Museum Archipelago is my insightful, opinionated podcast that expands the definition of museums.
Each episode, I visit a different museum, museum-like space, or future museum around the world run by individuals or communities of people who present stories and information rarely heard. The people I feature are pushing the restrictive boundaries of what we consider a “museum” to be. Just like museums aren’t neutral, my podcast isn’t either: my guests are at the center of the show, and their narrative is the focus. I concisely edit my interviews so that they tell their own stories and express how they interface with the museum world.
Over the course of over 50 episodes, I’ve visited the Kigali Genocide Memorial in Rwandawith the museum director who started off as a guide, toured historic markers about the Transatlantic Slave Trade in New Orleans, Louisiana with the activists who built them, and explored the ruins of the Bulgarian Communist Party’s UFO-shaped monument on Buzludzha peak with the architect who wants to turn it into an interpretive museum of Bulgaria’s Cold War past.
Institutions based out of large, expensive buildings, with huge endowments and biased benefactors controlling the content are not the focus of this project. Instead, I explore the experiences of individuals and groups who dream of creating their own institutions from scratch. Podcasting is the perfect medium for this project because because it is a throwback to an earlier web — an open web free from the pressures of generating content that will please social algorithms. As robust and decentralized as email, podcasting allows me to perform a deep dive into a museum nobody else is talking about while maintaining a consistency in the podcast feed itself. The medium offers my audience a direct, middleman-less relationship with the project, and while the topics are different every episode, they know each new episode will be less than 15 minutes, be tightly edited, and fit in with the overarching theme. No time for fluff or insider banter on Museum Archipelago. As the old saying goes, “if I had less time, I would’ve made a longer podcast.”
To achieve this consistency from sites all across the globe, I produce every episode entirely on iOS. The mobile operating system’s touch support means I can edit the audio content directly and turn an interview conversation into a main idea, add my narration, and distribute it without needing keyboard and mouse.
Every new episode of Museum Archipelago also broadcasts with a full episode transcript. The text transcript increases the accessibility of the show, and also allows hyperlinking and topic searching between episodes. With the transcripts, connections between episodes can be made more explicit: the episode about protecting the Apollo lunar landing sites on the moon as human heritage sites is remarkably similar to the efforts to create a Civil Right Museum in Bogalusa, LA and the episode about the future National Public Housing Museum in Chicago is engaging their local community in a remarkably similar way to a href=”https://www.museumarchipelago.com/53″>the tribal outreach program at the The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Seminole Indian Museum.