Museum Archipelago

About Museum Archipelago

A tiny show guiding you through the rocky landscape of museums. Museum Archipelago believes that no museum is an island and that museums are not neutral. Taking a broad definition of museums, host Ian Elsner brings you to different museum spaces around the world, dives deep into institutional problems, and introduces you to the people working to fix them. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes, so let’s get started.

Publisher

Ian Elsner

Category

arts · society & culture · society & culture

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

3 Apr 2015

Latest episode

20 Jul 2026

Latest episodes

1 of 113 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   20 Jul 2026TRANSCRIPT

   113. World Trade Center Steel in Your Area

   Artist and researcher Sam Holleran discusses how World Trade Center steel became dispersed national memorials, offering insights into memory and civic spaces.

2. 

   2 Mar 2026

   112. In Relooted, You Steal Back What Museums Won't Return

   It's 2099, and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high-security museum in Europe. One of the targets: the Kabwe skull, a roughly 300,000-year-old early human skull found in present-day Zambia in 1921. This is Relooted (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted/), a new video game from South African game studio Nyamakop (https://nyamakop.co.za/), where your job is to steal back looted artifacts by mapping entrances and exits, positioning your crew, and making it past robot security using your parkour skills. Several things about this are unrealistic. For one, the actual Kabwe skull, currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might not need such an elaborate plan. But there is a damningly realistic fact at the heart of the game: every single one of the roughly 70 objects you steal was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western museum or private collection. And the way museums in the game wiggle out of a fictional treaty to return stolen artifacts doesn't sound fictional at all. It mirrors the real-world tactics that have kept the Kabwe skull in London for over a century, despite Zambia's repeated requests for its return. In this episode, Ben Myers, CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and Mohale Mashigo, the studio's narrative director, talk about why heists are the perfect genre for a game about repatriation, what they found when they visited the real artifacts in person, and why their video game often does a much better job telling the story of these objects than the museums that hold them. Image: The Kabwe skull as it appears in a Relooted heist briefing. Topics and Notes 00:00 Welcome to Museum Archipelago 00:15 Relooted (https://store.steampowered.com/app/3255890/Relooted/) 01:30 "We overstated the security capabilities on museums" (https://www.instagram.com/reel/DK95EYLK-lV/) 01:45 Meet Ben Myers 02:50 Meet Mohale Mashigo 03:04 The Kabwe Skull 04:45 Labels and Missing Context in Museums 06:08 A Digital Museum 06:53 Treaties and Red Tape 09:37 Prosperous Future Africa 12:05 Hans Sloane and the Origins of the British Museum on Episode 39 (https://www.museumarchipelago.com/39) 12:16 Museum of Black Civilizations 14:50 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club/) DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 112. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript It's the year 2099 and you and your heist team are about to case an unnamed high security museum to steal the Kabwe skull. This moment occurs halfway through Relooted, a new video game from South African game studio Nyamakop. Your job is to map all the entrances and exits, position your crew members strategically, use cybersecurity techniques to break open the door, steal this artifact, and make it out of the museum past the robot security force using parkour, which fortunately, you're quite skilled at. “Video game excerpt: " Please look out for the Kabwe skull. For many years, the Zambian government tried to have the skull repatriated back from the United Kingdom. What's the security situation? Nothing you haven't experienced before. Robot guards, lasers, security shutters, pressure plates, blah, blah, blah, blah.” Several things about this moment in the game are unrealistic. For one, the actual skull, which is currently on display in the Natural History Museum in London, might actually be easier to steal. Ben Myres:  I've seen a couple of the ones in our game, in person now, and the first thing I noticed, is the Kabwe skull or broken Hillman in the Natural History Museum. That'd be very easy to steal. We've very overstated the security capabilities on museums. I have a video of, it's only 20 seconds long of the distance from the skull to the exit. I'm like, wow. Okay. That wouldn’t be very fun. This is Ben Myers, the CEO and creative director at Nyamakop, and one of the developers of Relooted. Ben Myres: Hello, I'm Ben Myers, CEO, and creative director at Nyamakop. I like to be known for making cool video games. But there is a very realistic -- damningly realistic -- fact at the heart of the game. The Kabwe skull is just one of about 70 real-world objects you heist during the game. And every single one of them was taken from the African continent and currently sits in a Western Museum or private collection. Ben Myres:  I think there was a French government report that came out in maybe 2018 and that estimated that 90 to 95% of all African cultural heritage is kept in museums off the continent. So the scale of it is like really absurd. I mean, it's hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of pieces. In like Western museums. So the, the major problem was like not, you know, finding artifacts, but which ones? Mohale Mashingo:  There were so many artifacts, really. So many, but we couldn't put them all in the