Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is never longer than 15 minutes, so let's get started.
This is episode 100 of Museum Archipelago, and I’m in a rental car 80 kilometers outside of Helsinki, Finland looking for a museum.
Field Audio - GPS: “In 400 meters, turn left onto the ramp”.
Field Audio - Ian: “I think… I can feel we are close to the Gulf of Finland”
But not just any museum. I’m deep in rural Finland because of the name of this podcast: Museum Archipelago.
Field Audio - Ian: “You know, I hope the museum has a bathroom…”
When I was starting this project and choosing a name, I hoped to create an audio lens to look at museums as a medium, and to critically examine museums as a whole. If no museum was an island, I reasoned, why not name the show after another geographic feature – a collection of islands?
And I enjoyed the symmetry with Gulag Archipelago – just a slight sinister undertone that this won’t be a fluffy museum podcast. And when I came across the quote by philosopher Édouard Glissant, “I imagine the museum as an archipelago”, the name stuck.
Museum Archipelago was snappy and a great name for a podcast – there was just one problem: the Archipelago Museum, located somewhere in Finland.
Field Audio - Ian: “Ah, I see a sign for the museum, but I can't pronounce it – ”
Field Audio - GPS: “Turn left”
For the first 20 or so episodes of the show, every time you searched the words Museum Archipelago on the internet, the top results would be about the Archipelago Museum in Finland, instead of my podcast.
It didn’t
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