The Power of Modelling

In the research project ‘The power of modelling’, Kirsten Marie Raahauge investigates ethnographic models from the three museums, The National Museum, Moesgaard Museum, and the Steno Museum. 

Physical models are used to produce and mediate knowledge in an immediately accessible way at and outside museums. Despite widespread use of physical models, however, we know very little about what they actually do: How do physical models function and take on meaning? And to whom do they carry meaning? The objective with “The Power of Modelling” is to produce new knowledge about physical models and to use this knowledge to develop a new format for co-creative exhibition-making. Collection studies and new ethnographic and historical data about four forms of physical models – toys, ships, buildings, and robots – serve as basis for developing the new exhibition format.

The project is organized as an interdisciplinary collaboration between three museums (The National Museum, Moesgaard Museum, and the Steno Museum) and three research institutions (Aarhus University, Royal Danish Academy and IT University of Copenhagen).

About Kirsten Marie Raahauge
As an anthropologist, Kirsten Marie Raahauge explores spatial anthropologies, especially in relation to the interior, conducting fieldwork in homes and institutions, as well as in haunted houses.

She is concerned with the relationship between cultural imaginaries, social relations and space, a triangulation that also involves studies into and frictions between aesthetics, agency, the uncanny, hygge, specificity and ideas about the generic and about dark sides of design, as well as what can be seen only out of the corner of one’s eye.