The Living Museum of Peoples

One of Damanhur’s purposes is to establishing a Learning Center to collect and disseminates ancient knowledge on how to create, sustain and develop a community and a People.

Connected to the Parliament there will therefore be a library dedicated to sacred and spiritual texts of Indigenous peoples, as well as to research on their traditions. A part of this knowledge will be collected by Damanhurian researchers themselves, in partnership with different experts and institutions. This is to make sure that the information can then be transmitted in a way that is as close as possible to the oral tradition through whichever they’re normally transmitted.

This will therefore include videos and recordings of words, songs, prayers and stories so that the diversity of languages can be preserved as well as recordings of sounds of the pertinent contexts. Ceremonies and rituals will be also recorded, whenever possible to be admitted to their original formats.

Handicrafts will be collected, too, also to be “digitalized” and reproduced in VR. In this way there will be a physical museum and a virtual one, accessible online to researchers all over the world.

The physical museum will be completely interactive, and visitors will have the opportunity to interact not only with the objects on display, but also with the information and knowledge gathered.

Parallel to the designing of the physical structure, the Museum Project foresees the creation of digital platforms and solutions to store and manage all the data, while making them accessible. In this way, the results of the research will be available even before the completion of the whole Parliament of Peoples.

AI will be used for advanced research: the variety and complexity of the information to be collected makes it particularly useful to use artificial intelligence systems to identify correlations and methods for accessing and using innovative information. These systems will also be made available to researchers, who will have access to a live archive and potentially connect to other data sources to enrich the initial database.

For the digital cataloging of artifacts, the physiognomy and clothing of the representatives of the peoples, a 3D acquisition system will be set up. 3D acquisition will simplify and speed up the creation of content for virtual and immersive experiences that will be realized both for the interactive museum, and for other fruition channels.

Finally, the design of a digital platform will make the information collected immediately available, even before the completion of the physical building of the museum itself and of the Parliament of Peoples. This modality will create a “digital twin” to make the experience available also in virtual reality mode.