game. Otherwise, this would be the world's longest game. This is Mohale Mashigo, narrative director at Nyamakop and one of the developers of Relooted. Mohale Mashigo:  Hi, my name is Mohale Mashigo. I'm the narrative director at Nyamakop, and I like to be known for telling great stories, living in a fishing village and having a cute dog. The Kabwe skull was discovered in 1921 by miners in the Kabwe mine in Zambia, then the British colony of Northern Rhodesia. The skull is roughly 300,000 years old, predating modern humans, and was promptly shipped to the Natural History Museum in London, which at the time was a department of the British Museum. About ten years after Zambia became independent from colonial rule, in the early 1970s, the National Monuments Commission formally requested the skull from the museum. That hasn’t happened, and the museum's own display undermines its case for keeping the original. Ben Myres:  So the Kabwe skull is interesting because Zambia has been asking back that back for quite a long time. And what was interesting about the Kabwe skull is it's surrounded by replicas. Like it's this sort of history of, you know, humanity from all these fossils and like skulls. But most of the skulls they have in that exhibition aren't. Real. So it just speaks to how like it's completely unnecessary for them to have that exact skull. When all the other ones surrounding them aren't real either. And most of the people going to the museum aren't gonna notice that anyway. Mohale Mashigo: I've been to a lot of museums in Europe and have sort of seen these things, but they feel so out of context. You know, it's kind of like, this is the name of the thing, A very small writeup that it doesn't feel humanizing or it doesn't feel human. And then actually working on them in the game is, oh my goodness, this is, this is a big deal to a community of people and how it's taken is also a big deal. So being in a museum, and I love going to museums, it felt so disconnected, seeing it, but actually. Writing about it and learning about it was something entirely different. The Kabwe skull is one of the higher-profile repatriation cases, but many of the 70 artifacts in Relooted don't have that kind of visibility. When Ben visited the British Museum, he noticed how the quality of wall labels depends on how much public pressure a museum is under to return those artifacts. Ben Myers: I think the captioning around the Benin Bronzes is actually pretty good. They use the word looting, they speak about where it happened, how they got hold of it. But I think what's interesting is when there isn't that external pressure or awareness, the way museums talk about artifacts in the collection is not as great. In the far corner, away from the Benin Bronzes in the British Museum, there is a display of something called an Ndome shield Mohale Mashigo: Yeah, Ndome shield from Kenya. Ben Myers: From the Kikuyu people in Kenya. We learned — we have one of them in the game — and when I was reading about the research, it became clear that these are passed down from father to son as an initiation ritual. It's a deeply personal familial object and none of that is really mentioned in the caption. It's either consciously or unconsciously getting away from the question of why do you have this and why is this here? Because if you understand that it's this deeply personal familial object, you might be a little unsettled about it being there and being displayed in the way it's displayed Both the Benin Bronzes and Ndome shield are artifacts you can steal back in the game. Before every heist, you and your team hold a briefing. Mohale and Ben built the game's artifact displays and dialogue to detail information about the object. Mohale Mashigo: We made a very conscious effort to say, this is what's so important about this artifact. How it was taken and the repercussions of it having been removed from where it's from. So in many ways yes, it's like a digital museum. And the fact that a heist briefing inside a video game does a better job at contextualizing these objects than the museums that currently hold them is another damning detail that the game designers didn't have to invent. In Relooted, you play as Nomali, a young woman in 2099 Johannesburg whose grandmother, Professor Grace, spent years trying to get stolen artifacts returned through official channels, and got stopped every step of the way. At the beginning of the game, she explains the Transatlantic Returns Treaty, an agreement signed by the world's powers to return stolen artifacts to African museums. This Treaty is also fictional, no such agreement has been signed, but the way Professor Grace describes museums wiggling their way out of actually returning artifacts sounds very real. “Video game excerpt:  There's an old clause in the treaty that uses the words public display. “Basically saying all artifacts that are currently on display to the public need to be returned.” “Museums are now using that old clause to basically remove artifacts from public display under the auspices of changing exhibits, maintenance, et cetera.They don't intend to put these artifacts back on display and are also not disclosing what they have in storage. They intend to have this on display for private viewings instead.” Can't give back what you don't have. Exactly. But that also means they cannot report the artifacts missing or stolen. Stolen? Who’s stealing them? Us! In the real world, these types of slow-rolling shenanigans are exactly what museums do. The British Government agreed to “negotiate” on the Kabwe skull in 2019, but no progress has been made. Ben Myers: It's so difficult to get these objects back. It's so complicated. And I think that's what it speaks to, but it also speaks to the dodgy ways they were acquired as well. Like the Kabwe skull — at the time it was taken, there was literally a British colonial law saying, do