The Ledra Palace Museum project was led by two Multidisciplinary Research Groups of CYENS Centre of Excellence, Museum Lab & ITICA MRGs, which were in close collaboration with the Leventis Municipal Museum of Nicosia. We are very proud to have assisted with the interactive table exhibit by 3D modeling and 3D printing the objects that visitors could use on the interactive table.
The Ledra Palace Museum project deals with the representation of difficult history in museums and investigates ways in which technology can help to overcome any obstacles this entails. Despite its decadence, the Ledra Palace Hotel remains a beautiful and interesting place with a history worth to be told.Our aim is, through an extensive archival research, as well as a layered collection of testimonials (interviews and crowdsourcing), to ‘revive’ the history of the Ledra Palace hotel in a more multivocal and multilayered way.
This project is mostly based on the notion that museums dealing with difficult heritage can use technology to facilitate participatory and collaborative approaches, and actively engage different groups and communities (especially excluded, marginalized or silenced ones) in order to tell contested histories. We are therefore, interested in stories of people who experienced the Ledra Palace hotel in different ways or capacities: as guests, as audience in a concert or a show, as participants in conferences, business or work meetings, as employees, or as soldiers. Since this could not be done on the actual site of the hotel, we tried to create a museum ‘in the wild’ with the use of interactive media and new technologies.
