Makers and Fakers: How copies, replicas, casts and fakes 'make' museum collections

Sunday 6 April, 12.30 - 16.00 

The Old Library, Pitt Rivers Museum

Behind the Scenes Tours: 12.30 - 13.00 and 14.00 - 14.30 

Book your free tour place here

Zine Making Workshop: 13.00 - 16.00 (Drop in)

As part of the Oxford-wide 'April Fakes Week', join Making the Museum researcher Dr Beth Hodgett and Zine collective Imperfect Bound (@ImperfectBoundCollective) to explore the stories behind the hundreds of copies, casts, replicas and fakes in the Pitt Rivers Museum collection. How do these often-neglected objects help us think differently about the relationship between making and museums? And how can making *Zines challenge us to reconsider ideas of 'authenticity', 'originality' and creativity?

Learn about the lives of the Pitt Rivers Museum's 'Makers and Fakers' - like the infamous forger of prehistoric artefacts Flint Jack - in a behind-the-scenes tour of the object collections, before heading downstairs to the Old Library to design and make pages for a collaborative Zine which will be accessioned into the Pitt Rivers Museum's Balfour Library. Selected pages from the Zine will also feature in a forthcoming academic journal, and be incorporated into our Making the Museum exhibition.

*Zines (pronounced Zeens) are small self-published magazines or pamphlets, traditionally made using techniques like collage and print-making. Handmade original pages are assembled into a final running order, before being photocopied or risograph printed to reproduce them on a larger scale at very low cost. This homemade approach - which often borrows of reproduces images and text from professionally published media - has a rich history of allowing counter-cultural self-expression, as well as having a loose relationship to traditional scholarly concerns like copyright.

Booking is required for the behind-the-scenes tour, but feel free to drop in to the Zine making workshop anytime!