not remove human remains, do not remove cultural relics from the country. And they did that and then donated it. So even acquiring the objects sometimes broke the law that they themselves had. And the current UK defense for keeping the skull is that it's technically not human remains — it's too old to qualify — so the repatriation framework doesn't apply. So it doesn’t seem inconceivable that these museums will manage to hold on until 2099. Mohale Mashigo: There's been so much red tape, just constantly. And I thought, what if even a hundred years from now they're still doing it and they're still finding ways. Because right now it's, "you don't have enough museums" or whatever. Or "we couldn't possibly hand it over because then we'd have to hand over everything." And even if they're trying to do something, there'll always be fishy business going on. The setting of 2099 also allowed the game designers to do something that Mohale says is rare: imagine a prosperous African future. Mohale Mashigo: Very rarely do we have an opportunity to imagine Africa in the future. And I'm talking about Africans imagining it. Often it's like some kind of lo-fi, scrapyard junkyard or whatever. People are suffering. The world has fallen apart, but everybody's got holograms and they're selling body parts. It's always something very gruesome when people imagine Africa in the future. And we wanted to imagine a future that suited us. It was a rare opportunity for us to actually imagine a prosperous, happy Africa. One of the reasons the game works so well is because heists are fun, and we already have a shared cultural understanding of what goes into a heist: a crew, a briefing, a plan that goes wrong. Mohale Mashigo: What I love about heist is the fact that the best heist works when it's like the little guy stealing from the big guy. You really want to see them succeed. They don't ever steal from people who deserve that money. They don't steal from hospitals. They steal from the guy who's got too many casinos. You know, he's not gonna miss it. As a player, we certainly feel it. We’re not only breaking into museums, but also fancy private collections. The game does such a good job laying out the case for bringing the artifacts back that you can focus on the fun of stealing. And there’s a game design theory dimension to heists too. Ben Myers: There's a great book called A Theory of Fun. And what they talk about is that fun is the experience your body has when it's learning. The human brain just loves patterns. And heists are just like patterns that you, as the viewer, are trying to figure out the whole time until it's revealed. And when you see the pieces finally come together, it's incredible. So using the way video games employ patterns helps the gameplay: each heist is a little harder, but fortunately you're a little better at it. But patterns also help the story: each time you learn of yet another stolen artifact from all parts of the continent, you start to realize the bigger pattern. The museums in Relooted are mostly unnamed, relying on subtle or not-so-subtle references to real world institutions. Some, like Hans Sloane and the British Museum, come up by name, along with narratives about looted artifacts, enslavers, or investment in human trafficking companies. You can learn more about Hans Slone and the British Museum on episode 39 of Museum Archipelago, or by playing Relooted. But there is one real-world museum important to the narrative. As you and your crew start amassing the objects, you return them to the Museum of Black Civilizations in Dakar, Senegal. From here, they are redistributed to their home countries. The Museum of Black Civilizations was the dream of Léopold Senghor, Senegal's first democratically elected president. Ben Myers:  the game for a long time was called Senghor’s Rebels because Senghor was the first democratically elected president of Senegal. He was a poet before he went into politics. And so when he became president, he put all this money into the arts in Senegal, but his dream. Was to always have this one museum in Dakar, Senegal, where he could bring culture from across the continent into one place. And he died before he saw what happened. But that is the Museum of Black Civilizations. In Relooted, the game design team recreated the facade of the Museum of Black Civilizations, which at the start of the game is a vast, mostly dark hall. As you advance through the game and bring the objects back to the continent, a plinth lights up containing the artifact that's been returned. This cleverly serves the in-game progress bar. Ben Myers: When I was sort of reading interviews and doing research about it, it seemed to be that the curators were alluding to the fact that the museum had deliberately, largely been left empty because they were waiting for all the artifacts to come back from the West. Ben Myers: Someone did a review recently where they literally posted a video of them visiting it and it was just this empty space. Even on TripAdvisor there are like two-star reviews being like, there wasn't a lot to see. Relooted is a triumph. It's genuinely fun while also being one of the most effective pieces of advocacy for repatriation I've ever encountered. If you spend any time thinking about museums, go play this game. Ben Myers: " Working on the game definitely changed my relationship with seeing objects in museums because there's so much about these objects that isn't like put in the captioning. And I find it deeply unsettling now to go to somewhere like the British Museum because I feel like I'm just surrounded by the sort of scale of looting and lack of information about how this stuff got there. So I, I feel like physically uncomfortable in this space and I can't really last. So, yeah, it was very interesting how that changed my relationship. Relooted is available now on Steam and Xbox. This has been Museum Archipelago.

