"They shape your world, what you smell and taste, whether you get sick or get better. They can save us or destroy us". Amsterdam's amazing microbe museum, Micropia
It’s on our travel list, when it’s safe enough to go (and we’ve carbon-earned it): Micropia, Amsterdam’s museum of microbes (the first in the world). We were alerted to it by John Thackera’s retweet about their “Fungal Wall Tapestry” (see video below), and on diving further in we’re delighted by the very idea of this museum.
Our microbial partners in life are become every more visible to us - connecting us to our own bodies, and those bodies to natural processes, in ways that can’t help but improve our ecological consciousness. And as the New York Times reports, post-Covid, we will have to embrace our microbial lives, as an element of our social resilience, in the face of waves of warming-induced infections.
We also love Micropia’s “free verse” text, on their “About” page:
You can’t see them, but they’re here.
They are on you. In you. And you’ve got more than a hundred thousand billion of them.
They’re with you when you eat, when you breathe, when you kiss.
They are everywhere. On your hands. And in your belly.
And they meddle in everything.
They shape your world:
what you smell, and what you taste;
whether you get sick, or get better.
They can save us or destroy us.
Microbes: the smallest and most powerful organisms on our planet.
We know very little about them,
but can learn so much from them.
About our health, alternative energy sources, and much more.
When you look from really close,
a new world is revealed to you.
More beautiful and spectacular than you could ever have imagined.
Welcome to Micropia.
The only museum of microbes, in the centre of Amsterdam.
A further explanation of the museum’s design and intent:
The relationship between human life and the natural world lies at the very centre of Natura Artis Magistra [since 1838, a science-museum for Amsterdam, and the host for Micropia] has experience in interpreting complex science for the general public.
The story is told through the zoo’s animals and plants and you begin to be amazed. You see them, you hear them, you smell them and sometimes you can walk around with them. This idea led to the development of Micropia.
At the very centre is the organism and micro organism and that is where the story begins. The story about its relationship with humans, about microbes’ special properties, about how we can use them and how they interact with the plants and animals you can see at Artis.
In the end, the recurring themes of Micropia are: where microbes fit in on the tree of life; what is special about them; what impact microbes have on individuals and on animals, plants and mankind – now and in the future. The visitor is constantly brought back to the relationship of microbes to his or her own life…
We realised we needed to test the principles governing how we told our stories. Prototypes of a number of innovative media installations were made in collaboration with their designers. The microscope was an essential component. Some organisms, such as colonies of fungi, could be seen with the naked eye but a microscope was indispensable in most other cases.
The wonderful thing about a microscope is that its two eyepieces allow you to cut yourself off from the world and dive into the world of microbes. It is a great shame that some visitors are just not up to the job of properly handling this delicate optical equipment. Navigating and fine tuning eyepieces are a necessary part of experiencing and being astonished by what normally is an invisible world.
These experiments resulted in the installation of a 3D viewer attached to the microscope via cameras on the eyepieces. Navigation, a necessary part of exploring the micro-world, has now been made simple. The feeling still remains, however, that you are diving into the invisible world. This method is used in many of Micropia’s displays.