The Guggenheim in Bilbao, the Rijksmuseum, and now also the Museum of the Spirit – with the win of the European prize for the museum of the year (European Museum of the Year Award), the Haarlem museum ended up in a row with big names on Saturday evening . Every year the prize goes to a museum in Europe that has recently been renovated or renovated.
The Museum of the Spirit reopened in the middle of the corona crisis. In the fall of 2020, the former Museum of Psychiatry came up with a new, activist setup. The museum aims to “challenge stereotypes,” its website says, and encourages visitors to sign a “Declaration of the Open Mind” speaking out against stigma and exclusion.
The jury is full of praise for it. The museum explores the nature of the human mind in a uniquely innovative way. “An innovative social project.”
“I’m really glowing here,” museum director Hans Looijen responds via a video link. “Super proud. Other museums spent tens of millions of euros in their renovation, but with us it was on a different scale. In the middle of corona it was sometimes quite complicated to get it done.” According to Looijen, the renovation cost a total of just under eight million euros. Before the corona crisis, forty thousand people visited his museum every year, while 2.7 million visitors came to the Rijksmuseum in 2019.
A “Explanation of the Open Mind,” what do you do with that?
“We use them to stimulate the debate, in healthcare institutions and beyond. For example, we are currently working on a project to make gloomy thoughts a topic for discussion in schools around Haarlem.
“Mental problems often manifest themselves in early adulthood, and you carry them with you for the rest of your life if you don’t act on them. So we want to do something about it as early as possible, and that starts with discussing it.”
What do you think other museums should do?
“Museums should pay more attention to the whole person. Too often there is a separation between artists and their personal lives. For example, Picasso was not friendly to women at all. Or Jackson Pollock, it never says he was an alcoholic. And we are in contact with the Van Gogh museum, which will do more with Van Gogh’s mental state. We greatly applaud that.
“The dark side of artists must also be highlighted. You should stay away from the romantic notion of an artist and madness. Nothing beautiful arises in madness, that is real frenzy in which you no longer have any leads.”
Centuries ago, the building where the museum now sits was a madhouse for people with the plague or psychiatric problems. Now standing in one of the pens where ‘insane people’ used to be locked up images by British artist Marc Quinn, about his alcohol addiction.
Do you also see your museum as a care institution?
“More like a campaign agency. We want to give people who are in, or are in the middle of, psychological care a voice.”
What personal reasons do you have for furnishing the museum in this way?
“My mother was a psychiatric patient. I thought for a long time: you are not going to work for your mother in a museum. But it certainly played a role. I grew up in the countryside in the 1970s, and her mental health issues just weren’t talked about. That’s what my mother had decided so that we wouldn’t be bothered by it. Of course it doesn’t work that way.
“As a boy you take that as your reality, but later I realized it didn’t have to be like ours. I would like people who are now the same age as I was then to be more understanding. But mental problems are not out of the woods yet.”