Working with the people of Vienna on a collection project
On March 25, 2020, shortly after the start of the first COVID-19 lockdown in Austria, the Wien Museum was the first museum in Austria to issue a call for collections on the pandemic, asking the Viennese population for information on objects that tell of the changed private and professional everyday life in times of COVID-19. At the same time, the Wien Museum launched photo projects to document the city in a state of emergency and began actively collecting objects itself.
By November 2020, the Wien Museum had received more than 3,000 messages with suggestions for objects and photos. By 2022, a total of around 500 objects and photographs had been added to the Wien Museum's collection, along with the personal memories of the object donors and comprehensive contextual information. The collected objects and photographs tell of a wide range of topics: They tell of the reorganization of everyday life between home office and home schooling, of the personal and social handling of illness, of hygiene and physical distance, of creative forms of crisis management and new forms of solidarity and neighborly help, but also of new areas of social conflict that opened up in the course of the pandemic.
An album of selected items from the collection project can be found here:
All COVID-19 objects in the online collection of the Wien Museum can be found here:
https://sammlung.wienmuseum.at/suche/?themes=1030471
Project duration 03/2020–04/2022
Project management Mag. Dr. Martina Nußbaumer
Project collaboration Anna Jungmayr, BA
