The Night of Museums in the Museum of Death: communication on the border between worlds

The article discusses field research materials collected at the World Funeral Culture Museum (Museum of Death) in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk during the Night of Museums event. According to the Museum's employees, around six thousand people attended the event. The visitors were offered an extensive entertainment programme including permanent and thematic exhibition tours, tours of the crematorium, concerts, theatrical performances, and prize competitions. The study I carried out at the Museum has become a new, unpredictable, and most intensive fieldwork experience of mine in recent years. If, at first, my research task was to analyse methods of visualisation and museumification of the idea of death, as soon as the event started it had to be changed as I found myself trying to understand what is happening at all, why this Museum has become the most popular in the city, what its visitors want to see, understand and take away from here. As a result, around 30 interviews were recorded, an analysis of which, along with an attempt to answer the questions raised above, is presented in the article.

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