How to develop content together?

Elisabeth Bodin, Louisiana Museum, Dänemark

In recent years, collaboration and co-creation have become widely appealing concepts for many art institutions – due to their overall ambition to democratize institutional structures, to acknowledge the visitors as more than passive recipients and simultaneously allow the production of valuable knowledge and experiences. However, following the question of why the institutions wish to undergo change, there is the question of what would make it feel worthwhile and realistic for everyone involved? Who needs whom? And are we even ready for the outcomes?

At the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, learning programmes are developed and handled by its learning department named Louisiana Learning. Here, exchange and learning processes are pointed towards the museum, too.  Indeed, this is what happens when a museum opens to collaborations and co-creation, for good and for bad. This presentation aims to describe and extract some of the hard and happy lessons along the way, from Louisiana’s collaborations with local schools and Red Cross schools on specific projects, experiences from the international learning programme with TATE or the joint digital platform for art and architecture together with a Danish publishing house.