Beckie Leach McDonald, James Aldridge, Alara Adali, William Wardlaw Rogers

Project Name

A Wilder Museum

Team Location

UK

Category

Community, activism & engagement