3. 

   15 Dec 2025

   111. Why Software Hasn't Eaten Museums (Yet)

   Museums today are filled with software, yet they've largely avoided being "eaten" by the tech industry. Unlike music or movies, exhibitions can't be downloaded or scaled infinitely. There's only one Mona Lisa. But if the wrong platform finds the right leverage, that immunity may not last. Which is why the kind of software museums choose matters. TilBuci (https://tilbuci.itch.io/tilbuci) is a free, open-source tool used by museums to build touchscreens, kiosks, and projections. It was created by Brazilian software developer Lucas Junqueira after watching too many digital exhibitions quietly break down once the opening buzz faded. Designed to be usable by museum staff long after developers leave, TilBuci treats software not as a product, but as infrastructure. In this episode, Lucas Junqueira talks about what it takes to build museum software that lasts. Through the story of a projection still running on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum in Belo Horizonte over a decade after it opened, we explore how open, locally controlled tools extend the life of museum systems, and what's at stake if a tech platform ever inserts itself between museums and their audiences. Image: A projection animates the façade of the Espaço do Conhecimento (Space of Knowledge) museum at Praça da Liberdade (Liberty Square) in Belo Horizonte, Brazil. Lucas Junqueira's software Managana, a previous version of TilBuci is running the projection. Topics and Notes 00:00 Intro 00:15 The Rise of Software in Museums 00:56 Software Eating the World 02:19 Why Are Museums Different? 03:16 Lucas Junqueira and TilBuci (https://tilbuci.itch.io/tilbuci) 05:09 Challenges and Innovations 08:09 The Flash Apocalypse 10:12 What's at Stake 11:48 Jurassic Park on Club Archipelago (http://jointhemuseum.club/) 13:00 Outro | Join Club Archipelago 🏖 (http://jointhemuseum.club/) DIVE DEEPER WITH CLUB ARCHIPELAGO 🏖️ (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Unlock exclusive museum insights and support independent museum media for just $2/month. Join Club Archipelago (https://www.patreon.com/museumarchipelago) Start with a 7-day free trial. Cancel anytime. Your Club Archipelago membership includes: 🎙️Access to a private podcast that guides you further behind the scenes of museums. Hear interviews, observations, and reviews that don't make it into the main show. 🎟️ Archipelago at the Movies, a bonus bad-movie podcast exclusively featuring movies and other pop culture that reflect the museum world back to us. ✨A warm feeling knowing you're helping make this show possible. Transcript Below is a transcript of Museum Archipelago episode 111. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, refer to the links above. View Transcript Welcome to Museum Archipelago. I'm Ian Elsner. Museum Archipelago guides you through the rocky landscape of museums. Each episode is rarely longer than 15 minutes. So let's get started. If you've been to a museum lately, any museum big or small, you've probably noticed ever more software-driven experiences. Interactive touchscreens, projections, buttons, videos are all controlled by software. Lucas Junqueira: I've seen mostly all exhibitions have at least some kind of interaction or some pieces of the exhibition that require some kind of software to enable it. This is Lucas Junqueira, a Brazilian museum professional and software developer. Lucas Junqueira:  Okay. My name is Lucas Junqueira. I've been working on this exhibition museum scene for quite some time right now. It's tempting to see the increase of software in museums as another example of software eating the world. This phrase, "software eats the world", was coined by investor Marc Andreessen in a 2011 Wall Street Journal opinion piece. The idea isn’t that software replaces everything. It’s that software absorbs the value layer of company after company, industry after industry. In the "software eats the world" thesis, traditional music labels only exist to provide software companies (like Apple Music and Spotify) with content. The software, everything from how the app looks on your phone to what song is recommended next, sits higher on the value chain than the music itself. Even the network effects of which app your friends use, matter more than what you listen to. Netflix, Salesforce, and the game Angry Birds are some examples Andreessen mentioned back in that 2011 essay, plus plenty of other companies I barely remember. But the core of the thesis, even if it's not explicitly mentioned, is the zero-marginal cost nature of distributing software. Whatever the up-front cost of developing Angry Birds is, it doesn't actually matter since the company can distribute it to every phone on the planet for zero dollars. Once it exists, it can be copied endlessly, instantly, and globally. Which is exactly what museums can’t do. And this is where museums are different. Museums aren’t infinitely scalable, and