JINR joined the Night of Museums annual campaign. On 20 May, the Institute’s Museum arranged an extensive free programme. Everyone interested could go on excursions, participate in games and quests, and see physical experiments. The exhibition “Connection: 7 perspectives of communication” held at the JINR Museum was one of the central events of the Night of Museums.

The Institute together with Dubna teenagers implemented this joint project with the support of the “Future time” foundation and the winner of the Museum 4.0 contest of the “Museum without boundaries” charitable programme of the Vladimir Potanin Foundation. In four months the participants learned about the history of the Institute at the JINR Museum of History of Science and Technology, studied the concept of communication, and wrote stories about how communications bring people together and affect society. Together with the employees of the Museum and the JINR Universal Public Library, the participants created seven final projects for all the citizens to see.

Thus, for example, visitors could hear various sounds at the entrance to the exhibition. This was the work “DNA of our communication, or From silence to silence” by Daniil Polyak. He edited an audio history of human communication: from the first words of an ancient man to the “clicks” of messengers. The recording ends with a long silent part, which emphasises the idea of people communicating less and less in person.

Another project was two 3D maps of the right and left banks of the Volga River in Dubna. This is a visual result of the “White spots of Dubna” study made by Nika Gaponova, Sofia Shakunova, and Artem Yakutin. They conducted a survey of the city residents and created a map where they highlighted most popular places of Dubna. The maps were connected by a 3D model of the Dubna bridge across the Volga. It was made by Maria Kapanadze and Maria Urvanova. They called this project “Pop-up bridge”, which shows how two parts of our city and their residents became closer to each other with the opening of the bridge.

The girls became the authors of another installation called “For which I thank you very much”. They studied the letters of a young man and a young woman who lived in the ’60s and corresponded for two years. Vitya and Lara wrote each other 168 letters after a single meeting. Later they met again and eventually got married. The girls chose the most memorable phrases from the letters of young people, printed them out and attached them to mannequins next to the desk. After getting acquainted with the installation, visitors could write a letter and either take it and later give it to the addressee, or put it in a desk drawer.

A stand with comics about child-parent relationships by Veronika Kazakova and Vasilisa Semenova was among the exhibits. The project is called “Growing up together”. In their drawings, the girls reflected situations that are difficult for teenagers and parents to cope with. They showed how seemingly harmless phrases of parents can be traumatic for a child.

“Our task in this project is to help children open up. I think that teenagers are rarely allowed to express themselves. Here they were able to implement their ideas”, one of the curators of the work of Dubna teenagers, JINR Museum Deputy Director Anastasia Zlotnikova said. “It requires a lot of responsibility to express yourself, and we are grateful that the children took it. We are proud that our exhibition turned out to be so extraordinary, and the young authors themselves take part in it and present their projects”.

The programme of this year’s Night of Museums included the JINR Museum tours, as well as a guided walk to the Institute’s part of Dubna with a story about the features of the city’s architecture. Intellectual games and orienteering quest were organized for children and adults. In addition, everyone interested could learn and see how the installations created by Robert Van de Graaff and Nikola Tesla work. This year, connections were the leitmotif of the Night of Museums: the connections between the past and the present, between science and society, parents and children, between all people.