The Museum of Literature Ireland – ‘MoLI’ as we call her, opened in September 2019. The museum is a collaboration between Ireland’s largest university, University College Dublin, and the National Library of Ireland. The museum is located in the original home of the university in the centre of Dublin city, in a suite of spectacular historic houses, with private gardens and links to a secret city centre park. Amongst its many exhibits are included notable items from the National Library’s literary collections.
From the outset, the mission of the museum was to celebrate the work of James Joyce and other Irish writers, while working with the living writing and artistic community, and in turn opening up the artform of writing to diverse audiences from all walks of life.
Initially, the museum opened with permanent exhibitions on the work of Joyce, Ireland’s most famous (and most European) writer, as well as installations and exhibits looking at historical examples of Irish writing from mediaeval times to the present day.
In Ireland, writing is perhaps our most dominant artform. We are a highly literate country, a nation of readers, writers and talker, but also of emigrants – many of our writers travelled beyond the island and wrote from elsewhere. And at home, their work inspired artists in other artforms, from theatre to music, dance and beyond. That international and cross-disciplinary role of writing in Ireland was always something that our museum felt compelled to explore and promote.
The museum was established through financial support from philanthropic sources, notably Ireland’s Naughton Foundation, and our national tourism development agency, Fáilte Ireland. Together with the University they saw the potential to create a visitable, large scale cultural institution that celebrated and created access into our country’s most widely regarded artform.
But creating that access was in many ways the biggest challenge - writing and literature are revered in Ireland, as is the architecture in which we are housed. In many ways, the museum’s two greatest assets were immediately its biggest barriers to audiences who may never usually be exposed to either. On one level writing and literature can be seen to represent intellectualism and elitism, whereas in truth the artform is a direct route to empowering and giving a voice to communities and individuals.
From the outset, we focused on the youngest audiences, bringing students of pre-reading age into the museum, working with local schools to develop creative programmes based around writing and personal biography, to enable students of all abilities to participate in the artform. We actively promoted the museum to schools around the country whose students may not ordinarily be involved in creative writing, reaching out to disadvantaged groups and forging links with community organisations who worked directly with people in challenging environments – refugees, homeless services, children who had fallen outside the school system, all the way up to adults learning to read for the first time. We developed online programmes for schools that broadcast to students across the country every week who would not otherwise be able to visit, and we run immersive teen writing workshops every year for students all over Ireland.
We encouraged young adult and teen audiences into the museum by collaborating with performance poets, rappers and hip-hop artists – some of the most vital young people working with words in Ireland today. This sent a signal that our museum had adopted the broadest possible perspective on what both its artform was, and who its public audience could be.
That broadness of vision is the true success of MoLI. This could have been a museum for a niche audience of literary aficionados and, while there is much for that audience to discover here, the museum has opened the doorway into literature for literally tens of thousands of young people across Ireland. And we do this by involving the living writing community in that work as mentors and teachers. In turn, MoLI has become a central space for the literary community in Ireland in just a short few years since opening.
MoLI is quite unique as a museum of literature – there are of course writers houses across the world, and wonderful smaller literary museums and writing spaces, but what is perhaps most unusual about the museum is that it seeks to promote the artform through exhibits that are created in collaboration with living writers. We regularly engage writers as curators of new artistic installations, actively commissioning new work from them to be presented in our spaces in unique ways. In the simplest terms, we are a museum of a mechanically reproduced artform, which people typically experience privately in their homes or on public transport. Curatorially we seek to encourage people to explore the artform in consistently different ways that challenge us as much as them.
Bloomsday 2023
The greatest difficulty MoLI has faced has of course been the Covid-19 pandemic. The museum had only opened for six months before it was forced to close for over a year, neutralising its opening momentum. A considerable focus on digital programming in advance of opening meant we were very well prepared for this, and immediately moved our programming online. In many cases this was more effective than on site programming in terms of our audience mission, and is something we took with us as the pandemic abated. But growth since the pandemic has been slow, and as a museum that is not operationally funded from state or other sources, financial sustainability continues to be a major challenge for MoLI. Maintaining that commitment to access, broad audience development, collaboration and joyful experimentation is increasingly difficult in an environment of rising costs and shrinking support for culture.
A key learning from the project to date is connected to this, and is really one of value - what is the real value of a museum, and for who? Why is it important that a museum like this exists? Value is calculated in many ways – the value of the activity of the organisation, the cost of running it, the income it generates, the expense of the architectural work. While a project can cost a lot to build and open, it will cost infinitely more to continue to exist, grow, achieve its ambitions and actualise its potential. Embedding a network of financial support into a cultural organisation like this from the outset is essential to allow it to thrive, and that is a hard lesson to learn. Opening a museum is, although a rare and often unlikely vent, the easy part – like any cultural activity, keeping it alive in a commercial world is a perpetual challenge that we should not take for granted.