The temporary exhibition "Wuchta Wiary. Heroes of Organic Labor in Greater Poland" brings closer the origins and historical context of organic labor in the Prussian partition in the 19th and 20th centuries. It tells the story of the heroes of organic labor and the social projects they carried out. Our goal was to create an exhibition that would break the previous standard of historical exhibitions and make the topic attractive also to the younger generation. The exhibition is part of a cultural and educational project led by the Wielkopolska Museum of Independence, and was created in cooperation with the Palace of General Dabrowski in Winna Gora coordinating the Route of Organic Labor. The project was co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Government of the Wielkopolska Region.
Before starting the design, we did the antsy work of collecting factual and iconographic material on the assigned topic. Many hours of browsing through bibliographies and online catalogs culminated in a selection narrowing the list of heroes of organic work to dozens of figures. We also spent a lot of work on tracing the locations of objects and localities associated with the restrictors in the Grand Duchy of Poznan. We also conducted a search among museums and selected monuments for loan. We consulted the results of our work with the staff of the Wielkopolska Museum of Independence and the scientific consultant Prof. UAM Dr. Przemysław Matusik.
We began our design work by familiarizing ourselves with the museum space where the exhibition was ultimately to be created. We checked its capabilities and limitations, and also looked at the permanent exhibitions to see how museum professionals communicate with visitors. This experience led us to make important design decisions: basing the design of the arrangement on boldly colored and compositionally large-format posters of the heroes of organic labor, taking care of simple and comprehensible language, conveying historical information in the form of statistical data and a timeline, in addition to the monuments, introducing educational stands and creating many opportunities to activate visitors.
Due to the limited exhibition space, it was necessary to carefully plan and organize the division of content. We decided to divide the exhibition into three parts so as to guide the visitor through the most important issues as smoothly as possible. In the first module we gathered all the basic information answering the questions of where and when, who and what. The central space of the exhibition was filled with large-format posters with the heroes of organic labor, and the last with an interactive map "In the footsteps of the heroes of organic labor." The axis of the exhibition is marked by a seven-meter-long table filled with objects and educational stands, which at the same time serves as a buckle that binds the entire arrangement and is a customized complement to the content covered on the boards.
