A lockdown museum opens in Brussels on 18 March

The temporary exhibition will be hosted by the Free University of Brussels (ULB)

Europe has just marked one year since the first coronavirus-induced lockdown begun. To mark the occasion, the Université Libre de Bruxelles (ULB, Brussels’ Free University) decided to prepare an exhibition named “Temporary lockdown museum.”

After several months of preparation, the exhibition is set to open on Thursday, 18 March, on the territory of the university’s Solbosch campus.

Creating a shared story about the lockdown

ULB Culture has launched a call for projects open to the ULB community, inviting it to bring together creations made during the lockdown and present them in a temporary museum. The works reveal the impact of the crisis on our lifestyles, social ties and our creativity, explains the university website.

The exposition contains hundreds of pieces of art, in the form of musical compositions, stories, dance, photographs, paintings, drawings, writings, crafts, videos, or even unexpected or diverted everyday objects, that have become symbols of the lockdown. The objective of the exhibition, therefore, is to recreate the social bond, by going through the difficult moments together, to build a shared story of the time spent in isolation.

These works and objects will be staged in the "Temporary Museum of Lockdown-ULB" exhibition, from 18 March 2021, in the Allende space of the Solbosch campus. The collection will be expanded continuously, thanks to contributions from the university community, with no end date scheduled at this time. Furthermore, a separate space will be reserved and equipped to allow visitors to record their own testimonials from the time of the health crisis.

A collection of selected works is already available on ULB Culture's Facebook page and Instagram account.