Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories: Narrating the Past for the Present and Future 3110787407, 9783110787405

Table of contents :
Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories
Part I: Narrative Theory and Temporality
“Feeling Truth”: Objects, Embodiment, and Temporality in the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC) and the Legacy Museum (Montgomery, Alabama)
Reading Museum Narratives: A Narratological Approach to the Holocaust Exhibitions at the Jewish Museum Trondheim and the Oslo Jewish Museum
The Telling of Many Stories: Multivocality and Pluritemporality in Berlin Global at the Humboldt Forum
Museum Objects as Clues in Fictional Detective Stories: Story-led Art Exhibitions Helsinki Noir – A Crime to Solve and Before the Night – Tornio Noir as Case Studies
Narrating Grief: The Storytelling Strategy and its Immersive Potential in Pia Says Goodbye (Dortmund)
Sounds, Narrative, and Emotions in Historical Exhibitions: The Case of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica
Part II: Ruptures and Repair
Acts of Rupture and Repair: Staging Post-Critical Re-Readings of Colonial Histories in V&A Dundee through Contemporary Art
Beyond the De-Colonial: Rethinking the Future of Museums in Africa
Baring our Teeth: Narratives of Colonial Conflict at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira
The Art of Decolonizing the Museum: Implementing Sámi Ontology and Storytelling at the Sámi Museum in Karasjok through Sámi Artwork
Revisiting Grand Narratives at the National Museum of Colombia: Striving for Inclusion and Diversity
Celebrating Bad Times: The Epideictic Work of Museums of Racial Trauma
Part III: Difficult Memories and Histories
Narrative Spaces of Conflict and Social Repair: The Conflictorium and Museum of Conflict (Ahmedabad)
Clandestine Captivity, Testimony, and Construction of Truth in a Memory Site: Narrative Strategies and Memory Work at the ESMA Site Museum’s Permanent Exhibition (Buenos Aires)
Finding Meaning in Tragedy: A Critical Reflection of Audience Engagement at the Salem Witch Museum
“Use Me, When Needed Again”: Performing Heritage at Monuments of the Yugoslav Era
Uncementing Narratives: Memorial Architecture as a Way to Support Intergenerational Remembrance and Contest Dominant Memory Politics in Sarajevo
Narrative and Resilience: Museum Exhibitions under Forced Change – A Case Study of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk
Notes on Contributors
Index

Citation preview

Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories

Museums and Narrative

Edited by Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger Editorial Board Silke Arnold-de Simine, Jennifer J. Carter, Steven Cooke, Eric Gable, Jenny Kidd, Stefan Krankenhagen, Erica Lehrer, Suzanne MacLeod, Jesmael Mataga, Peter McIsaac, Thomas Thiemeyer

Volume 1

Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories Narrating the Past for the Present and Future Edited by Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger

ISBN 978-3-11-078740-5 e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-078744-3 e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-078746-7 ISSN 2942-1179 Library of Congress Control Number: 2023950762 Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the internet at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2024 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston Cover image: © Conflictorium Archives; installation details: Empathy Alley, Conflictorium – Museum of Conflict, Ahmedabad Typesetting: Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. Printing and binding: CPI books GmbH, Leck www.degruyter.com

Contents List of Illustrations

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Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger Introduction: Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories

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Part I: Narrative Theory and Temporality Amy Sodaro “Feeling Truth”: Objects, Embodiment, and Temporality in the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC) and the Legacy Museum (Montgomery, Alabama) 25 Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt Reading Museum Narratives: A Narratological Approach to the Holocaust Exhibitions at the Jewish Museum Trondheim and the Oslo Jewish Museum 45 Daniel Morat The Telling of Many Stories: Multivocality and Pluritemporality in Berlin Global at the Humboldt Forum 65 Sanna-Mari Niemi Museum Objects as Clues in Fictional Detective Stories: Story-led Art Exhibitions Helsinki Noir – A Crime to Solve and Before the Night – Tornio Noir as Case Studies 75 Jana Hawig Narrating Grief: The Storytelling Strategy and its Immersive Potential in Pia Says Goodbye (Dortmund) 95 Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková Sounds, Narrative, and Emotions in Historical Exhibitions: The Case of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica 115

