Threads of Connection
Museum Beyond the Walls
A multidisciplinary cultural project · Manchester · 2026
About the Project
Threads of Connection: Museum Beyond the Walls is a multidisciplinary cultural project exploring sustainability through communication — between people, cultures, generations, nature and technology.
The project brings together collections and expertise from Manchester Museum, botanical knowledge, Chinese cultural heritage, students from the School of Digital Art (SODA), contemporary sound practices and digital storytelling.
The project extends the philosophy of Manchester Museum's Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery beyond the physical museum, transforming collections, research and curatorial interpretation into an evolving digital experience.
Participants
Threads of Connection 2026 brings together cultural institutions, creative educators, community contributors and media partners in a shared commitment to living heritage.
Manchester Museum - Chinese Culture Gallery
The primary cultural institution, providing access to collections, scholarship and the physical gallery space.
SODA - School of Digital Art, MMU
Bringing students and digital art expertise to the project.
RHS Yangzhou Scholars Garden
Providing the living botanical landscape and site of student fieldwork.
The Chinese Culture Gallery
The Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery was created not simply to display Chinese objects, but to build empathy and understanding through personal stories, cultural perspectives and the historical and contemporary connections between Manchester and China.
"We will give our visitors a sense of what it might be like to be a British person in China or a Chinese person in Britain."
— Bryan Sitch, former Deputy Head of Collections, Manchester Museum
Museum Beyond the Walls continues this vision — creating conditions in which objects, plants, histories, technologies and contemporary audiences can enter into dialogue.
Structure & Composition
The project is built around one main theme explored through selected museum objects. A garden featuring plants characteristic of China is also proposed as an object — carrying special meaning and symbolism in Chinese culture and serving as a kind of 'living message'.
Narrative Theme
Nature & Sustainability through communication
Selected Objects
- Museum's objects with peony, plum, lotus, bamboo, pine, sweet osmanthus, chrysanthemum, orchid
- Music instruments from the museum's collection
Garden
RHS Yangzhou Scholars Garden as a place of inspiration
Plants as Cultural Connectors
China is one of the world's major centres of plant diversity — approximately 35,000 species of higher plants, representing around 10% of the world's total.
Plants cultivated in China were collected, exchanged and introduced to Britain and Europe, becoming part of landscapes now perceived as quintessentially British. Manchester Museum's Herbarium holds approximately 600,000 specimens, including around 2,500 collected in China during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The project focuses on plants that carry both cultural and aesthetic significance.
Selected Museum Objects
The project brings together textiles and decorative objects from the Manchester Museum, featuring a rich vocabulary of botanical motifs: peony, plum, lotus, bamboo, pine, sweet osmanthus, chrysanthemum and orchid. A selection of musical instruments — including a flute, cymbals, two-stringed fiddles and a four-stringed fiddle — adds another dimension, weaving together botanical imagery, cultural heritage and sound.
THE STUDENT PROJECT
The Garden as an Instrument: From Plant to Sound
The central experiment of the project asks: What happens when a plant becomes a source of sound?
Students from SODA work in groups to transform selected plants into a new sonic language. RHS Yangzhou Scholars Garden will be the place where students get their inspiration and real-life experience.
Plant Sensors
Sound Design
Electronic Music
Digital Interpretation
Museum Collections
Live Experimentation
The students are not simply recording plants. They are exploring how a living landscape can become a source of musical material — and, in doing so, asking how technology can create new forms of attention towards the natural world.
A Garden You Can Hear
The outcome will be an interactive digital garden: a landing page shaped by photography, landscape illustration and a digital representation of the Chinese Garden — alongside a set of music tracks.
The digital garden creates a space in which botanical knowledge, museum collections, sound and cultural interpretation coexist. The physical garden becomes a point of departure rather than a destination.
Plant Story
Cultural Context
Listen to the Plant
Explore its Sound
"The museum object becomes a thread. The plant becomes a thread. Sound becomes a thread. The digital space becomes new reality for long conversations."
An Open Final
The digital space allows the project to remain open, unfinished and conversational.
Ideas can circulate between the museum, students, artists, researchers, specialists, communities and the public. Audiences can encounter the project at different stages and contribute their own questions, interpretations and responses.
The project therefore becomes less an exhibition than an evolving network of relationships.
Work-in-progress updates
Behind-the-scenes documentation
Conversations with students
Interviews with museum specialists
Opportunities to ask questions and contribute to discussion
Together, these threads form a structure through which knowledge can move — between cultures, between generations, between human and non-human worlds, and between the material past and the possible futures we are collectively creating.
Voices of the Project
"Knowledge is not fixed or universal in its form. It is shaped by cultural contexts, generations, languages, and the positions from which we perceive the world. Knowledge transfer therefore becomes a process of translation and negotiation between different ways of knowing, through which perspectives encounter one another and new forms of understanding can emerge."
Katerina Karp, Curator and Creative Lead
"It is wonderful to see museum objects being reinterpreted and reproduced through contemporary art and creativity. In this way, the objects are given a second life that extends beyond the museum cases."
Hazel Ng, Chinese Culture Community Producer, Manchester Museum
"The Lee Kai Hung Chinese Culture Gallery uses museum objects to tell narratives, invite conversations, make connections and inspire empathy. Multisensory storytelling is achieved via Digital Arts. Through the Threads of Connection, the floral patterns on the objects are brought into life in the UK's largest Chinese garden."
Dr. Fang Zong, Collection researcher and Culture consultant, Manchester Museum
"There is a particular kind of listening this project asks for. Not just to the plant, or the object, or the sound it becomes, but to what happens in the space between them, where a student's hands and a museum's history meet. Immersive digital technology gives us a way to bring specialists and students into that same room, generating ideas neither could reach alone, and opening these spaces to new ways of thinking, new audiences, new ways in. That's where the real learning lives and continuing its legacy."
Debbi Bandara, Academic lead, Senior Lecturer in Future Media Production at the School of Digital Arts, Manchester Metropolitan University
"A living museum. A listening garden. A new musical language."
Threads of Connection 2026 · Museum Beyond the Walls
Manchester Museum · SODA, MMU
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