Cutting edge arts and production company
Museum of Ordinary People
Winner if the Brighton Fringe Visual Arts Award in Association with HOUSE and AOH.
MOOP is a new kind of museum that tells the stories of ordinary people, exploring and considering the magic and mundanity of ordinary life, chronicling hidden narratives and celebrating the ripples that we leave behind. It serves as an antidote to celebrity mania and the pervasive cultural construct of presenting picture-perfect versions of our lives. It is also a direct rebellion against an already well-established canon of museums celebrating the lives of the elite. MOOP is a temporary / pop-up museum running for one week during the Brighton Fringe Festival presenting collections created by and about ordinary people, as part of a wider programme of events that includes performances, talks and workshops.
The Story of MOOP
In 2016 theatre practitioner and company director Jolie Booth developed her first and critically acclaimed one-woman-show HIP. Produced under her company name Kriya Arts - a cutting edge arts and production company, HIP explored the life of an ordinary woman named Anne Clarke, whom Jolie had discovered through found objects left behind in a flat she squatted in 2002. The flat had been left empty for over a decade and had become a magical time capsule back to the 1980's and 1970's.
A year later, based on further discoveries made about Anne's life and the city of Brighton they had both inhabited at different times in history, Jolie created an interactive walking tour called the Hip Trip of Brighton: A Psychedelic Wander, which explored Anne's Brighton by sharing with participants the places where the beatniks, hippies and punks had hung out and a little about what they'd got up to.
Lucy Malone came on one of these walking-tours and afterwards in the pub Jolie shared with her an idea she'd been mulling over for some time of creating a Museum of Ordinary People. A permanent space where people who had found or inherited an archive of documents or objects could explore and share that person's story.
This idea resonated with Lucy because she was also creating work along a similar theme. When Lucy's mother passed away suddenly in 2011 Lucy inherited all of her belongings. For five years these remained in boxes, until as her final project / dissertation on her BA in Psychosocial Studies at Birkbeck College; Lucy opened the boxes and discovered what was in the notebooks, envelopes and lists, in order to assemble an archive of her mother's artistic practice, creating a research project and art piece which combined practice-based research methodologies to look at memory, loss, grief and materiality.
When speaking to each other in the pub after the walking tour, back in May 2017, Jolie and Lucy realised there were many parallels between their work and both became excited at the prospect of working together. They began to meet regularly and dream, over many hot chocolates, how to get this exciting project off the ground... Thus, this pop-up version of MOOP was born... With much bigger dreams to follow.
