Permanent exhibition

Energy, New Dreams

Le Pass, Scientific Adventures Park
Frameries, Belgium

In 2015, The Pass – Scientific Adventures Park – celebrates its 15th birthday and is one of the 25 partner institutions of Mons2015 – European Capital for Culture. For the occasion, this Science Museum built on a former mining facility, opened a new exhibition dealing with Energy on June 26th. The total budget for this 300m² exhibition was €600,000 (half of it covered by the European capital for Culture).

It was a tough subject to deal with and it took more than a year for the team to come up with this last exhibition in the complete renewal of the Museum. With this exhibition we wanted to tackle this core subject for future generations (as more than half of our audience is made of children) without blaming our visitors.

Therefore, we chose to deal with energy as a scientific phenomenon before dealing with it through a societal and political lens. The exhibition has been built for the visitor to go through three steps in his discovery. The first step is understanding that energy cannot be created but can only be transformed from one way to another. It offers many hands-on experiments. It is noisy, dynamic and it gets frenetic sometimes when large audiences gather in our museum. Then we explain to the visitor that Mankind uses various sources of Energy for various purposes. Pro-renewable and pro-fossil-energy people are given an opportunity to speak in this part of our exhibition, datas are exposed but we do not stand for one opinion or the other, it is for the audience to make up its own mind. The last step is for our audience to realize “New Dreams” are to come true in a near future (or have already come true). 36 projects or ideas are briefly explained, most of them are from Wallonia. The core message in this conclusion of our exhibition is that solutions do exist and the only way for a sustainable future is through responsible innovation. It is for everyone of us to act on a scale that is adapted to our way of life.

This exhibition was a challenge for all our teams. Energy is a tough, complex but unavoidable subject for a science and society museum like ours. This exhibition had to be enjoyable and responsible at the same time, both informative and entertaining. We wanted a design that reminded old laboratories but also circus. We ended up with a “Steampunk” aesthetic, designed by Eric Verrier, mixing noble essences of woods, white lay tiles and copper-like materials. All the contents of the exhibition, as Energy is a very precise and difficult science, had to be reviewed by Professor Marc Frère of the university of Mons. New activities for schools were also tailor-made by our animation teams to fit this new exhibition and the school programs at the same time. For the “New Dreams” box, we had to contact a lot of partners that were willing to talk about their project in an exhibition from corporate companies and public institutions to start-ups and families.

The result is a reference exhibition for the Pass, in a time when we are totally renewing our offer to the public. It deals with science but also with societal matters in a poetic and “implicative” scenography. It can be used for teachers to explain many things that are hard to come up with in a classroom or a school-lab, but also for families to answer questions about their own energy consumption. Finally it is embodying what our museums are to be for the future: a place where debating on serious matters is allowed, having all facts in mind and in hands.