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Part II: Ruptures and Repair Emma Bond Acts of Rupture and Repair: Staging Post-Critical Re-Readings of Colonial Histories in V&A Dundee through Contemporary Art 131 Farai Mudododzi Chabata and Jesmael Mataga Beyond the De-Colonial: Rethinking the Future of Museums in Africa

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Rowan Light Baring our Teeth: Narratives of Colonial Conflict at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira 167 Anne Schäfer The Art of Decolonizing the Museum: Implementing Sámi Ontology and Storytelling at the Sámi Museum in Karasjok through Sámi Artwork 187 Jimena Perry Revisiting Grand Narratives at the National Museum of Colombia: Striving for Inclusion and Diversity 207 M. Elizabeth Weiser Celebrating Bad Times: The Epideictic Work of Museums of Racial Trauma 221

Part III: Difficult Memories and Histories Mark W. Rectanus Narrative Spaces of Conflict and Social Repair: The Conflictorium and Museum of Conflict (Ahmedabad) 245 Florencia Larralde Armas and Julieta Lampasona Clandestine Captivity, Testimony, and Construction of Truth in a Memory Site: Narrative Strategies and Memory Work at the ESMA Site Museum’s Permanent Exhibition (Buenos Aires) 265

Contents

Rachel Christ-Doane Finding Meaning in Tragedy: A Critical Reflection of Audience Engagement at the Salem Witch Museum 277 Marija Đorđević and Stefan Krankenhagen “Use Me, When Needed Again”: Performing Heritage at Monuments of the Yugoslav Era 289 Selma Ćatović Hughes, Ena Kukić, and Sabina Tanović Uncementing Narratives: Memorial Architecture as a Way to Support Intergenerational Remembrance and Contest Dominant Memory Politics in Sarajevo 303 Maria Kobielska Narrative and Resilience: Museum Exhibitions under Forced Change – A Case Study of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk 317 Notes on Contributors Index

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List of Illustrations Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger: Introduction Figure 1

Figure 2

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Tjanpi Desert Weavers, “Seven Sisters,” 2018, desert grasses (minarri, wanturnu, yilintiji), reeds, wire netting, wool, emu feathers and other natural and recycled materials. Temporary exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, courtesy of Humboldt Forum Berlin and National Museum of Australia. Photo by Stephan Jaeger 2022, used with permission of Tjanpi Desert Weavers and the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council 2 Mirrored experiential room, in which visitors are introduced to life-size hologram projections of individual refugees. Permanent exhibition Refugees at All Times. Design BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group & Tinker Imagineers. © and photo by Flugt– Refugee Museum of Denmark, 2022 9 Four portraits of Rohingya people, Showife, Jomila, Mohammed, Sumida. Temporary exhibition Burma’s Path to Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Photo by Stephan Jaeger, January 2023, used with permission of USHMM 13

Amy Sodaro: “Feeling Truth” Figure 1

Figure 2 Figure 3

Point of Pines Cabin. Slavery and Freedom exhibition. National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). Photo by Eric Long, used with permission of NMAAHC 33 Community Remembrance Project soil display. Legacy Museum. Photo and permission by Equal Justice Initiative 37 Slave Pens. Legacy Museum. Photo and permission by Equal Justice Initiative 38

Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt: Reading Museum Narratives Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3

View from entrance door in Home. Gone. © Jewish Museum Trondheim Escape section (detail) in Remember Us. © Oslo Jewish Museum / Bolt Design 48 Memorializing the death victims (detail) in Remember Us. © Oslo Jewish Museum / Bolt Design 49

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List of Illustrations

Daniel Morat: The Telling of Many Stories Figure 1

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Free Space “Citizens with Equal Rights” in Berlin Global, curated by the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma. © Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma / Stadtmuseum Berlin / Kulturprojekte Berlin. Photo by Michael Setzpfandt The hall on war in Berlin Global © Stadtmuseum Berlin and Kulturprojekte Berlin. Photo by Anne Preussel 72

