Dutch Museums to Give ‘Gym Lessons’ in Protest of COVID Restrictions

Several museums are going to give a kind of gym class this week as a protest against the cabinet decision that they must remain closed for the time being. Sports are allowed again, so museums are coming into their buildings with playful gym lessons for the brain, especially next Wednesday. After all, mental fitness is just as important, they believe.

For example, the Groninger Museum will present a graffiti workshop as brain gymnastics on Wednesday. Kunstmuseum Den Haag and the adjacent Fotomuseum also offer “gym for your mind” on Friday. Kunstmuseum in The Hague already had a “mindfulness tour”. With earphones on, and therefore closed off from others, the visitor can wander through the museum and randomly select and view works of art or the parts of the museum building designed by architect HP Berlage.

The Van Gogh Museum, the Chabot Museum Rotterdam and Slot Loevestein are also among the participants in the action of the Museum Association. He calls it “inexplicable” that museums must remain closed. “It undermines the principle of equality, the sense of reasonableness and solidarity.”

“Why are commercial transfer locations such as Bijenkorf and IKEA allowed to open and cultural transfer locations (museums) not? The opening of museums would generate too many travel movements. A calculation quickly undermines this argument. No matter how successful, 450 museums are in no way proportional to the trips to a total of 85,000 physical stores in the Netherlands in terms of movements,” according to the museum club. The organization also points to the special corona protocols with which the museums opened safely earlier and in their own words.

The association kicked off the action on Monday morning, although there had already been a few small actions here and there before. For example, the Drents Museum opened the shop and had musicians perform there, but the public had to go through the exhibition space first. The organization thinks that dozens of museums will participate. Activities such as yoga and a walk through a sculpture garden, for example, are already planned.

An overview of the available activities under the name Museum Gym will be published on museum.nl in the run-up to Wednesday.

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