On September 25, 2020, Alexey Shaburov, Director of the Association of Private Museums of Russia, visited Kuzminki-Lyublino Park at the opening of Russia’s first interactive museum, In Silence.
The In Silence Museum is a place where, in a unique playful way, they clearly show two different worlds of the deaf and hearing, who can communicate despite it.
The museum demonstrates technical devices designed to solve everyday problems of the deaf (light bells, alarm clocks, video babysitting, and a minicom), tell facts and dispel myths about the life of the deaf, familiarize us with the situations they face every day, form an attitude towards sign language as a foreign, and show that people with hearing impairment can successfully fulfil themselves.
The In Silence Museum is a way to solve the problem of social isolation of the deaf.
“We see the blind and people in wheelchairs on the streets, but we do not see the deaf, we do not distinguish them in the crowd and, accordingly, do not know anything about their world. We do not think about how the deaf understand that guests have come to them and the door needs to be opened, or how they understand that the alarm clock is ringing. We don’t know how to interact with the deaf, no one teaches us how to communicate with the deaf and hard of hearing people, and this limits us very much,” says the founder of the museum, Maria Aizina.
The museum helps us feel what soundlessness is… The more museum visitors are immersed in the world of silence, the more they feel empathic, and not only for the deaf, but also for each other. Here it becomes especially obvious that we are all different and this is normal.