On 15 December 2020, young people from Russia and the Netherlands came together online to hold the final joint session of the International Youth Consultative Board of the Russian-Dutch project Museum 15/24.
Over the past few months, the youngsters from Russian and the Netherlands have been working on ideas for new formats to promote the Hermitage’s exhibitions among an audience of their own generation and to involve young people in the world of classic and contemporary art on the basis of the Hermitage collections. Proposals for the most up-to-date means to get young people of different ages, social and cultural backgrounds involved in museum programmes – both as viewers and as participants – have been discussed throughout the whole term of the Museum 15/24 project and were presented during the online meeting.
At the meeting with the International Youth Consultative Board of the Museum 15/24. project, Hermitage Director Mikhail Piotrovsky said: “I would like to thank you for participating in the project, and for making such a pleasant addition to the Hermitage Days that are currently underway. A few days ago, we held a splendid seminar that came about precisely thanks to your activities – on ‘COVID-19 and Museum Educational Programmes’. We had a great many people attending online and many guests listened to our meeting later.
“We are grateful to you for your work, for the interesting and remarkable projects. For the museum, you are translators. You translate what the Hermitage offers people into a global language. What are translators, if they’re not machines? They need to know two cultures: the culture of the people that they are translating and the culture of those for whom they are translating. So, you need to know the culture of the Hermitage and the culture of those that our programmes are aimed at. Translators are probably among the most important people, the most significant in this difficult time.
“I am opening your meeting with the hope that the lockdowns will come to an end and that we will return to normal life and normal events with new experience. But the main thing that makes us human beings is the ability to speak and think. And that’s what I am asking of you: to speak and think.”
Irina Bagdasarova, senior researcher of the State Hermitage, curator of the applied programmes of the Museum 15/24 project in the Hermitage, said: “The participants in the International Youth Consultative Board from both countries have made a lot of useful discoveries for the Hermitage and for museum work with young people as a whole. We will certainly be continuing the practice of involving young people in planning museum programmes for the 21st century.”
The photographs come from the archive of the Museum 15/24 project and were taken in 2019.
The Museum 15/24 project
The Museum 15/24 project is a complex innovative programme for the State Hermitage being implemented by an international consortium made up of the Hermitage–Amsterdam Exhibition Centre, the Hermitage 21st Century Foundation, and the Outsider Art Museum (Netherlands). The project is part of the Dutch-based international programme Creative Twinning.
The aims of the project are to develop new methods of involving young people aged 15–24 in traditional and innovative museum practices with museums in Russia and abroad, educational and research institutions in Russia and the Netherlands.
The programme is overseen by the State Hermitage.
The International Youth Consultative Board
Ten young people from Russia and eleven from the Netherlands came together to work jointly on the Museum 15/24 project as consultants, co-ordinators, specialists on the quality, topical relevance and format of the information environment, initiators of new forms and themes for project development. The main venues for the implementation of the ideas from the International Youth Consultative Board project in 2019–21 are the State Hermitage and the Hermitage–Amsterdam Exhibition Centre.