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Sanna-Mari Niemi: Museum Objects as Clues Figure 1

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Exhibition view from Helsinki Noir showing Jarno Vesala’s work Behind the Curtain (2015). Mixed media including a video projection, audio elements, and selected objects. In the background of the installation, the projection shows the victim’s corpse floating on waves. © Amos Rex Archives. Photo by Stella Ojala 84 Exhibition view from Before the Night: Tornio Noir. View of the fictional artist Poukama’s atelier. Photo by Sanna-Mari Niemi 2022, used with permission of the Aine Art Museum 87

Jana Hawig: Narrating Grief Figure 1

Figure 2

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Pia’s room at the beginning of the exhibition: She is in shock; her world is shattered. Pia says Goodbye, DASA Working World Exhibition, 2020. Photo by Patricia Dobrijevic, DASA. Art Direction/Illustration by Romina Birzer 102 The artwork depicting Pia’s grief after room 5 Funeral Reception. It shows several months of her grieving process before visitors enter the last room. Pia says Goodbye, DASA Working World Exhibition, 2020. Photo by Patricia Dobrijevic, DASA. Art Direction/Illustration by Romina Birzer 104 Pia’s room at the end of the exhibition, where she recalls her past experiences with grief. The armchair reminds her of Ruth. Pia says Goodbye, DASA Working World Exhibition, 2020. Photo by Patricia Dobrijevic, DASA. Art Direction/ Illustration by Romina Birzer 105

List of Illustrations

Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková: Sounds, Narrative, and Emotions Figure 1

Figure 2

Military trench, multimedia exhibition, Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, Banská Bystrica. Photo by Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková, 2022, used with permission of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising 121 A soldier making a gesture of silence in the direction of the visitors, military trench, multimedia exhibition. Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, Banská Bystrica. Photo by Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková, 2022, used with permission of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising 122

Emma Bond: Acts of Rupture and Repair Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3

“Inspiration Wall.” The Scottish Design Galleries V&A Dundee. Photo by Ruth Clark. Courtesy of V&A Dundee 135 Alberta Whittle, Exodus – Behind God’s Back, 2019, washing basins, cable ties, string vests, flotation devices, cake soap. © Alberta Whittle 141 Swapnaa Tamhane, The Golden Fibre, 2021–22. Commissioned by V&A Dundee. Photo by Neil Hanna. Courtesy of V&A Dundee 145

Farai Mudododzi Chabata and Jesmael Mataga: Beyond the De-Colonial Figure 1 Figure 2

Entrance to the “Ways of the San Gallery” at !Khwa ttu. Photo by Jesmael Mataga, 2021 159 Part of !Khwa ttu San Culture & Education Centre, South Africa. Photo by Jesmael Mataga, 2021 160

Rowan Light: Baring our Teeth Figure 1 Figure 2

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Taniwha-Tū-Horo-Whenua (2005) by Toi Te Rito Maihi. Te Kupenga Catholic Institute, 2022. Photo by Rowan Light 168 The north-facing layout of the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s second-floor war galleries. The “New Zealand Wars” gallery is located on the east side, chronologically preceding the Boer War and World War I galleries. AWMM 179 A possible expansion of the current gallery space, discussed as part of the Human History workshop on the New Zealand wars gallery renewal project in 2021. Photo by Rowan Light 181

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Anne Schäfer: The Art of Decolonizing Museum Strategies Figure 1 Figure 2

Window display at RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (SVD), Karasjok, Norway, 2021. © Anne Schäfer, used with permission of SVD 193 Anders Poulsson’s drum and a sieidi in an open display case by Jåks and Andersen, Aslak’s riverboat and mural by Jåks in the background at RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (SVD), Karasjok, Norway, 2021. © Anne Schäfer, used with permission of SVD 196

Jimena Perry: Revisiting Grand Narratives Figure 1 Figure 2

Flora Tristán (1803–1844). © United States Public Domain 213 Activities by transgender women proud of having their stories at the museum. Red space of section “Races and Racism.” Temporary exhibition Glasshouses: Human Diversity and Paul Rivet. National Museum of Colombia. © Alejandro Suárez Caro, 2022 215

