Kitchen space and kitchen equipment as interpreted by Estonian museums
Recent exhibitions focusing on kitchen spaces – “Köök” (Kitchen) at the Hiiumaa Museum (September 2015 to September 2016), “Köök. Muutuv ruum, disain ja tarbekunst Eestis” (The Kitchen. Changing space, design and applied art in Estonia) at the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design (February to May 2016) and “Süüa me teeme” (We Make Food) at the Estonian National Museum (opened in October 2016) – are noteworthy signs of food culture-related themes rearing their head on our museum landscape. Besides these exhibitions, in May 2015, the Seto farm and Peipsi Old Believer’s House opened as new attractions at the Open Air Museum, displaying kitchens from south-eastern and eastern Estonia.
Compared to living rooms, kitchens and kitchen activities have not been documented very much at museums and the amount of extant pictures and drawings is also modest. Historical kitchen milieus have for the most part vanished without a trace. Estonian museums’ archives also contain few photos of kitchens or people working in kitchens, or of everyday foods, as they were not considered worthy of research or documentation. The article examines comparatively how the museums were able to overcome these challenges and offer new approaches to kitchens and kitchen culture. The analysis focuses on aspects related to material culture and museum studies: how the material nature of kitchens and kitchen activities were presented and how objects were interpreted and displayed. The research is based on museum visits, interviews with curators and information about exhibitions in museum publications and in the media.
The new directions in material culture and museum studies have changed our understanding of museum artefacts, highlighting ways of connecting with them directly – physically and emotionally. Items are conceptualized not only as bearers of meaning or interpretation but also as experiential objects. Kitchens are analysed more and more as a space where domestic practices shape complicated kitchen ecologies that become interlaced with sets of things, perceptions and skills – a kind of integrative field.
At the Estonian museums’ exhibitions, kitchens were interpreted as lived and living spaces, in which objects, ideas and practices intermingle. The development of the historical environment was clearly delineated but it was not chronological reconstructions that claimed the most prominent role; rather, the dynamics of kitchen spaces were shown through the changes in the objects and practices. All of the exhibits brought out the social life of the items, albeit from a different aspect. While the Museum of Applied Art and Design and the Estonian Open Air Museum focused more on the general and typical aspects, the Hiiumaa Museum and the National Museum focused on biographical perspective – individual choices and subjective experiences.
The sensory aspects of materiality were more prominent in these exhibitions and expositions than in previous exhibitions that focused on material culture of Estonian museums, as they used different activities to engage with visitors. At the Open Air Museum, they become living places through food preparation events or other living history techniques. The Hiiumaa Museum emphasized the kitchen-related practices through personal stories of “mistresses of the house” as well as the changes over time in the form of objects with similar functions. At the Museum of Applied Art and Design, design practices or ideal practices were front and centre, even as the meanings associated with the objects tended to remain concealed. The National Museum enabled visitors to look into professional and home kitchens, see food being prepared and purchased through videos and photos and intermediated the past’s everyday actions, by showing biographical objects and stories.
The kitchen as an exhibition topic allowed the museums to experiment new ways of interpreting and presenting this domestic space. The Hiiumaa Museum offered the most integral experience in this regard, where the visitor could enter kitchens connected to one another, touch and sense their materiality in a direct and intimate manner. The Open Air Museum’s kitchens with a human face along with the women busy at work there foster a home-like impression. The Applied Art and Design Museum and the National Museum used the language of art and audiovisual materials to convey culinary ideals and realities; the National Museum did more to get visitors to participate in critical thinking and contextualization of exhibits. Topics such as the extent to which dialogue, polyphony and gender themes were used to represent material culture in the museum context came to the fore more clearly than in the past.
Although every exhibition had its own profile, together they produced a cumulative effect, stressing, through domestic materiality, the uniqueness of history of Estonian kitchens on one hand, and on the other hand, the dilemmas of modernday consumer culture. All of the kitchen exhibitions were successful among the visitors, but problems also emerged in connection with the collection and display of material culture in museums. The dearth of depositories, disproportionate representation of items in collections and gaps in background information point to the need to organize collection and acquisition efforts and exhibition strategies in a more carefully thought out manner and in closer cooperation between museums.
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