Sharks and us
At the end of September, we headed over to Sydney for the opening of Sharks at the Australian Museum, an exhibition that we’ve been working on, with the museum and our frequent collaborators Studio Cassells, for almost three years.
Sharks epitomizes many of the themes we’ve been talking about in these blogs, mixing indigenous knowledge, conservation, and science. Its subject is sharks, the incredible, diverse creatures that have lived in our oceans for hundreds of millions of years. But just as much, it’s about people too.
Sharks are in trouble. Populations of many species are in free-fall. The reason is, 100%, us. On average around the world sharks kill about eight people annually, while we humans kill about 100 million sharks a year.
What's going on? Clearly, however we feel as individuals, our modern, global culture doesn't respect or value sharks. Sometimes we kill them because we hate and fear them. More often, we kill them because like everything else in the ocean, to us they are just a resource to be exploited until it is gone.
A truly shocking infographic showing just how many sharks die at the hands of humans per hour. Click through to the link to get a true sense of the horror
Other cultures do things differently. In many Pacific and Australian First Nations cultures, sharks are revered - often seen as ancestors, or even gods. Among some groups, sharks are never taken; in others, only under strict protocols. The premise of the exhibition is that we need to learn from these cultures if we are to save sharks, and with them our oceans.
We tested the idea early in the project, fearing that it might be hard to sell to a public brought up on Jaws and its descendents. If that had been the case, we wouldn’t have changed the basic idea (it was the museum’s brief from the start), but we would have had to try much harder to make it work.
Mood boards used to test visitor reactions to different content related to sharks
As part of the research Briar and I intercepted shoppers at a mall at Shellharbour near Wollongong, showed them reference imagery of different themes and asked them what they thought. (A highlight was Briar approaching a young man who had his leg in a cast. Turned out he was a surfer who’d recently been bitten by a shark. Ah, Australia…)
James interviews shoppers about sharks while conducting visitor research at a Shellharbour shopping mall
Somewhat to our surprise, we found that ordinary Australians were actually extremely receptive to the idea of contrasting how different cultures view sharks. “We know what our culture thinks” said one shopper, pointing to the famous Jaws poster, “it’d be good to know what others think.” We felt like hugging her.
Three years later, after thousands of hours of Zoom calls, discussions, debates, workshops, interviews, writing, film-making, spatial design, graphic design, modelmaking (hats off to CDM Studio, from Perth), interactive coding and animation (Hong Kong-based Yu+co Lab and Wellington-based software developers), fabrication and installation by the museum teams and suppliers, and the show is opened with a beautiful performance by Meriam Island Dance Troupe. Next year it starts an international tour.
An early bubble diagram outlining the rough thematic structure for Sharks and the Know+Care+Act journey that we hoped to take visitors on.
We’re proud to have helped make it happen.