TWO Disseminating Event – Workshop with Marlen Mouliou

Drawing information and ideas from material culture studies, perception theories, neuroaesthetics and other fields of knowledge, this workshop offers experiential exercises that will provide insights into how we can connect with objects both in the personal and collective realm, and how we can make meaning and construct narratives about the material world and about us. This is an experience we can have in our everyday life and of course in museums, the object repositories par excellence.

One of the most challenging tasks for museum curators, let alone students who are trained on object-based learning, is to write engaging object-based stories that are both intellectually and emotionally meaningful to museum audiences.

To celebrate this year's Academic Heritage Day topic, the workshop explore the concept and experience of "sensation" in the object interpretation process. It was structured around a very short introduction by the moderator, some creative word-play tasks by the participants and lots of discussion within the group.

Participants were required to bring with them an object (personal or from a museum context) which for them connects (in any way) with the concept of "sensation".

These objects have been the pop-up collection based on which this workshop unfolded.

Marlen Mouliou is Assistant Professor of Museology at the Department of History and Archaeology of the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens (NKUA) and a member of the Special Cross-faculty Committee of the MA in Museum Studies. She is responsible for the Public Archeology activities organised in the context of NKUA’s Excavation at Marathon and Coordinator of CIVIS Alliance Open Labs in the NKUA. In 2023, she has been awarded a Fellowship by Fulbright Foundation in Greece. 

Her research interests focus on: the social role of museums, museums as spiritual places, museum history and contemporary museums’ operations, public archeology, etc. In 2020, she created The Museum Inside Me,  a participatory initiative aimed at promoting the public value of museums. Together with Mark O’Neill and Jette Sandahl, she co-edited the book Revisiting Museums of Influence. Four decades of Innovation and Public Quality in European Museums, Routledge, 2021

Marlen studied Archaeology and History of Art at the NKUA and Museology (MA, PhD) at the School of Museum Studies, University of Leicester, UK.