Kaçıs Yok Antalya - Figma Map

This is a work-in-progress interactive map of a temporary exhibition at the Antalya Archeological Museum. The Kaçıs Yok exhibition is part of a series of exhibitions across the country that have highlighted objects repatriated to Turkish museums over the past two years. The first exhibition was at the Museum of Anatolian Civilizations in Ankara on November 14th, 2023, to honor the International Day Against Trafficking in Cultural Property. The exhibition was then turned into a series for the 2024 Türkiye Kültür Yolu Festivali, an eight-month-long touring festival featuring arts events in 16 cities.

For my current Fulbright research project, I am traveling to museums around Türkiye to see how repatriated artifacts are displayed after their return. I noticed that while there is a lot of news coverage about the many recent repatriations to Türkiye, very little information is available about what happens after repatriation.

How are these objects displayed after their return?

How has their story changed after repatriation?

What do they look like in the context of local museums?

I knew that a key piece of this project would be documenting the individual objects and exhibits I encountered during the research process. My background studying Roman archeology remotely in Hawaii and California made me acutely aware of what information was frequently missing from exhibition descriptions and catalogs. This drove me to create an online exhibit overview that contains text, detailed images, wide images, and interactive elements. It’s written for American researchers and students who are curious about the display of repatriated objects. Although all of my written content and summaries are in English, I also wanted to provide the Turkish text in case users want further reading.

I used the interface design platform Figma to create this exhibition overview for the temporary Kaçıs Yok exhibition at the Antalya Museum. At first, I was just using Figma to organize my own information, linking together notes, photos, and written content from the exhibit. It took me a while to realize that this explorable map wasn’t just a digital whiteboard, but a tool that could be shared and used by other researchers.

Text-based descriptions provide key information about the objects and are easiest to search through and cite, but I typically remember exhibit information spatially. Maybe this is because I study experiential design, but when I imagine objects in a museum I recall their contextual placements: the dagger is in the case with the coins, which is next to the bronze bust, across from the marble sculpture, and so on. This is reinforced by how the curators arrange objects. Objects, cases, rooms, and exhibits are arranged by shared characteristics, almost fractally. As I engage with the objects and didactics, I choose what to focus on and dive in to gain more information.

While this is not as easily represented in published catalogs and other written descriptions, services like Google Arts and Culture present online interactive museum experiences as an engaging alternative. Drawing inspiration from these digital humanities initiatives, I organized content from the Kaçıs Yok exhibition at the Antalya Museum in an interactive map.

I use Figma every day, making the most use of the website’s digital whiteboard tool FigJam. It can seamlessly handle a variety of content including text, hyperlinks, and photos in different file formats. I find this incredibly helpful when synthesizing archeological information, as it helps me keep track of accession numbers, and links to publications news stories, and object images in one place. I wanted to share this work-in-progress map and explain my process in the hopes that other archeology students or museum designers may be using the service. I welcome any feedback or suggestions as I continue to research these objects and analyze the design of this exhibit.