The Ledra Palace Museum Project (2018 – ongoing)

The Ledra Palace Museum project deals with the representation of difficult history in museums and investigates ways in which technology can help to overcome any obstacles this entails. Despite its decadence, the Ledra Palace Hotel remains a beautiful and interesting place with a history worth to be told. Our aim is, through an extensive archival research, as well as a layered collection of testimonials (interviews and crowdsourcing), to ‘revive’ the history of the Ledra Palace hotel in a more multivocal and multilayered way. Since this cannot be done on the actual site of the hotel, we will try to create a museum ‘in the wild’ with the use of interactive media and new technologies (virtual reality, sensors, holograms, augmented reality). This will be done in two steps: through a physical exhibition which would be organised in collaboration with the Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia at the Museum’s premises, in 2021 and through a virtual exhibition at a later stage. This project is mostly based on the notion that museums dealing with difficult heritage can use technology to facilitate participatory and collaborative approaches, and actively engage different groups and communities (especially excluded, marginalized or silenced ones) in order to tell contested histories. We are therefore, interested in stories of people who experienced the Ledra Palace hotel in different ways or capacities: as guests, as audience in a concert or a show, as participants in conferences, business or work meetings, as employees, or as soldiers.

A CYENS Museum Lab project. Funding: Research Centre on Interactive Media, Smart Systems and Emerging Technologies (CYENS Centre of Excellence)

https://www.cyens.org.cy/