Charles landry believes that heritage and creativity go hand in hand. In a chat with Shrabasti Mallik, he explains that what we consider as works of heritage were great innovations in their times
When you walk into the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, you will be given an identity card of one of the thousands of Jews who were killed at Auschwitz. You will also be asked to relate to the person before stepping in and as you navigate through the recreated persecution dumps where so many people were exterminated, the feeling will be different from when you visit any other museum. According to Charles landry, who is an international authority on the use of imagination and creativity in urban change, the concept of this museum is simple yet engaging. He believes that it is one of those rare museums of the world where the audience can communicate with history in a very real way.
“To communicate well, it is not necessary to have high-tech instruments. One has to develop and conceptualise interesting ways to engage with people. We have to be more imaginative, really creative,” he explained to us before his much awaited conference at the National Museum.
The conference, he told us, is about museums. “I am associated with creativity in the future but what I am going to talk about is how heritage and creativity are great partners. I want to break the notion that these two concepts go against the other,” he elaborated.
When we asked how creativity and heritage are great partners he pointed out the fact that what we regard as heritage now was something of an innovation during its time. He explained with the example of the Eiffel Tower. “It is now regarded as an architectural beauty but when it was built it was a work of innovation. It was done for the world fair expo and some of the engineering that was invented to construct it is still applied in different areas of the field. So you could say that the best things we keep or see are often the things that were innovative in their time,” he said.
He is against treating heritage as a relic of the past like it is confined within a certain boundary. He constantly tries to dig out the aspects which are of relevance today. “That leads to storytelling. When I was in the Jaipur Palace, the guide kept loading us up with information. I do not like to know how any wives the maharaja had but I want to know about the conflicts that he had in his empire — did they argue, was the governance easy and stories like that. I want to know things in contemporary terms which I can relate to my current existence,” he said.
According to the scholar, museums have tremendous potential in preserving the heritage of a place and making it a relevant template. But they should also have a sense of responsibility to the audience. “You have to connect; you have to think through the psyche of the audience and then decide how to communicate with them. You have to really think about that communication — it can be through new creative ideas or simple experiences. If I give you too many facts, you will not remember anything. For me, it has to be something deep; it has to transform me. Museums are incredibly important and in order to make sure that they remain important, one needs to communicate well. And that requires both the scholarly and communicative people to present it together,” he said, pointing out to the fact that the lack of funds to maintain and upgrade an existing museum also becomes a barrier.
Thirty years ago he created a connection between creativity (the culture of a place), city development and city re-invention. He said, “That’s what I have been doing for the past 30 years, working in cities and trying to figure out where they are and where they might go and how do they get there.”
He believes that there are five things that people want from the city they are living in. First, he said, is a sense of anchorage, “which includes the past, the things that you hold on to, the familiar things, your family and loved ones and the like.” The second is a sense of possibility of choice, of being able to do things. “like a choice of doing an interesting job or engaging in something that would bring out more about oneself,” he added quickly and continued, “The third aspect I think people want is a sense of connection. Now this connection can be from person to person, could be between neighbourhoods or it could be networks within organisations.”
The fourth factor that people want is some sort of sense of being able to self-improve — to make more of themselves, to grow, to learn and to know more than they did before and not be static, to develop personally and to become more than they think they are. “The fifth aspect that I think people want is some sort of sense of inspiration. Now historically inspiration might have come through some relationship with Gods or the spiritual realm and all of that. In Europe as an example, less people believe in Christianity but often galleries and museums act as this inspiration that lifts you out of the ordinary,” he said.
photo Sanjeev Kumar