What do we know about other civilizations? About all the native cultures here in Canada, and the cultural background our ancestors or we ourselves brought to Canada?

THE MUSEUM OF UNKNOWN CIVILIZATIONS (MUC)

On June 25, 2003, I made the decision to realize a dream, which I’ve had since my childhood days: I founded a personal museum, “The Museum of Unknown Civilizations”. The things that fascinated me most about museums as a child, were the objects, which had question marks attached to their labels. For example, there was the “Bear-goddess” (?); the “Fertility Idol” (?); the “Magical Statue” (?); the “Ancestral Figure” (?); the “Cultic Chalice” (?); the “Travel Amulet” (?). All these question marks became for me an invitation to immerse myself in secretive worlds and they allowed me to invent imaginative stories. It is for that child within me and within other adults that I am establishing my museum, recycling and transforming used materials into mysterious artifacts.

The first object of the museum’s collection is “The Magic Tap” I created in 2001 when I was meditating about how precious water is in the Okanagan Valley and around the world.

In 2007, I began to work on objects for an addition to the imaginary building of my museum. This section shows archeological sites.

The Museum of Unknown Civilizations (MUC) is to be found in the southern part of the Okanagan Valley in B.C. The building which houses the museum’s collection keeps on changing both its architectural shape as well as its actual location and, in this aspect, is related to mirages in the desert or castles in the air. Usually one can spot the MUC at one of the many vantage points on the arid hillsides overlooking the lush orchards and vineyards in the vicinity of the little town of Oliver, the “Wine Capital of Canada”.

Kurt Hutterli