Reflect and Connect

Should you stroll through the Museum today, you might notice one of ROM's five new installations, each of which is made of wood, adorned with splashes of colour, and affixed with a black banner announcing its presence. These are the Connection Stations: interactive hubs designed to encourage self-reflection, understanding, and exchange via the Museum's many objects. While purpose-built to challenge assumptions, the Connection Stations are also undeniably engaging.

Case in point: “Decisions, Decisions,” a game of choices you can play solo, but best with two. Located on the main floor and the third floor, the touch-screen game invites players to select one of twelve ROM objects—from a pair of Mexican high heels to a statue of the Buddha—best representative of a big topic like “Faith” or “Play” or “Care.” After, players discuss their choices, then choose a final object together. 

Up two flights of stairs from the main floor, in the Samuel European Galleries, is another Connection Station, this one defiantly analog: “Many Stories.”  Standing amid ornate Renaissance-era crosses, cups, and silver, this Connection Station displays a chocolate cup and saucer from 18th-century Austria. The wooden panels ringing the case below offer brief histories of porcelain and chocolate. (Even more fun: you can pop open a small wooden box to take a whiff of chocolate.) But then comes the shock: the very chocolate that filled the pretty saucer on display likely came from slave labour on “colonial plantations in South America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia.” 

After this reveal, visitors are provided paper and pencils to reflect on what they initially thought of the cup and saucer—and how that changed. One response, encased in a thin plastic sleeve, read: “[S]ometimes behind beauty, there is pain.”

The other “Many Stories” Connection Station, located in the Teck Suite of Galleries: Earth’s Treasures, takes a lighter approach. The object here is an elegantly carved and polished jade vase and cover from 1700-early 1800s China. Jade, the panels inform us, is more valuable than any other material in traditional Chinese culture—a simple fact meant to spark discussion about the subjectivity of value. Here too, visitors can use paper and pencil to respond to prompts. 

Asked to describe “something valuable to you or your culture,” one visitor responded with “Chinese metaphors.”

“Stories ground our culture, dictate right from wrong,” wrote the visitor. “They warm us, inspire us, and I cannot believe how they’ve withstood the test of time.”