Five weeks of exhibitions, events, workshops, performances, talks, trails and hand-on fun bringing together culture and creativity across the city
To curate is to select, to organise and to care for objects but what does it mean to you?
Displaying sea shells collected on holiday on a window sill? Developing a blockbuster art exhibition? Planting a riot of colourful flowers in the garden? Programming a season of theatre performances? Commissioning art for public spaces?
Join us on a journey of exploration into the culture, community, passion, diversity, vision and individuality that makes Cambridge what it is.
Download the events programme below, or have a browse online.
Curating Cambridge: our city, our stories, our stuff is presented by the University of Cambridge Museums with the Festival of Ideas, cultural partners and community organisations.
A bit of background…
Through a five week programme Curating Cambridge brings together a range of approaches and perspectives from across the city that will engage people in the city with Cambridge’s rich culture and heritage.
It is an exciting public programme including exhibitions, workshops, displays, talks, performances and other opportunities to get involved that together explore our central themes of:
- our relationships to the things and places that surround us
- the stories and connections that add value and understanding to these things and places
- the stories of Cambridge and its treasures, looking to the past and to the future
- the process and forms of Curation
Our starting point for Curating Cambridge is that the city is home to world class collections from across the arts and sciences. Our collections tell stories about our connections to these objects, one another and the rest of the world. The collections in museums can connect you to the past, or to an idea, as can a more personal connection to an object in your daily life. For us curating is to select, to organise and to care for things, but it is also to tell a story or to ask a question, to pause for reflection or to enjoy a link to those who came before us.
As well as asking these questions in our museums we will be asking them in people’s homes, in our public spaces and joining with cultural partners and their practice. In a way that is both playful and learned, both contemporary and informed by the past, Curating Cambridge will provide a wide range of opportunities for people to engage with our collections and to take their part in telling our collective stories.
In partnership with Festival of Ideas
Curating Cambridge has been developed by the University of Cambridge Museums with the University’s Public Engagement team, building on the museums’ established contribution to the Festival of Ideas. It will launch as part of the two week Festival of Ideas, contributing to it’s 2014 theme of ‘Identities’ in particular exploring our relationship to objects, places and nature and the stories that these tell. It will then run for a further three weeks extending the creative and cultural thought provoking opportunities initiated by the Festival of Ideas.