What is your ideal museum? What if a museum were designed for everyone? These are some of the questions we answered during our last training “A Museum of One’s Own” given by Léonore Frenois, multidisciplinary artist, mediator and podcaster.
The two-day training brought together museum professionals from different services to rethink the museum as a living, shared and inhabitable space. The focus was on adapting our environments for neurodiverse audience.
Neurodiversity is an activist concept that sees differences in how brains work as natural variations within the human species, rather than problems that need to be fixed. It moves away from a deficit-based view and instead focuses on strengths, differences, and the many ways people can experience and understand the world.
In a museum context, this can mean recognising that some visitors may be more sensitive to noise, bright lights, or crowded spaces. Therefore, providing low-stimulation environments or quiet moments provide accommodation for stimuli related needs.
Through participatory workshops and reflective exercises, we discussed what an inclusive museum could feel like in practice, from sensory experiences to the ways people move through and relate to museum spaces. A particular focus was placed on imagining an ideal museum, including what a “quiet zone” could look like and what concrete changes participants could apply directly in their own institutions after the training. As well as advice we would like to spread among our teams.
To share our reflections and working process, we chose a different medium: the podcast. Our reflections nurture “Coup de Balai”, a French-language podcast created and hosted by Léonore Frenois that explores the sharing of knowledge through the lens of feminism and gender studies. In this conversation, they explore what a museum that respects bodies and senses could look like. The discussion highlights a key idea: adjustments made for neurodiverse and disabled visitors ultimately improve the experience for everyone, making the museum more comfortable and adaptable for all.
Listen to them imagining their perfect museum.
Photo © Léonore Frenois