M. Elizabeth Weiser: Celebrating Bad Times Figure 1

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Images of the Tulsa Race Massacre combine art, photos, and audio testimony screened on surfaces built to resemble the ruins of buildings. Photo by M. Elizabeth Weiser, 2022, used with permission of the Greenwood Rising Center 229 From the NCRM’s Memphis sanitation strike exhibit; this is one of many instances of civil rights supporters “on the march” throughout the museum. Photo by M. Elizabeth Weiser, 2022, used with permission of the National Civil Rights Museum 235

Mark W. Rectanus: Narrative Spaces of Conflict and Social Repair Figure 1 Figure 2 Figure 3

Empathy Alley. Museum of Conflict. Courtesy of Conflictorium 254 Memory Lab and Memory Jars (2019–2020). Museum of Conflict. Courtesy of Conflictorium 257 Sorry Tree (2019–2020). Museum of Conflict. Courtesy of Conflictorium

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Florencia Larralde Armas and Julieta Lampasona: Clandestine Captivity Figure 1

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Entrance of “Capucha” (hood). Panels in this room explain the characteristics of isolation and reclusion. Audiovisual recreation screen showing the layout of the space when it operated as a Clandestine Center of Detention (CCD). © ESMA Memorial Site 271 “Capucha” (hood) Room. Wall Projection of survivor Victor Basterra’s testimony at the ESMA Trial in 2010. ESMA Memorial Site. Photo by Julieta Lampasona, December 2018 272

Rachel Christ-Doane: Finding Meaning in Tragedy Figure 1 Figure 2

Salem Witch Museum illuminated at dusk, 2019, © Salem Witch Museum “The Witch-Hunt Wall,” 2005, © Salem Witch Museum 285

Marija Đorđević and Stefan Krankenhagen: “Use Me, When Needed Again” Figure 1 Figure 2

Memorial Park Popina, Serbia. Photo by Vladimir Kulić, 2014 293 Monument Battle of Sutjeska, Memorial Park Valley of Heroes, Tjentište. Photo by Luka Skansi, 2018 297

Selma Ćatović Hughes, Ena Kukić, and Sabina Tanović: Uncementing Narratives Figure 1

Figure 2 Figure 3

Above: infographics indicating the wartime position of the Tunnel D-B. Bottom left: an impression of the new rammed-earth museum and memory-boards displaying the wartime and post-war evolution of the site. Bottom right: the new museum meets the 25-meter original segment of the Tunnel D-B. © Sabina Tanović, 2017 308 Renderings of Kenopsia Museum as seen from the street; courtyard; interior (left to right). © Ena Kukić, 2017 312 City map diagram of once uninhabitable boundary of danger and a rendering of re-Tracing the Veil as a non-material memorial museum. © Selma Ćatović Hughes, 2021 314

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Maria Kobielska: Narrative and Resilience Figure 1

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Part of the Polish Underground State section with a view on the “Irena Sendler corner,” her portrait visible through a new window cut in a wall. Permanent exhibition, Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Photo by Maria Kobielska, September 2021, used with permission of the Museum of the Second World War 330 The Unconquered, duplicated, screened upon the “Iron Curtain” installation. Permanent exhibition, Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Photo by Maria Kobielska, September 2021, used with permission of the Museum of the Second World War 334

Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger

Introduction: Museums, Narratives, and Critical Histories Introduction In the summer of 2022, Berlin’s Humboldt Forum hosted the blockbuster Australian, Indigenous-led exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters.1 One of the Humboldt Forum’s first major international shows, the large-scale exhibition used poetic multi-media scenography to bring to life the foundational history of Australia. Written by indigenous custodians and culture bearers, Songlines invites visitors to follow the ancestral women in their journey through Australia’s central and western deserts and landscapes (see Figure 1). As they flee and outsmart a powerful male, shape-shifting figure, the sisters map the land in image, song, and dance and impart their way of seeing, sensing, and knowing to receptive audience members. The exhibition is narrated by a small group of contemporary aboriginal, community-appointed knowledge holders: as visitors, we meet them as our guides at the exhibition’s entry on life-sized screens and follow their voices, songs, and artworks, throughout the exhibition. The temporality of the show is deliberately fluid: The beginning of time and indigenous knowledge systems blend with contemporary voices, art, and digital media to both convey foundational stories and creatively reflect on the act of storytelling itself. In this sense, the exhibition invites viewers to ponder the generation, custody, transmission, and preservation of narrative. Songlines tells a story about storytelling based in knowledge that resides with First Nation Australians and that they themselves decided to share with a larger public. As such, the show offered a remarkable presentation of intangible cultural heritage as lived presence. The Humboldt Forum was a charged venue for Songlines. Embattled since its conception as part of a citizens’ initiative to rebuild the Prussian castle, the new museum has had to reckon with its own imperial history and the colonial histories of its global collections.2 Only very recently has the Humboldt Forum embraced repatriation as a step toward repair. In this context, the opportunity to

 The exhibition inaugurated at the National Museum of Australia in 2017 and then traveled to Perth’s Western Australian Museum in 2020. In Europe, it was first shown in Plymouth, United Kingdom, at The Box in 2022. Subsequent stations have included Berlin’s Humboldt Forum (2022), the Musée de Quai Branly in Paris (2023), and the Museokekus Vapriikki Tampere, Finland (2024).  See also the chapter by Daniel Morat in this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-001

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Figure 1: Tjanpi Desert Weavers: “Seven Sisters,” 2018, desert grasses (minarri, wanturnu, yilintiji), reeds, wire netting, wool, emu feathers, and other natural and recycled materials. Temporary exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, courtesy of Humboldt Forum Berlin and National Museum of Australia. Photo by Stephan Jaeger 2022, used with permission of Tjanpi Desert Weavers and the Ngaanyatjarra Pitjantjatjara Yankunytjatjara (NPY) Women’s Council.

host Songlines and to allow the museum’s Western audiences to follow the paths of the seven sisters represented a most generous gift. Currently on tour in the European metropoles and museums that actively participated in, and benefited from, global regimes of colonial violence and plunder, Songlines turns the tables. It opens a radically different museum view and gives voice to the First Nation communities themselves. As a meta-exhibition about storytelling, the show expands the boundaries of museum scenography and narrative media. Songlines exemplifies critical developments in contemporary museum practice that this book aims to further unfold and explore. Over the course of the last decade, museums in the global North and South have embraced new ways of storytelling. In ever closer dialogue with their communities and audiences and often under public pressure to reckon with the institution’s implication in the history of colonialism, nationalism, and exclusion, curators have enlisted contemporary artists and experimented with new exhibition formats to work toward redress

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and repair. More generally, museums across the globe deal with the challenge to find new ways of narrating difficult knowledge and entangled histories. Besides decolonization, indigenization, and redress, such knowledge includes genocide, war, and atrocities, flight and migration, murder, social justice, scapegoating, and the commemoration of death. Erica Lehrer and Cynthia E. Milton define “difficult knowledge” as: knowledge that does not fit. It therefore induces a breakdown in experience, forcing us to confront the possibility that the conditions of our lives and the boundaries of our collective selves may be quite different from how we normally, reassuringly think of them. Such knowledge points to more challenging, nuanced aspects of history and identity, potentially leading us to re-conceive our relationships with those traditionally defined as “other.” (2011, 8)

