The Teens Project · PEACE PLUS · SEUPB
A digital archive, a youth programme, and the foundations of a future museum.
MOTAP is not only a website or an exhibition concept. It is an operational system for intergenerational oral history, ethical publication, funder reporting and the longer civic ambition of a world-class Museum of the Troubles and Peace.
An invitation
Hear it from us — come and join.
Two short messages from the project team inviting young people across Northern Ireland to take part in the teens cohort.
Invitation · 1 of 2
Invitation · 2 of 2
The museum vision
There is no single narrative of the Troubles. The museum vision is explicitly multi-voiced: social and cultural history, peace-making, everyday resilience, education, and the hard work of understanding shared suffering.
What this site supports
Recruitment, testimony capture, archive publication, historical photography, programme delivery and the public-facing case for why this work matters now — a quarter century after the Agreement.
Core project strands
Youth-led oral history
Young people aged 15–18 are trained to interview the generation who lived through the conflict, preserving testimony before it disappears.
Digital-first museum building
The virtual archive is an immediate public outcome and also a prototype for a larger museum ecology: testimony, photography, artefacts, interpretation and education.
Peace process literacy
The second programme strand expands from lived experience of conflict to the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement, asking what peace means to younger generations now.
Plural integrity
Independence, integrity and plurality run through the project: nationalist, unionist, feminist, labour, LGBTQ, peace and community narratives all belong in the record.
Assembly Rooms ambition
The Assembly Rooms, Belfast — one of the city’s most iconic buildings — has a neglected and abandoned appearance. MOTAP designed the successful proposal to the World Monuments Fund that got the WMF involved in saving the building. As John Gray of the Assembly Rooms Alliance put it, this was a ‘game changer’, and led to Belfast City Council buying the building.
Reference documents
Booklet
Museum of the Troubles and Peace — 2021 vision booklet
The core rationale for the museum: plurality, resilience, education, peace-building, regeneration and creative interpretation.
Exhibition dossier
Troubles Photography Exhibition — selections and rights
Provenance and captions for donated and licensed photography, including Germund Sjövall, Bobbie Hanvey and Jane Morrice material.
Want to take part?
Whether you are a young participant, a school, a family member with a story, or a collaborator interested in archive, education or exhibition work, this project is designed to grow.
Get involved