they aren’t frictionless. You can't really download an exhibition in the way that you can download a song. You have to show up. There's only one Mona Lisa. And that's why software in museums is (so far at least) immune from software eating the rest of the world. Yes, there's more software in museums than ever, but that software rarely becomes the value layer. Museum software doesn't own the audience relationship, and it doesn't become the product like Spotify was able to do. Instead, it supports the product. As long as museums continue to control distribution, software remains infrastructure: a tool to help museums tell their stories. Lucas and I are both software developers, specializing in building exactly that infrastructure. One of Lucas's early projects was creating software to project images onto the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum, which faces Liberty Square plaza in the Brazilian town of Belo Horizonte. Lucas Junqueira:  We provided them a tool so they can make, a projection. They do have a projection on the front wall of the museum. It's a very big projection, and it is right in front of a square here in my city that is very crowded all the time. So they wanted to use this to show something they are exhibiting right now the museum is funded by a university, so they wanted to show some scientific evolutions. They want to use it like an information tool. They wanted to do that and provided them with the software used to produce the content to show on this big projection. Almost always, the cost of these projects is front-loaded: museums pay Lucas, or me, to create the software that projects the images and everyone is focused on that opening day. Lucas explains that this focus on new exhibitions is related to sponsorship funding. Lucas Junqueira:  We see that,, most of the museums had some requirements when they start a new exhibition, they usually have some kind of budget and some kind of funding to that. And that doesn't really happen when these institutions have to maintain their spaces. They can get some sponsors to new exhibitions, but they don't get so many sponsors when they are just keeping the museum open, right? And this is what happened to the projection on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum. Long after Lucas finished building the software, and long after the project had successfully finished, the museum wanted to update that projection to show new content. Lucas Junqueira:  And it was these, that, brought me the idea of creating a tool so the people on museum can use it without technical knowledge, because I felt they were needing to create some interactive content, but they needed to do it by themselves. Lucas wanted to make software that acted like infrastructure. Lucas Junqueira:   And I felt this need to create something that the museums and the, institutions can use to both create the big exhibitions, the big interactions for the new exhibitions, but also something that they can use, on by day, day basis. Lucas Junqueira: Because they don't have that sort of technical people or budget to fund these on a day by day basis. Right? And so when I started thinking about creating something that they can used for both things. They can use it when something new is coming and they can hire people to do it. They can hire technical people, they can hire developers to do it, but something that they can install on their computers and with minimal knowledge they can use to solve day by day problems. The result is TilBuci, a piece of software that Lucas developed on his own. It's a tool for helping build the software infrastructure a museum might need. The name TilBuci comes from Lucas's dog. Lucas Junqueira: His name is Busi He, he keeps company for me. He is always where I am. When I'm working, he's close to me all the time. So when I had to think about that name first I thought, that would be perfect, let's name after him! TilBuci, which you can download for free on any OS platform you want, is an impressive suite: capable of doing anything from slideshows, interactive menus with animation, dialogue systems, survey kiosks, and quiz games. Lucas Junqueira: It started growing slowly with the functions that started growing slowly because of course it's a free software and it's not funded by anyone. Well, it's funded by my own work. Right? So, I started creating like this. So when someone hired me to develop, for example, a kiosk and I had to build a, a in specific function instead of creating it somewhere else, I use it on that case, I create, I use it to create the code and incorporate it on the base software.And so the, the, the basis of, of TilBuci started that. It started growing from the day by day work, my of myself. But it wasn’t without setbacks. Lucas’s early code was written to be distributed on Flash. Flash Player was, for a long time, an easy way to make interactive media work on the web and in museums. It was a browser plugin developed and controlled by Adobe, and