Vienna Museum collects pandemic-related artefacts for ‘future generations to remember’
Vienna’s museum of city history said Tuesday an appeal to send images of everyday items to record the coronavirus pandemic for decades had attracted hundreds of submissions so far.
After the Wien Museum launched its appeal on March 25, some 1,800 images of masks, signs and other items have been issued, spokeswoman Konstanze Schaefer said.
“We want to see how we tell our children, or our children’s children, what happened in Vienna because of course this is a big moment for all of us,” Schaefer told AFP.
“We must call for this now… A lot of the projects that came into existence in the beginning (of the crisis), such as neighbourhood aid initiatives, don’t exist anymore,” she said.
Some 200 photos of the received submissions were posted on the museum’s website.
These include a photo of a discarded blue rubber glove, a one-meter (three-foot) social distance police signboard, and a cell phone screen displaying a call lasting more than one hour and 28 minutes with the coronavirus hotline number.
The museum will continue accepting submissions “as long as there is a corona,” Schaefer said.
Those items ultimately selected to become part of the collection would be picked up from their owners and placed into storage — but showcasing these may be years from now, according to Schaefer, giving time to step back from the crisis.
Schaefer added that other museums in Austria and neighboring Germany have started similar efforts to seek to chart the crisis for future generations.
So far the brunt of the health crisis has spared the Alpine nation of nearly nine million people, with just under 15,600 confirmed infections and 606 deaths.
