Abstract

The imagination is at play when audiences experience museum exhibitions. In fact, it plays a central role in the interpretations involved in their museum encounter. If scholars are to understand the imaginaries involved in museum experiences, they face a challenge: how does one explore that which is imagined? This paper presents the collage method as a tool for exploring the imaginaries of museum audiences. Based on a recent study at the National Museum of Denmark, involving twenty participants creating collages to express their imaginaries of Ancient Egypt and the Viking Age, this article illustrates examples using the collage method and explores how it differs from other audience research methods. The collage method involves audiences beyond active participation. It works to aid access to memories and to make audiences express rich, personal narratives; it facilitates non-verbal creative expression and generates elaborate, multimodal data sets. The insights gained using this method provide new perspectives and understandings of audience imaginaries and the repertoires they bring with them to the museum experience. Collage examples illustrate how popular media and cultural education alike—fact and fiction—blend in the imaginaries of audiences, thus providing complex points of departure for their interpretations in and of the museums.