María Pálsdóttir, actress and entrepreneur, plans to re-open a disused tuberculosis treatment center.
“I am going to open in May 2018 a center on the story of TB—on one hand an exhibition and on the other a café, which will be in the style of the 1930s. It will be on Kristnes, which is a beautiful spot ten kilometers south of Akureyri, where one of the country’s two TB treatment centers was built in 1927,” she explained to Vísir.
“This is my childhood stomping ground. The idea ignited when I was strolling there and saw how things were getting drab. I decided to do something about it,” she says.
María believes the story of tuberculosis is an important one and has been studying it over the last year or so. “It is a really remarkable story, this incredible disease which raged here early in the 20th century. There was no medicine for it until nearly the middle of the century. People were taken and put into isolation. Many were young and did not know if they would live to see 30,” she explains.
The exhibition will be interactive, in keeping with María’s own theatrical background. She wants it to feel like walking into a real, living institution. She plans to use multimedia techniques to tell personal stories about this widespread disease.
She has set up a Facebook page for the project and is asking people for their own interesting stories about their own relatives who may have had TB.
María will be searching for investors in the project at the Startup Tourism open investment day on April 28.
