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Voices from the Past


By Marie Ørstedholm

"Just place the sack here and take a quick pull. The bag goes down into the box and then you move on to the next. Sometimes it happens that other things than envelopes go down there – but we don’t want to talk about that, do we?"


Narrative Figures
The admission in the above quotation is but one of many from the merry lad clearing the letter box on his Nimbus in the museum’s permanent exhibition. Together with a number of other historical figures he gives the visitors a glimpse of his life as a player in the Danish history of communication. It takes place at a listening post set out beside the figures where you can hear dramatized narratives and period pictures about e.g. the Nimbus postman in the 1960’s, told by the figures themselves.

A Variegated Assembly
The narratives cover a wide field of time and place. In the exhibition section dealing with the early postal service a wretched mail-coach driver trapped in a terrible tempest is praying the Heavenly Powers for help: "Oh my Lord Jesus, please let us not get stuck; if we are late, I will get fined by the postmaster and my wife will get so angry. Good Lord, we cannot afford to be late". In the section about the history of the telephone a young telephone operator relates vividly her work at the KTAS main exchange in Nørregade: "It looks quite hectic with all the cords and panels, and it can be rather noisy at times. You cannot be of a nervous disposition, and it is essential to keep a polite tone towards the subscriber. The subscriber is never wrong, you see!"

The Blessings of Technology
In the exhibition section about our own time a 17-year-old girl takes a minute’s break from the SMS’s: "Check out my new mobile phone: MP3 player, tuner, camera, colour display, and wireles synchronization with the laptop. I have craved it for so long. Hang on for a sec … I need to see this message from Josephine". A man in his fifties – perhaps the girl’s father – is attempting in vain to get through to the service department and has had enough of all the modern technique: "We have got e-boxes now and we must wait and see which problems they will cause along the way ... next the password is lost and we have to look it up. Double work for us to do. Really now, I put more trust a piece of paper!"

In the gallery of characters you can also meet among others Denmark’s first female telegraph operator, women’s liberationist Mathilde Fibiger, a clerk from the telex department in Købmagergade, and a very talkative bureau wagon worker.

The narrative figures have been developed in cooperation with Zentropa Interaction as a new way of presentation in the permanent exhibition of the museum.



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