Queen Maxima opened the Groote Museum last week; a special, new attraction for neighborhood and visitors in De Plantage. After being closed to the public for 75 years, the Groote Museum on Artisplein is now open again. And how!
The beautiful, monumental building from 1851 has been renovated and houses a completely new concept; in addition to the differences and similarities, visitors experience above all the connection between everything that lives: humans, animals, plants and microbes.
You can hardly call it a museum, it is much more than that. The collection is actually ‘life’, and as a visitor you are one of the objects yourself. You literally experience the connection between all life on earth. In the monumental and at the same time simply furnished rooms – with rough wooden floors and stained walls – you imagine yourself in the beautiful attic of an old scientific institute. There you can, undisturbed by too much design, fully focus on a journey of discovery about your place in nature and in this life…….
You may, and even must, touch a lot, listen to, experience, smell and try out for yourself. You see your own blood circulation, compare your heartbeat with that of animals and you experience sounds that you must have heard as a child in the womb. A plant talks to you and shows you that its (or her?) life is similar to yours.
What is the meaning of our being? What can you learn from the nature around you? The visitor enters into a conversation with himself about the Great Questions of life; and that’s exactly the point.
The reopening of the Groote Museum is an important step in ARTIS’s future plan to allow visitors to see the world through different eyes.
Groote Museum, Artisplein, Plantage Middenlaan 41, open daily from 10:00 AM to 6:00 PM and on Thursdays from 10:00 AM to 10:00 PM