The village of Herrnhut has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site for two years. An information point is now opening to mark the occasion. The Moravian Church in Herrnhut would therefore like to organise an exhibition on its origins and history. We are devising the exhibition, taking charge of the design and developing a scenographic concept. We are also handling the exhibition’s marketing and developing a key visual and several print products for this purpose. We are working all this out in advance with the Moravian Church in a collaborative workshop.
At the heart of the community is a simple, white and light-filled church hall. According to Nikolaus Ludwig Graf von Zinzendorf, the founder of the Moravian Church, it is the people who truly enrich the hall – thus the focus lies on the congregation and the spoken word. This idea, together with the theme of light, became the starting point for our design concept. The motif of light runs through the entire exhibition. It appears as coloured accents of light, information panels shaped like cones of light and in the shapes of the hall’s windows, and is also reflected as a motif in the key visual.
It was fascinating to stage this interplay of light in a room with so many windows whilst at the same time creating sufficient exhibition space. To achieve this, we designed the exhibition panels as modular partition walls and fitted most of the windows with generous curtains.
Each themed area invites visitors to explore through a variety of presentation and interactive formats.
These include:
- recessed display cases containing selected exhibits that can be easily removed, such as the bowl used for the annual drawing of the ‘Losungen’.
- audio stations featuring musical and biographical audio pieces
- an in-depth station with archive boxes, where visitors can discover biographies and portraits of historical and contemporary figures
- digital displays offering insights into the worldwide work of the Moravian Church
- a digital information point about the Moravian settlements (UNESCO World Heritage Site)
- a printing station where visitors can print out the current daily motto at the touch of a button and take it with them
- integrated play areas and specially made play figures invite children to play.
