Museums have always used art collectors, local historians and general public artifacts in their expositions. This form can hardly be called participatory culture since it does not imply sufficient viewers' contribution to exposition content. But the visitors could not see or hear these people in the exhibition.

The change became visible when museums started to collect not only things but stories and voices belonging to artifacts' owners — contemporaries of particular events of the past. This type of interrelations, as a rule, has a certain impact on curators' vision of the exhibition and its content.

It is especially pertinent to the projects dedicated to historic events of public pain and concern, where curator cannot do without people’s memories and voices. For instance, in 2006 Vietnam Ethnology Museum organized the exhibition "Subsidized Times" ("Thoi Bao Cap") documenting everyday life of Hanoi residents in the 1975−1986. The most important element of the exposition was eyewitnesses' accounts. Curators conducted discussions with aged people, recorded video interviews and then edited the film together. The exhibition was a success with young generation while old Hanoians were pleased with their work [1].

Nowadays this museum turn from an item to man is being increasingly adopted by the Russian museums, and many good examples testify to it: for instance, the project "Gaidarika Land", an exposition that discloses the theme of the Soviet childhood on the basis of 1930s artifacts. The authors' idea to depict that period through eyes of children of that time required dozens of interviews and resulted in the exposition the key part of which was contributed by 15 residents of St.-Petersburg who lived in the city in the 1930s [2].

One more fact shows popularity of this approach in Russia: out of 13 winners of the X contest (2013) "Changing Museum in Changing World" five projects were directly connected with personal stories collecting and the exposition was arranged on their basis ("Voices and faces of World War I in family memory", "Museums of Izhevsk: new semantic of "IZ"", "Siberians free and captive", "Lipetsk in memories. The XX century", "The art of travel").

This turn to micro-history, everydayness history positively influences the humanities-centered component of museum narrative, creates conditions for a dialogue, reference to visitors personality.

Our address to personal stories had one more aspect of importance. Initially we collected visitors' views of the way the travel exhibition should be arranged. It helped accumulate some stories and approaches in this context. Later we shifted the focus from the museum exposition to people. We were actually interested in their life, personalities and their travel experience. We wanted to speak about them, not the exhibition.

This shift allowed us to enter a new level. Individual meetings, in-depth interviews gave us the opportunity to collect dozens of exciting stories and artifacts as well as to understand what our exposition should convey and what it should be about.

Openness to the world, readiness to go beyond stereotypes and make one’s dreams of travel come true, travel to others as travel to oneself, passion to discover the world and trust in pathway — all this connected exposition halls, became the key to content interpretation, basis for participatory zones arrangement.

Evgeny Neustroev, Valentin Sinel’nikov, Anatoly Vyazivtsev, Tatyana Serykh, Yulya Shangareeva, Nikolay Erokhin, Lera Korolyova, Kirill Novosel’sky, Nikita Suchkov, Olga Varezhkina, Pavel Smolin, Evgeny Ivanovich Vinogradsky, Andrey Mel’nikov, Aleksandr Veryovkin, Tatyana Archipova, Nikolay Rundkvist, Zinaida Gorbunova, Sergey Kondrashin, Oleg Kolpaschnikov, Larissa Kataeva, Valery Shumkov, Aleksey Gus'…people of different professions, destinies, attitudes agreed to spend some of their time with us sharing their views of traveling.

We thank them very much indeed.

Why these people?

Sketches drawn by Marina Slozhenikina – Local History Museum designer

Strictly speaking, sample representativeness is not questioned in such types of research. We didn’t pose a task of compiling an "encyclopedia" of travelers' types and their approaches to travel. Still, we had a strategy for searching our conversationalists. We tried, in particular, to go beyond the scope of "prime suspects" and didn’t invite touristic club members, "distinguished" travelers. We looked for different angles and unusual perspectives. Among others the author took several interviews in high security prison and gained some unpredictable comments.

By large, we were guided by 2 considerations: 1. We were hooked by people with vast experience, specific attitude and their own culture of travel. 2. It was significant that these people were of different ages, gender and travel directions.

The very strategy employed the combination of two approaches:

a) dealing with "communicators" - people in contact with the widest categories of people capable of arranging our acquaintance with some of them in person

b) accidental encounters, free search when you are given a luxury (in A. Saint Exupery’s words) of meeting some really interesting people.

This period of the exhibition preparation left the most powerful mark on us. It was the time of amazing discoveries, breathtaking stories, charm and disappointment.

