We hope you’ve enjoyed the Museum of Marco Polo and that it’s got you thinking about Time, Memory, Stories and the role of Imagination and Creativity in museums, whether they are real, lightly fictional or utterly imaginary.  We hope it’s also got you wondering why some museums are so poetic and how it is that such solidly three-dimensional things should be as much about ideas as they are about artefacts.

But now museums are going through hard times.  They are under severe financial pressure, and maybe because of this they are turning experimental.  They are bringing in theatre-makers, inviting communities to co-create their exhibitions, and questioning their own stories.

At the same time novelists, poets, film-makers and artists like Mark Dion and Michael Rakowitz are falling in love with the language of museums.

There’s a feeling that we’ve come to the end of one way of making museums;  also that museums are no longer the sole owners of their content and stories.

And so we’ve launched this new version of the Museum of Marco Polo to understand and celebrate the role of Imagination and Innovation in museum-making.