ANP Director Fresco Sam-Sin (r) at the Onze Taal conference last year. Princess Laurentien on the left
In association with
Broadcasting West
NOS Nieuws•vandaag, 17:04
The Language Museum in Leiden will cease to exist. Director Fresco Sam-Sin announced this in the NPO Radio 1 program The Language State. The museum has money problems. It is the second museum to close in a week.
The Language Museum did not have its own building. It was in fact a foundation that Leiden University and the municipality of Leiden established together in 2016 to organize traveling exhibitions and activities for others, according to Broadcasting West.
An example is the exhibition Slightly many Olga, which was shown last year in Rotterdam and Leiden, among others. At that exhibition tells Aunt Olga (1928) in solemn Dutch that she left Suriname for the Netherlands with her mother and children in 1965. Although she has lived in The Hague for almost sixty years, her language, cuisine, customs and things are still unmistakably Surinamese.
Admission to the exhibition was free, Aunt Olga received more than a million Tiktok views, say the museum itself. But the money to organize these types of exhibitions has run out. Director Sam-Sin says it hurts to make the decision. “We’re in a time where we’re all talking about language all the time,” he says.
Doctor’s manuscripts
He calls on every major heritage institution or municipality to invest time and energy in similar exhibitions about language. “Look at your collections and come up with something that has to do with language,” says Sam-Sin. “A town hall can do something with official language. A hospital can do an exhibition about doctor’s handwriting. A concert hall about tearjerkers. There are so many possibilities.”
On January 1, the Louis Couperus Museum in The Hague was closed, also due to a lack of money. Since its founding in 1995, owner Caroline de Westenholz has invested approximately 30,000 euros per year in the collection and the building, which was dedicated to one of the Netherlands’ most famous writers and his striking language. But she is no longer able to do so financially, De Westenholz said last week. The building itself is now closed. The website remains online. The founder has given herself until May 15 to find solutions.
2024-01-06 16:04:42
#Language #Museum #Leiden #closes #due #lack #funding
