With our contribution to the exhibition, we wanted to explore a few different themes. The idea at the centre of our exhibition was "what role does Bnieuws have at the faculty and how has this changed over time?" We wanted to explore this because the COVID-19 pandemic heavily effected the things Bnieuws did and the way it functioned. There were three whole editions that Bnieuws created that were never printed physically, and therefore only exist on this website and our ISSUU repository. For nearly a year, the Bnieuws team met almost exclusively via zoom meetings, which made team work difficult at times. It was the pandemic that ultimately led us to create this website as a new platform where Bnieuws could exist.
We set up our exhibition in three main sections, each corresponding to a part of our title 'Past, Pandemic, Future'. These are pictured below. In the first segment, we dived into the past of our magazine to discover what the function of Bnieuws used to be. If you didn't know, Bnieuws has existed for 55 years this year, dating back to 1967. A big collection of old editions exists at the archive at the New Institute in Rotterdam. Editions from the early years are fascinating to see, offering a wonderful insight into life at the faculty back then.
The middle section of our exhibition looked at the 'pandemic' period and everything that Bnieuws did in this time. With a timeline, we explored what Bnieuws did throughout the months, giving a new life to editions that were never printed. At the end of this timeline, we created possible future scenarios for Bnieuws. With these scenarios we theorized what Bnieuws might become in the future.
The final section of the exhibition consisted of two things; a large empty piece of paper where visitors of the exhibition could share what they had learned from the pandemic period as well as an early version of our "Faces of the Faculty" video, a project we're still working on. Instead of only showing what Bnieuws had been up to throughout the pandemic period, we wanted to invite everybody to reflect and share what they had learned. An empty A0 poster with a pen next to it gave everyone the opportunity to do so. The BK EXPO team liked this idea so much that they recreated it on a larger scale on one of the central exhibition panels. Finally, we showed a first preview of our "Faces of the Faculty" video, which we're still working on. In this project, we interviewed students at the faculty to talk about their experiences throughout the pandemic period. You can watch this preview below.