To invite visitors’ agency, involve them in an emotional sense, and possibly bring them to consider and even question their own belief systems, many museums have deepened their engagement with new and critical techniques of narrating the past. Roger I. Simon reflects on the curation of difficult knowledge as an ethical high wire act where curators and visitors have to find each other in a delicate balance so that visitors may “work out what they might be feeling in relation not only to information they have acquired, but also to the questions, thoughts, and commitments provoked by the exhibition experience” (2011, 201). Mapping a broad range of museum practices, this volume lends equal weight to critical engagement with current historical narratives in museums and heritage institutions as to visions and dreams for future museum practices on local, regional, national, transnational, and global scales. The contributions assembled here cover recent historical as well as art and design exhibitions in thirteen countries from India to New Zealand, Zimbabwe to Scotland, Colombia to Norway, Germany to Argentina, Poland to Bosnia-Herzegovina, and from South Africa to the USA. As curators, designers, and scholars, our authors train their critical lenses on exhibition narratives but also include narratives about museums as place- and time-specific institutions. In their contributions, they test the resilience and ethics of museum narratives for ideologically divided societies and reflect on the ways the discourse of decolonization translates into specific geo- and socio-political museum practices. These practices are multifold and in their critical assessments, the authors of the essays that follow prompt us – as scholars, museum visitors, and museum practitioners – to reflect on our own positions, voices, and the crafting of (museum) narratives. Taken together, the book’s global case studies show a remarkable diversity of narrative modalities in contemporary museum culture, scholarly, and curatorial practice. These range from multivocal and multi-perspectival exhibition concepts to narratives carried by one voice or a discrete group of witnesses, from displays

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anchored in material culture and art to immersive scenography, interactive installations, and fictional storytelling. Across these modalities, we find exhibitions addressing visitors in distinct roles: as witnesses, as community partners, as members of memory collectives but also of the interested public, and – yes, as tourists. While these roles at times overlap, each of them carries affective and ethical dimensions that our authors explore. In the following, we review some guiding concepts and new approaches to critical storytelling and narrative in museums. Our interest, as well as that of our authors, is in the connections between technology, visitor emotions, and temporality, in multiperspectival storytelling and co-narration, and in decolonial practices and narrative. We explore these concepts and themes in dialogue with a number of specific exhibition projects from our own research and interweave them with a multitude of insights developed in the global case studies by our contributors in the chapters that follow.

Critical Storytelling and Narrative in Museums Acknowledging that there is never only one way to “read” an exhibition, we were guided in our conceptualization of this volume by an interest in the temporalities inherent in museum narratives. We asked contributors to explore how museums and exhibitions rewrite, question, and deconstruct established narratives and how they craft new ones. Attending to the ongoing and often exciting changes in museum practice, exhibition scenography, and multimedia technologies, we sought insights into how these developments affect the ways in which museums tell stories in the first place, how they curate memories, and how – or whether – they base themselves in the communities they are out to serve: Whose voices are heard, amplified, or muted? How do visitors find themselves addressed and implicated in the displayed histories? What are the emotional and cognitive dimensions of museum narration? To understand the different dimensions of storytelling in museums, we deem it crucial to analyze the positioning of the museum visitors in relation to historical contents. Traditionally, originating in the historiographical approach from the nineteenth century, museums aimed to create exhibitions that treated the visitor as a detached observer (Macdonald 2003, 3–4). In the wake of “new museology” (Vergo 1989) in the 1990s and early 2000s, museum curators, designers, and educators turned to more theatrical and scenographic approaches to “stage the past” so that visitors would be drawn “into the ensemble of exhibited objects,” and be challenged “to express their own perceptions, judgments, and emotions” (Beierde Haan 2006, 192–193). As our contributors hone in on the rhetorical effects of

