Creating Your Stories

Your Stories is an experience specially created for National Museum in Belgrade – as a part of the H2020 project GIFT. Our starting point for this project was that every “big” history (or historic epoch, event, period, war…) is a mosaic of small, personal, or family histories that never or rarely find their way to museum exhibitions.
We suggested to National Museum in Belgrade to open its doors for personal stories and enable visitors to bring their objects that will be 3D scanned and become a permanent part of the digital museum collection. The museum kindly accepted our idea thus starting the six months process leading to the creation of the unique collection of 3D personal objects and stories associated with them.

The first step of the process included a public call inviting visitors to come to the museum with objects that they considered meaningful. A total of 25 visitors brought a variety of items such as clothing, military mementos, children’s toys, and much more. Each piece was carefully 3D-scanned and visitors shared their personal stories about why their specific item should be immortalized in the museum.

Incorporating visitor content in the museum

After the first stage, museum curators and NextGame spent months carefully matching the digitally scanned items to the physical artifacts on display in the museum. The idea behind Your Stories was to show the everyday, human part of history. While the artifacts in display cases may seem distant and belonging to an era that we can’t relate to, at the same time they tell the story of our ancestors who perhaps weren’t as different from us as we think. Creating a narrative connecting the past and the present was the most important part of the process. For example, an exhibit on children’s toys dating from early human history was matched with a cozy toy added to the collection by one of the visitors – the favorite possession of their own child. It illustrated how everything we now treat as cultural heritage has once belonged to someone and has been a part of their lives, just as everyday objects that are meaningful to us now may one day become history themselves to our grandchildren.