Sanura 

Come and Play the Exhibition

Inspired by modern computer games where you have to pass through different levels, solve riddles, and gather points, the museum welcome you to a new and different exhibition. Visitors will move through various environments in the exhibition as if they were levels in a game. In that way the exhibition is in the nature of a large playground where you are allowed to touch, feel, play, lie down, nose around, experiment, and fantasize. But what is it you are working towards?

Sanura's Mission

The exhibition is based on games and experiments, but it is actually a serious matter requiring the utmost from the visitors. At the entrance you are met by Sanura, the heroine of our adventure and the owner of a time machine. Sanura comes from the future, from the year 2103, and she is living on a planet called Alexandria. She has travelled back through time to Earth in the year 2007 with an assignment of the greatest importance - and for that assignment she will need help from the visitors to the museum.

The inhabitants of Alexandria are descendants of people from the planet Earth who have built up a society sometime in a not so distant future. To remind themselves and future generations of their past they had amassed grand museums, archives, and libraries filled with all the history and knowledge of the universe. But a gigantic storm has swept over the planet and everything has been lost. All that remains are for a very few fragments of strange unknown scraps of paper and shreds of manuscript. No one knows what these fragments mean anymore! So people have been sent from Alexandria across the universe to rediscover all the lost knowledge. 

One of the tableaux, created for "On Track of the Words". 

One of the envoys is Sanura who has been sent on a journey through the universe and back in time to find the meaning of the fragments from planet Earth. Her only travelling companion is her pet kitten called Archimedes. If Sanura and Archimedes are successful, they will contribute to unlock the history of Alexandria. As visitors you will join Sanura on her journey around the world and help her solve the puzzles that will enable her and Archimedes to return to Alexandria with the information. The large holes in Sanura's knowledge must be filled, and the exhibition is arranged so that you can send Sanura back to Alexandria with her "mission accomplished" 

Messages in extreme areas: A post office in western Greenland, 1900. Photo: Arctic Institute, Denmark.

 

The Time Machine

Sanura's time machine has landed in the exhibition hall of the museum. It is overwhelmingly big and in two storeys. On the ground floor will be displays and activities associated with contemporary and future language technology. Climbing the stairs to the first floor visitors will enter the futuristic time portal itself. It is here that visitors will find a series of puzzles that will invite them to explore the exhibi-tion and its variety of scenes in order to discover the answers to a set of puzzles. Alongside each puzzle will be a wormhole slide. Sliding down the worm-hole visitors will arrive in a distant land or in a distant time such as a ship struggling in heavy seas, a Bedouin tent or perhaps even a nineteenth century inventor's workshop! 

Communication from all over the world: Postwoman outside the post office in Pemalang on Java, Indo-nesia. Photo: Tropenmuseum, the Netherlands. 

The time machine is the central element in the exhibition. The wormholes make it a very physical experience to move around in the exhibition? When did you last get around in an exhibition by means of slides?

The Environments
From the wormholes you are landing in the different environments of the exhibition. (If you do not like the idea of sliding on a time journey through wormholes, visitors are also able to sedately walk around the exhibition and enjoy every facet of it without raising the blood pressure too much). 

Jack 

Each of the exhibition's seven scenes has been designed to demonstrate and illustrate the variety of factors that have contributed to language and communications technologies and services through time. Having solved the puzzle found in that scene, visitors may then return to the time portal and take a new puzzle and a new wormhole slide, if they so choose. 

Landing in the cabin of a ship struggling in heavy seas, visitors will be immersed in an environment dedicated to language and communica-tions that is used in dangerous or even emergency situations. Here visitors will also meet 11-year-old Jack who often travels with his father, the captain of the ship.

Also in other scenes visitors will meet a character: In the Bedouin tent we will meet Fatima whose father runs a business selling Bedouin-made products from his website on the Internet. Fatima tells us about the variety of communications technologies she uses to contact her relatives who have moved to another country. Through Fatima we learn more about communication technologies in extreme locations and how new developments such as solar-powered battery chargers and satellite technology are enabling communications where there is no infrastructure. Inside the tent visitors will also learn about the languages of the world such as how many different languages exist today? And how many have existed historically? 

Fatima 

In the street scene visitors will learn about street language and how languages are constantly in development. You can fish slang of the past out of a dustbin full of forgotten words or try to break the world record in cell phone text messaging. In the inventor's workshop experiments are being made with might and main, and in other scenes you may bump into ancient clay tables and papyrus rolls - just to mention a bit of what is presented in this exhibition.

Mission Accomplished

Contrary to many computer games you decide your own chronology in "On Track of the Words". However, the object is the same for everybody: To send Sanura back with restored knowledge of the words, languages, and communication of the past. You will learn a lot of new things on the way - and have fun at the same time. There will be something to get for both young and big children, and if there is just a little bit of child left in them, parents and grandparents will enjoy themselves just as much as the children.

The gallery of characters in the exhibition are drawn by Lasse Jacob Middelboe Outzen.

A Travel Book

Every visitor to the exhibition will get a travel book together with the admission ticket; a guide to make the journey through the exhibition even more exciting. The travel book is an initiator in which Sanura is guiding the visitors through the exhibition. It contains information, riddles and puzzles, as well as facts to be inspired by or surprised with. The riddles and puzzles can be solved by exploring the exhibition.
The 20 pages' booklet addresses itself to children at the age of 6 to 12.

For schools

The school service of the museum has prepared an educational course for school children. The pupils will be introduced to Sanura's story, to the idea of travelling through space and time, and to the concept of "wormholes". After the introduction the children will explore the exhibition on their own or in small groups with the travel books in their hands. Finally, the class gather in the Bedouin tent to exchange experience and sum up. And, as usual, you can enjoy your packed lunches at the museum. Moreover, you can download educational material free of charge as an appetizer prior to the museum as well as for a finishing treatment of the visit.

"On Track of the Words" can be seen on the 4th floor of the museum during the period 9th February-21st October 2007.