Cracks in the Museum (Säröjä museossa) is an artistic intervention and an experimental performance that borrows its form from a traditional guided museum tour. It critically explores prevailing assumptions about the relationships between humans and more-than-human nature. The performance brings forward complex questions concerning interspecies relations. By defamiliarizing romanticized and anthropocentric conceptions of nature, it opens up space to examine the uncomfortable dimensions of multispecies coexistence, ethically challenging negotiations, and power dynamics.
Cracks in the Museum draws inspiration from Nicole Seymour’s (2018) concept of “bad environmentalism”, making use of affects and sensibilities often considered inappropriate—such as contradiction, awkwardness, irreverence, and playfulness—to challenge and expand mainstream nature and environmental discourses. The performance leads participants to the spaces of the Nature of the World exhibition, where conventional guided tour narratives and affective atmosphers are transformed in absurd and unexpected ways.
The performance is co-created by exhibition designer Anni Puro (formerly Granroth) from the Finnish Museum of Natural History and Henrika Ylirisku, university lecturer in art education at Aalto University School of Arts, Design and Architecture. Puro and Ylirisku, who met through the research project Children of the Anthropocene (funded by the Kone Foundation, 2022–2025), and began developing new approaches to environmental art education and museum pedagogy based on their shared interests.
Cracks in the Museum is aimed at adult audiences and has been performed several times for invited groups at the Finnish Museum of Natural History during spring 2025. The performance is written and performed by Granroth and Ylirisku themselves.
Photos: Pasi Ylirisku
Presentation:
Oh *%!# that snake! – An experimental guided tour in a natural history museum as an intervention, 8th European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI), Edinburgh, UK, 8.1.2025.
