“We will conserve only what we love;
we will love only what we understand
and we will understand only what we are taught.”

Baba Dioum, Senegalese wildlife conservationist

A shelter is a space of peace and harmony. A place that is safe and shared, welcoming and friendly. A nest we care for. An asylum that we look after. A shelter is our home, our family, our immediate community, the nature around us, our planet. The shelter is our body. In times of rapid change, the question of how to restore balance and save what is most important to us is of particular value. How do we protect the shelter?

The exhibition 'Shelter: wellbeing’ is the conclusion of the two-year international art and education project 'Shelter – Climate, Migration, Heritage’. It is an attempt to create an open and creative space that links the world of culture with the world of nature, the world of humans with the world of non-human beings – plants and animals, the world of science with the world of art. It is a story about cultural and natural heritage and about climate change and the search for methods of responding to it, based on the knowledge of past generations, contemporary science, art and education. It is also a story about what brings us together in a multicultural world – meeting at the common table.

At the heart of the project is interdisciplinary creative collaboration. The exhibition scenario was developed in cooperation with Project Partners from Norway, Iceland and Poland, and with the substantive support of researchers from Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. To create the exhibition, we invited a group of international experts in ecology, cultural anthropology and ethnography, educators from the City Miniatura Theatre, designers from the architecture and research studio Centrala, and Norwegian artists from Trøndelag Bildende Kunstnere (TBK) in Trondheim, German and Polish. The theme of the project inspired students from the Faculty of Architecture at the Gdansk University of Technology, the Faculty of Sculpture and Intermedia and the Faculty of Design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Gdansk, the Faculty of Ethnology at the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznan. The exhibition also features the granary building, the surrounding park, the museum’s ethnographic permanent collection and sculptures by Pomeranian folk artists. Abbots’ Granary has been transformed into a place where remembrance of the past inspires action for the future, and sensitive observation of nature gives the impulse to actively work to protect our common wellbeing.