Thanks to this experience we framed two principally different participatory ways of museum content interpretation and exhibition design.

Way 1 — search for associations, context around certain museum exhibits. This way is quite sophisticated and often ineffective as it requires a) development of special game-like forms since this task is not very interesting for the majority of audience a priori; б) either special selection of participant possessing wide cultural background, erudition, reflexive frame of mind, or possibility to involve really mass audience in the project to use the effect of multiplicity.

Way 2 — a talk about how people "do" something, in our case, how they travel. People are eager to take part in such gatherings [3],

and as a result we got a conceptual core of exposition alongside with a set of approaches, styles, practices and stories: as authors we could create exhibition structure, select an interpret artifacts through this context. Besides, we had a quantity of modern stories that make the museum a place of interest for local community museum as a place for the alive, ("museumification" of modernity).

At the same time this way raises a new question: What will the museum have to do with these stories?

Here we have two options:

• The museum can present them as a set of separate "live" voices, living memory,
• On their basis curators devise a sort of meta-story, enter them into social and cultural context of the epoch, situation, History

The first way can be exemplified by the project "Open house: if these walls could talk" realized by Minnesota History Center [4]. The exposition provided a window into the daily lives of people of the past. 118-year -long stories of 50 families, from the first German immigrants through the Italians, African-Americans, and Hmong who succeeded them, are told through rooms representing different eras of the house. Visitors become detectives, piecing together lives of the families who lived at 470 Hopkins Street. This structure induced people to tell their own stories associated with things on display and share their impressions.

A shorter time period was the basis of the project using the same approach "Lipetsk in memories. The XX century" - one of the winners of 2013 contest "Changing museum in Changing world" [5].

"Over 500 people were engaged in the project.

For the first 6 months people came, brought things and shared their memories of the city turning into their life stories. We concentrated on the past but the past and the present are not isolated worlds. We could hear "this is the place where there used to be a square and I met my wife there". We had 3 memories sessions when one participant started to talk and another continued.

Residents learnt about the project via local media. As we collected audio memories, too, our partner Galina Kislova suggested creating of a series radio-programs… word of mouth also played its role. .

We compiled a questionnaire for citizens.

The age varied from 7 to 70 and above. Children brought things belonging to their grandparents. One more thing that mattered was the fact that both young and old generations took part in the events. For example, at Museum Night young visitors were reciting poems and singing song of the Soviet period, while 60+ adults were dancing and telling anecdotes of the Soviet era".

Yekaterina Sergachyova, the project curator

The exposition representing routine life of the city in the XX century was constructed as a typical living area of the Soviet times: a clothes room, a playroom, a common kitchen, a "Khrushchev-era" apartment. The display also included sections "March of time" showing the collection of clocks, alarm-clocks, etc., and "Audio equipment of the XXs". A sound track of people’s memories was added to some exhibition section.

Exposition space entailed several interactive zones: visual aid room exploiting amateur films, slides, records, tape-records; "play room" with interactive exposition of toys and games: "Lip Lipych" tram" - a place where a visitor could record his/her recollections about the time and themselves.

During a virtual walk round the exposition we see hundreds of artifact of that period vocalized by their owners. This exposition is a nostalgia space for the people of that time.

It is difficult to say how this space can work in terms of other contexts. A lot of items immerse us into very subjective, personality-centered times, but it is still the past. It is not quite clear whether meta-level, the use of multiple research materials on the Soviet everydayness and world outlook is appropriate here.

A good example of the second way is the exhibition mentioned above "What did it feel like to be at war?" organized by Serlachius Museum in Mättä, Finland — a generalized story of 144 veterans recollections. Another example is the project "Soldaty. Soldaten. Soldiers" prepared by Nizhny-Tagil Fine Arts Museum, a strong pacifistic narrative compiling family archives and museum collections from Germany, Austria, Russia, the USA, the UK, the Check Republic. With the help of photographic portraits, personal files, diaries and letters of World War II soldiers the exhibition explores the realm of the Human part in Man [6].

This transforming, new vision-generating approach was more interesting for us. Bearing in mind our purpose of motivating people, their horizons widening just to collect people’s stories was not enough. A more challenging task was to clarify key questions, vectors and strategies of travel realization.

Our story-tellers let they be our contemporaries or older generations representatives became faces (models) of styles, techniques, travel trends, regular or single-time practices, approaches to them, typical and unique solutions of their "geo"-biography.