In London, organizers and staff have flipped a museum. Suddenly, the collection is the museum, and the exhibitions are whatever you decide.

At V&A East Storehouse, over 250,000 items sit inside carefully constructed storage warehouse wings waiting for a day that might have never came: the call that they would be included in a new or permanent exhibition at the London Design Museum.

One of the largest of its kind in the world, it owns everything from Roman frescoes to Renaissance paintings to the icons of mass production and haute couture.

Now however, museum curators and conservationists alike are encouraging the public to “lean into the delirium,” and enter a brand-new, 4 story gallery where visitors can view every single item, in a way not too dissimilar to the underbelly of a flatpack furniture showroom.

“This is real back-of-house museum work,” said the V&A East Storehouse’s senior curator Georgina Haseldine, on a visit by CNN. “We want visitors to learn what a collection is, how we store it… How colleagues work across the museum, from conservators to the technical service team.”

The “delirium,” which the V&A Storehouse design studio Diller Scofidio + Renfro spoke of, is the criteria by which the collection is organized: by age. As a result, you might hope to see the 14th century paintings of Simone Martini, but it could well be flanked by anything: a suit of armor, a thimble, a snuff box, a dining set, or a pair of fireplace tongs—before you see the next Martini.

Especially large museums like London Design are encountering a problem whereby the number of items they are collecting continues to grow far in excess of gallery and exhibition space. It means the chance of all such items being selected for public view decreases.

Rather than continuing to vest the power of deciding what the public gets to see in themselves, in a stroke of democracy akin to the invention of Wikipedia, the curators and management have given the reins over to the public: and that includes on the objects themselves.

NEW MUSEUMS:

Anyone visiting V&A East Storehouse can apply to enter the conservation room and handle or examine any item in the collection; alongside short concise lessons on the conservation techniques of various materials of various ages.

“These collections belong to the public. And it’s just incredible that we can enable access,” Kate Parsons, director of conservation, told CNN. 

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