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specific media, they share a concern with how exhibitions construct “narrative environments, experiences which integrate objects and spaces – and stories of people and places – as part of a process of storytelling” (Hourston Hanks et al. 2012, xix). How do such environments foster or hamper the staging of critical histories that resonate with contemporary visitors in distinct ways? How, in other words, might visitors “become [. . .] actor[s] in the story-world and move themselves through the story, shifting from conscious to unconscious engagement depending on their own narrativization of self” (Austin 2012, 109)? In dialogue with the operational logic of new museology, museum studies scholars have further developed the notion of “critical museology” noting that objects have different meanings depending on their positionality in regard to distinct ethnic groups, classes, institutions, and exhibitionary strategies, which imply mutual rights and obligations (Shelton 2013, 19). In this vein, Joy Sather-Wagstaff unfolds the complex, emotional dimension of museum narratives which – as conversation and as storytelling – are “valuable for teasing out the unfolding meanings of polysensory processes of knowledge-making and the potentially transformative always-in-process politics of affect” (2017, 24). To continue this lineage of “new” and “critical” museum studies scholarship, we explore in this volume how storytelling in history, community, and art & design museums engages and positions museum visitors. We analyze how this process deconstructs old narrative structures, and how it creates new temporalities and positionalities. Together with our contributors, we focus on how multiperspectival or agonistic storytelling may open new emancipatory space for the museum public: how the dialogic juxtaposition of different discourse positions, for instance, invites visitors to develop their own qualified stance vis-à-vis the difficult histories on display (Cento Bull et al. 2019, 614). Drawing visitors closely into the storyworld of historical exhibitions – by telling and listening to stories – can be an important strategy for museums to promote social justice (Huhn & Anderson 2021). In this context, Leslie Bedford points out that storytelling in museums only reaches its full multi-sensorial potential if it moves beyond the mere basics of a story (such as characters, setting, and action): A narrative has to be true to its medium. For exhibition makers, that means engaging all our senses including the somatic or physical, speaking to our emotions, using the specific to generate connections to the familiar and universal, and telling us something about someone we are going to care about. Something happens in the imagination in the face of a real story; it creates a new one. (2014, 41)

If we expand this reflection to recent trends in digital storytelling within and outside of museums, it becomes even clearer that historical storytelling in museums

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constitutes a complex performative act. In this context, Alke Gröppel-Wegener and Jenny Kidd remind us in their study of immersive storytelling that “stories are not just told but made through experiences” (2019, 104). In other words, storytelling only fully comes into being in museums if the present time of the visitor interacts with documented times and stories represented in the museum, creating new temporalities and spaces in the process. Forms of digital simulation and audio-visual technologies can further enhance this performative dimension, since they often simulate the past or other realities without having a reference in the “real” world, as we will discuss further in the following section.

Technology, Visitor Emotions, and Temporality Critical museum practices have deliberately sought to break with linear narratives of progress and begun to experiment with new forms of “recognition and identification to unsettle received narratives about the past and/or to produce new forms of subjectivity” (Witcomb 2013, 255). At a time when museums began to embrace the call for more interactive displays, Andrea Witcomb rightly pointed out that interactivity alone does not break with long-standing ideological patterns of museum making: “Adding a multimedia station to an exhibit,” she reminds us, “will not [. . .] necessarily challenge the one-way flow of communication which the exhibition as a whole may be premised on. Nor does multimedia in itself necessarily represent a more democratic, open medium of communication” (2002, 130). If the mere inclusion of multi- and digital media alone did not break the spell of linear, traditional storytelling in museums, experiments with theatrical scenography opened an alternative plane. From The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army (British Museum, 2007–2008) to the above-mentioned Songlines exhibitions have created mediated environments that are at once “architectonic and scenographic, audio-visual, graphic, installation art, [. . .] atmospheric and, above all, narrative” (Greenberg 2012, 95). While reflecting on his team’s narrative exhibition design for The First Emperor, Stephen Greenberg calls on scenographers to deepen their practice of “sampling” and “collaging,” the layering and borrowing from different (narrative) media. In order to further exemplify the high stakes involved in staging difficult history, we will briefly turn to an exhibition that seems to employ all tools of an immersive digital narrative but falls short in critically engaging visitors. In the Thiepval Museum of the Historial de la Grande Guerre (France) visitors find themselves confronted in the first exhibition room with a monumental 60-metrelong mural by the well-known Maltese-American graphic novel writer and car-

