Open GLAM Night

05.09.2024 @ Neubad, Bireggstrasse 36, Lucerne | free admission, no registration required

Collage created on the occasion of the Open GLAM Night 2024. Image credits see below.

Over the past ten years, the Swiss Open Cultural Data Hackathon (or “GLAMhack”) has stopped off in a different city each year, inviting participants from a variety of backgrounds to engage in a playful manner with cultural heritage data. On its journey, the event has transformed itself by and by – both as regards its thematic focus and the methodological approaches employed.

This year, our journey takes us to Lucerne, where the GLAMhack is hosted by the Central and University Library. In reference to the city’s role as Switzerland’s tourism capital and historical transportation hub, we chose the theme “on the move”: In the focus are people who have left their homes for a variety of reasons and have found themselves in faraway places. Their encounters with foreign lands, their inhabitants, their customs, their flora and fauna, have left traces in our collective memory, which we put at the center of this year’s event.

To set the mood and to introduce the theme, we invite hackathon participants and the general public alike to join us on the eve of the hackathon at Lucerne Neubad to celebrate an Open GLAM Night with contributions from Mexican artists, an immersive performance entitled “Re-imagining Future Collections” by the Afro-Cuban artist Ivonne Gonzalez and Ali-Eddine Abd El Khalek, as well as a kaleidoscope of “remarkable” Lucernese people presented by the ZHB Luzern.

The first part of the event will be live-streamed to one of the cinemas of the Complejo Cultural of the Benemérita Universidad Autónoma de Puebla (BUAP), our Mexican partner organization.

Program

Important note: For medical reasons, Ivonne Gonzalez had to cancel her participatory performance. We are working on a replacement programme. In the table below, the new elements are given in italics.

Thursday, 5th September 2024	Program Open GLAM Night (location: Neubad)
19:00	Opening of the Doors
19:30 – 19:45	Welcome and Opening of the Open GLAM Night
19:45 – 20:45	CultureFLOW – Artistic Projects from our Mexican Partner University
21:15 – 21:45	Deep GLAM – A deep dive into the past and the future of the GLAMhack (by Oleg Lavrovsky)
21:45 – 22:00	Kaleidoscope of “Openness” by ZHB Luzern
23:00	End of the event

Times are in CEST (UTC +2), live-streaming from 11:30 to 13:00 Puebla time (UTC -6).

CultureFLOW – Colonial Heritage Through the Lens of Mexican Artists

This year, Opendata.ch has teamed up with the Benemérita Universidad de Puebla (BUAP) to implement a novel method (termed “CultureFLOW”) for the facilitation of artistic creative processes that engage with collective memories, in the form both of heritage artifacts and of living memories. A pilot project has been implemented that involves students in visual arts from Mexico as well as Mexico-related heritage collections in Switzerland.

During this session, three artistic creations (some still under developement) will be presented, and the artists will share their experiences during their creative process, which in one case involves getting in touch with the Lipan people (the south-easternmost Apache tribe living across the border between Texas and Mexico). Sandra Palacios, our coordinator at BUAP, will be present in person and share her impressions of the cooperation so far, while Beat Estermann (Opendata.ch) will share his experiences regarding the involvement of Swiss ethnographic museums in the process.

Re-Imagining Future Collections (cancelled)

By means of their participatory performance, the Swiss Afro-Cuban artist Ivonne Gonzalez and Ali-Eddine Abd El Khalek will take the audience on an interactive journey through Swiss heritage collections, touching upon themes such as migration, disability, the participation of women in Swiss political life, language barriers, different musical styles, etc.

Kaleidoscope of “Remarkable” Lucernese People (modified)

In a cooperation project with the portal UnsereGeschichte.ch, ZHB Luzern is searching for “remarkable” people from the Canton of Lucerne. In this participatory project, anyone and everyone is invited to submit stories or sketched portraits of people who, for whatever reasons, are “remarkable” in the many senses of the word. This participatory project, addressing the public at large, has been inspired by and is intended as a contemporary counterpoint to the portrait gallery of “Merkwürdige Luzernerinnen und Luzerner” in the ZHB’s catalog hall, featuring honorable people from Lucerne’s history.

Image Credits

Collage created on the occasion of the Open GLAM Night 2024. Creator: Beat Estermann, with AI support. In copyright. Individual images (from the top left, in clockwise direction):

Demon mask, Oaxaca, Mexico. Unknown artist, 20th century. Unknown rightsholder. Photo: Museum Schloss Burgdorf.
Arrival of the Emperor Maximilian and the Empress Carlota at the Port of Veracruz, Mexico. Lithograph, unknown artist. Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons.
Death of Arnold von Winkelried during the battle of Sempach 1386. Painting by Konrad Grob (1828-1904). Public Domain. Wikimedia Commons.
Two mountaineers, presumably on the Titlis towards the Wenden Glacier. Photo: Weber-Strebel, Joseph Maria, 1905. CC0 1.0 Universal (CC0 1.0) Public Domain Dedication. https://zentralgut.ch.
Mask, Teotihuacán style, Mexico, 3rd-6th century. Museum Rietberg. Photo: Beat Estermann, CC BY 4.0.
“Mujer Lipan” (“figurine d’indien”), Mexico, before 1896. Public Domain. Musée d’ethnographie de Genève. Photo: Johnathan Watts. Copyright held by the Musée d’ethnographie de Genève (MEG).