Monika Haider, Director of equalizent in Vienna (AT)
Austria
Video in spoken English, with English subtitles.
The interview below is different from the video.
You are the Director of equalizent. How did you become interested in Deaf History, Deaf Culture?
Before I founded equalizent, I worked for five years in the biggest school for the deaf in Austria.
After that, I was politically active and negotiated school laws as head of an association. The goal of the association was to enable the joint education of children with and without disabilities.
I saw some shocking abuses there. Examples of how sign language was suppressed and even banned. I also saw how important this language is for deaf people.
That was the motivation to found equalizent, in order to enable deaf people the right to sign language at least in the educational field. And the more I dealt with the topic, the more I was captivated by it.
And then, of course, it is no longer about the current situation, but also about how it came to be that sign language was banned. Why do deaf people often refer to themselves not as people with disabilities, but rather as a language community or culture?
I have often signed with deaf people about these exciting questions, I have read books and discussed with experts. And you never stop learning. New information and new aspects are constantly being added.
When did you decide to build the Hands Up exhibition? How long did it take?
I had the idea for this many years ago. In our work, we noticed how little society knows about deafness and sign language.
Therefore, we developed an awareness-raising training package. It included aspects of communication, history, as well as peculiarities of the deaf community.
We expanded our training, adding digital tools. In this way, everything grew into an exhibition to provide information, but above all, to put experience at the forefront.
It took us five months to set it up. It was more difficult to find the funding. That took years.
(see below for a video about the Hands Up exhibition.)
A short Video about the Hands Up exhibition:
Why did you decide to do this, what was your motivation?
What was your starting point?
What materials, expertise, skills did you have, and who helped you?
I've always seen that there is a huge gap between hearing and deaf people. These are parallel worlds that know little about each other and that is a shame!
Hearing people are often reluctant to approach deaf people because they don't know how to communicate with them. Deaf people are usually very open and inventive anyway. But this first step is the crux of the matter.
This exhibition, with deaf guides lead, marks the first important step: the visitors notice that communication is possible, that it is fun. You also learn a lot of interesting details about deafness. For some, this is the beginning of a sign language "career". They are so enthusiastic about the language that they take a course with us.
This is a great added bonus for us! It used to be assumed that the deaf should simply read lips. The more people attend sign language course, the more people truly understand that the tables have turned: hearing people need to take the step towards deaf people and not the other way around. Inclusion needs mutual effort and approach.
What were the major challenges? How did you deal with these?
The biggest challenge is certainly financial. Since the beginning of the pandemic, this has become even more acute as the exhibition has been closed for many months. Of course, the guides are still being paid.
Therefore, we have developed a concept to bring the exhibition to the people. It can be displayed outdoors or in companies, at schools for example. HANDS UP on tour is our 2nd – flexible - exhibition.
How was the deaf community involved? What was their reaction? To your plans, to the finished exhibition?
According to the motto "nothing about us without us", deaf employees of equalizent were involved in the construction of the exhibition from the beginning.
A mixed team of hearing and deaf people enabled us to integrate all points of view. On the one hand, it was important to us that deaf people have a say in what is communicated about them.
On the other hand, in an exhibition aimed at a hearing audience, it is also crucial that the knowledge of hearing people is included.
After the opening of the exhibition, we also deliberately invited the deaf community for guided tours to learn from their feedback and to further improve the exhibition. The feedback was extremely positive.
We succeeded in getting deaf visitors to identify with the content of the exhibition. For the community, it is certainly a great thing that their culture, their language and their history finally gets a public space.
Who is your main target group, who do you want to visit your exhibition / museum?
Deaf or hearing people, people from your country or also international visitors? Children, young people, families, adults?
How do you meet their specific needs, expectations, preferences?
The exhibition is primarily aimed at hearing people. Most visitors come from Austria. Individuals, families, school classes come. Companies have also already booked the exhibition for company outings.
Since many digital and playful elements are integrated, everyone can take something away with them.
Our guides are also flexible enough to adapt the tour to the visitors. For example, when it comes to teaching individual signs, they tend to show children the signs of animals; for adults, signs from social life, work, and leisure are more interesting.
The texts on the walls are also in English, so that tourists or people with a migration background can also visit the exhibition. We will also pay more attention to this after the end of the pandemic.
In addition, we have used the time in home office during the Corona restrictions to develop focus topics, such as LGBTIQ and deafness. We hope that in the future people will come to the exhibition not only once, but also for special topics.
How did you decide what to include in your exhibition / museum? And: how to display them?
It was important for us to focus on interaction, in addition to tangible information such as timelines about important events in the history of the deaf, about famous deaf personalities, etc.
Our deaf guides are the heart and soul of the exhibition. With a lot of charisma, they approach the visitors, take away fear of contact and show how interesting their world actually is.
We also wanted to create an exhibition that is modern and digitally playful. We therefore included a digital sign language quiz, for example, in which visitors can try out for themselves which signs they already know.
You can try to read lips yourself with and will be surprised that this is quite difficult.
A highlight is certainly the sign language karaoke. On a vibration platform, hearing people can feel how different types of music feel to the deaf. They have the opportunity to try out musical gestures themselves as well.
Did you do any market research before you started?
If not: why not?
If you did: How, and what were the results?
We researched in several countries, had contact with the operators of the deaf exhibition "Dialogue of Silence" in Hamburg and Tel Aviv and with the licensors of the worldwide blind exhibition "Dialogue in the Dark". We conceived our exhibition as a cooperation project with the Viennese "Dialogue in the Dark”.
How do you advertise your exhibition? Do you use social media, if yes: how?
We did active presswork at the start of the exhibition. The media showed great interest, so we were able to attract attention right away.
Otherwise, we manage various social media channels, where we want to reach new visitors on the one hand, but also keep former visitors informed with postings about the topic of deafness and sign language as well as with news from the deaf community.
We have written directly to schools to draw attention to our exhibition and any special offers.
Do you keep check of the number of visitors, enquire about their background, how they found out about your exhibition/museum?
Feedback is very important to us. Especially in the early days, we invited students and pupils for a month and gathered their feedback in a structured way in order to adapt the exhibition or guide content. Only then did we open the exhibition to the general public.
Since then, we have been distributing short feedback forms at regular intervals.
Some data cannot be collected so easily for data protection reasons. But of course we also wanted to know how people found out about our exhibition. After all, that helps in the planning of advertising measures.
How was / is your exhibition financed?
We have received public start-up funding to set up the exhibition and later to get it up and running. With this, we received financial support for 1.5 years.
After this phase, however, we had to stand on our own two feet and now we finance ourselves exclusively through ticket sales.
How has the Covid-19 crisis and shutdowns affected your exhibition ?
What are your plans for the future? Short-term & long-term?
We are now increasingly relying on "HANDS UP on tour". This means that school classes and companies no longer have to come to us, but we come to them. In this way, other federal states can also benefit from our exhibition. An exhibition tour abroad is also quite conceivable.
To motivate visitors to come more often, we are developing focus topics, like LGBTIQ and deafness, or e.g. linguistic minorities and sign language, racism, deaf people in the time of National Socialism, deaf women, etc.
The knowledge from the first visit can thus be deepened in many directions, resulting in a more comprehensive, differentiated picture of the world of deaf people.
by Liesbeth Pyfers, Pragma - NL, 24 March 2021