it allowed designers to build animations, videos, games, and interactive experiences that ran the same way almost everywhere. If you wanted something dynamic, visual, and relatively easy to deploy, Flash was often the answer. Museums adopted Flash for the same reason everyone else did: it lowered the barrier to making interactive content. But Flash was also a closed system. Museums didn't control it. When Adobe decided to end support in 2020, thousands of interactives simply stopped working -- not because the exhibitions had changed, but because the supporting software wasn't allowed to run. Lucas Junqueira: At  that time when we called the apocalypses, our digital apocalypse when we when the found problem of the Flash player. And what in about 2020 was kind of bad because it heavily depended upon the flesh player. I remember the Flash Apocalypse too. That moment exposed something important. Even when software is "just a tool," the kind of tool matters. Especially when museums don’t control it. And that's the problem Lucas was trying to solve in the first place. So Lucas switched course and made sure that his software was made with open source technologies. Lucas Junqueira:  I started thinking on ways to bring it back to life with something more open, some more open technologies. And that's when I started studying better the JavaScript and something like that. And then I could convert it, convert what we have done to what we have now. While museums have so far avoided software “eating” them, that doesn’t mean they’re immune forever. It's not hard to imagine a company offering museums free interactive kiosks in exchange for visitor data, or a platform that hosts digital exhibitions and starts competing with the physical visit for attention. The moment a third party controls the interface between a museum and its audience, the museum becomes the content supplier—just like the labels became for Spotify. Tools like TilBuci show a different path forward. Instead of extracting value, they extend the life of museum systems by keeping them editable, local, and owned by the institution, long after us programmers leave. They allow institutions to adapt, update, and respond over time — even when budgets shrink and staff change. And this brings us back to the projection on the facade of the Space of Knowledge museum. That projection opened in 2012. And because of TilBuci, it’s still working today. Lucas Junqueira: In this example,this projection without the tool for them to create themselves, it would be closed some time after we left there or there, or it would just be used to show some static videos and so on. But with the train them to create interactive content gave some life to this projection for a bigger time, bigger time spent than it was, than it could have been without it. This has been Museum Archipelago. They never call it a museum. Jurassic Park has a visitor center, a tour, a gift shop, fossils on display. It's curated, it's interpretive, it's full of didactic signage and high budget audio, visual material. It has a pulse visitor experience that begins with an introduction film, but nobody ever says museum. That's because museums are slow, they're dusty, they're institutions. Jurassic Park wants to be something faster, cleaner, cooler, a theme park, a show a miracle. But Jurassic Park is a museum movie. The dinosaurs are exhibits, living dioramas, engineered to validate a particular vision of science and nature and human knowledge. The tour is scripted. The narrative is highly controlled. That is until it isn't. The latest episode of our Bonus podcast, Club Archipelago is an hour and a half on 1994's Jurassic Park from a museum professional's perspective. It’s a good one. Listen at jointhe museum.club to join the club to support the show.

Inside a recent episode

113. World Trade Center Steel in Your Area

Published 20 Jul 2026 · Transcript excerpt

[…] Sam first encountered the steel from the World Trade Center, not at a museum or a memorial service, but in a posting for a small-town public art commission. The posting said, we have a relic piece of steel from the World Trade Center. And without altering it, we request that you incorporate this into a sculpture. And that piqued my interest. And then I started to talk to my brother, Max, about it. And he said, I think there's a real story there. That story, like the story of the Berlin Wall, begins almost immediately after the towers fell. On the evening of the 9-11 attacks, the pressing goal was to clear the giant pile of rubble, already called Ground Zero, to rescue survivors. […]

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Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Apple Podcasts (US)

4.9 / 5

88 ratings

Spotify

5.0 / 5

5 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 59 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

81

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

92

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