Belfast Stories will be a major new people’s history museum, based entirely around the stories of Belfast residents past and present.

As lead curator in a joint RAA / Barker Langham team, I shaped an overarching narrative and interpretation scheme designed to hold and generate fragments of stories at every scale, from kitchen table anecdotes, to broader evocations of the city’s rhythms, to mosaic reconstructions of key events seen from hundreds of different points of view.

My ongoing work on the museum has been built on intensive public consultation. The narrative concept was tested and refined through open story sharing sessions held across the city, while the museum’s approach to co-production, co-curation, and co-creation was defined through multiple rounds of stakeholder engagement, designed to establish the conditions under which residents would be happy to gift their stories to the museum, and how those gifts should be received and reciprocated.