Now that the exhibition is done, it’s time to reflect on how it (as well as the assignment as a whole) went. 

I’m pretty pleased with how my group and I worked both as a team and on the assignment. I don’t think we could have done any better, and I believe that our method of telling a real-world story — a museum exhibition of a long-dead alien race — was a great idea and a novel way of telling a story that let us flex our world-building and art muscles. I hope it’s received well by the audience (who wouldn’t), but I also hope that they try and piece together the whole story based on the small fragments we gave them, using the clues from the didactics and artefacts we created to figure out what exactly happened between the Codons and the Arbors. The whole exhibition was meant to resemble a walkthrough of a museum’s gallery of old art from societies long-gone, and how they can narrate and depict a story of that civilisation, and I hope it was successfully recreated by us on that day. 

Preparing for the exhibition was easy enough (Olivia and Dani had the worst job of bringing the huge sandbox to present on exhibition day) and mainly consisted of setting everything up where we thought it matched best. It was somewhat surreal having people walk through and view it, however. Seeing people view physical pieces we had created, and try and figure out what happened to this alien society that we made up, almost falling into the narrative of the Codans being a real society, was nice to see and something that I had never really experienced before. I had shown videos and things I had created to people in the past, but I suppose that having all the media be primarily physical and the context of our exhibit changed the relationship people had with them, essentially fulfilling the role we wanted them to play in terms of the museum narrative we were trying to set up. 

In terms of our collaboration as a group, I was really happy with how our group worked together and collaborated to get everything done. We split up the overall exhibition into smaller artefacts: ones that could be completed individually on our own time before reconvening in class to check in and see how everyone was progressing. Parts that we did work on together were the worldbuilding of the Codans and didactics, as well as the general planning of the exhibit and what everyone was making.  Doing the exhibit in this way broke up the whole workload into manageable chunks, and made the time we spent together as a group much more efficient and progressive since many of the artefacts themselves were already being worked on outside of class time, and we didn’t need to meet up and have to work around scheduling conflicts. It also catered to everybody’s strengths; people got to work on what they could do best — whether that be painting or sculpting — leading to a greater final product at the end.  

Overall, I’m thrilled with how our final exhibit went. I hope that the viewers and audience managed to find the story we were trying to tell about the Codans, as well as the story we were trying to tell about the narrativization of museums as a whole, and I’m glad my team and I worked together to the best of our abilities to pull it off.