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To Budapest for a Kuratorium meeting of the Museums and Visitors Foundation. An opportunity for a Turo Rudi - curd cheese with chocolate on the outside and sometimes apricots or hazlenuts in the middle, which sounds weird but in fact is very good. It's been culturally important for Hungarians since 1968. Read all about it [Link removed 12/12/23 as no longer in existence.].
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Nicola's presentation at the Museums + Heritage Show was well received as a practical how-to guide with plenty of hints, tips and links for working with an independent evaluator. Those who attended seminars at the show will already have received the link from the show organisers to download presentations; Nicola's is in the Visitor Insight strand, curated by the Visitor Studies Group.
Every now and then there's a surprise. The AP Lite Arts Professional newsletter arrived in my inbox and in the "From the Archives" section there's a link to the piece I wrote for AP back in 2008 about the family tree project at Woodhorn. Visual poet Ira Lightman created animated family trees - it was alll about encouraging people to use the archives to start doing their family history.
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The lectures and workshops in Ljubljana and Zagreb were well received and well attended by senior museum staff to museology students. The lectures covered the reasons for carrying out evaluation, a short introduction to quantitative and qualitative evaluation, and examples of techniques to use. In the workshops, we put ourselves in the shoes of teenagers and visited the galleries (in the Ljubljana City Museum and the Ethnographic Museum in Zagreb) and used this as a basis for trying out various evaluation methods.
Museoforum (the museum education part of the Slovenian Museums Society) invited me to Ljubljana, and ICOM Croatia invited me to Zagreb.
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To Bratislava, and a visit to the Slovakian National Gallery to see (amongst other things) the contemporary art exhibition Iron Applause by artists from central Europe and the Balkans which used to be behind the Iron Curtain. It is usual, in central Europe, to show appreciation of a performance by clapping slowly and in unison - exactly the opposite of what an English audience would expect to do - hence the phrase Iron Applause.
In Kosovo Albanian culture, parents often name their children after well-respected relatives. In 1999, many parents named their newborn sons Tonyblair, because of Tony Blair's support for them in the war against Serbia. So there was a photograph of a dozen Tonyblairs, in front of an image of their namesake.
Iron Applause again in Budapest, at a concert by the internationally-renowned pianist Ádám Fellegi, held in his living room in a flat in a side street not far from the Opera. He explained, described and played Beethoven's Appassionata, and the applause was indeed slow, in unison, and very enthusiastic.