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toonist Joe Sacco.3 The mural opens an imaginary window into the first day of the Battle of the Somme, on July 1, 1916, when 20,000 British soldiers were killed. While contemplating the mural, visitors may activate a QR code through their phones and listen to an audio reenactment of the war offensive. The reenactment is told in first-person voice by a fictional British soldier. Over the course of the day, the soldier provides a highly personal and emotional description of the unfolding apocalyptic events. As his emotional state shifts from cautious optimism to deadly panic, he begins to question his leadership. In the end, he survives though he misses basically all the other comrades who fought with him and were killed. They had come from the same village and played on a rugby team together. The highly pitched, emotional rendition of the British soldier gives voice and perspective to the mural’s detailed visual representation of military operations. While the mural depicts the landscape of the Somme and a multitude of soldiers, the audio narrative channels the visitors’ perception and flattens this installation’s scenography to one story alone. As artwork, the mural could have opened up numerous paths of aesthetic engagement with the narrated past, but in dialogue with the audio reenactment, it is reduced to a merely referential illustration of broad and stereotypical developments during one day, sentimentalized in the initial optimism and in the eventual despair of the reenacted soldier. In this sense, the installation reduces the critical potential of art to open up multiple meanings and different paths of aesthetic engagement that many chapters in this volume – for example the ones by Bond, Light, Niemi, Rectanus, or Schäfer – demonstrate. The exhibition space invites visitors into an immersive installation framed by the mural. That space also includes a narrow band of display cases with artifacts found on the battlefield and monitors sunk into the floor in the middle of the room, offering displays of maps and footage. Yet, the viewer is most likely drawn into one specific soldier’s experience that pitches a universal antiwar argument. Through the audio device, storytelling and immersive reenactment become reduced to one sensory, internally focalized, and ultimately universal experience of suffering. There are two obvious shortcomings in the Thiepval installation. First, visitors who listen to the audio may find themselves technologically manipulated to inhabit one “reconstructed” and stereotypical representation of the emotions of the past. In this case, visitors are neither invited to bring their own worlds and experiences to bear on the history on display nor are they encouraged to draw

 The new Thiepval Museum opened in June 2016. https://www.historial.fr/en/thiepval-museumpresentation/museum-layout-and-visiting-the-museum/ (June 11, 2023).

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conclusions for their own future attitudes and agency. Second, the installation reinforces stereotypes instead of expressing any individuality in its representation of the past.4 In the following, we further reflect upon both of these shortcomings vis-à-vis two exhibitions that stage more complex and critical historical narratives to enhance visitor engagement. Throughout, we connect our discussion with our contributors’ global case studies of critical histories and storytelling. As we have suggested, the first shortcoming of the Thiepval installation lies in its inability of integrating the visitors’ emotional and cognitive reception processes into its narrative design. Storytelling that aims to expand an audience’s capacity to hold critical knowledge about past events in the present – and to express critical histories – cannot simply tell one true and complete story of past events visitors are detached from. As noted above, one of the strengths of (digital) storytelling is that it can produce a story or multiple stories – based on historical sources and evidence – that have not existed before. In the museum space, the very act of visitors connecting with curated stories from the past can be highly generative and may invite visitors as co-narrators (see our section on co-narration below). Museums have the ability to simulate multi-sensory spaces that merge different temporal and spatial layers, particularly the presence of visitors and the represented past. This volume’s global case studies not only point to the importance of such critical and reflexive museum narration where the past on display may resonate with the socio-political present, they also bring to the fore culture-, place-, and timespecific dimensions of these narratives. As a multi-media and multi-sensorial unfolding, storytelling in museums invites visitors into their realm as embodied participants. Anyone who enters the museum brings their own present time into the encounter with historical artifacts, audio-visual stories, interpretive or archival texts, and art objects. The visitors’ own subject positions, knowledge and belief systems, memory, and implications in the exhibition’s storyworld play a significant role in how the past on display touches their present. To further illustrate how technology can aid the creation of temporalities and storyworlds that affirm and challenge visitors’ present sense of themselves and others, we briefly turn to an example from the Refugee Museum of Denmark in Oksbøl.5 The museum uses digital technology to create an emotional connection between visitors and the life-stories of refugees. Its elaborate story-telling audio guide is activated by geo-sensors or by the visitors themselves when passing the

 We restrict our critical analysis to the opening “Sacco” room and its use of digital storytelling; the overall exhibition offers other approaches that express more individuality of lost soldiers, such as the room “Multitude of the Missing,” that promotes a transnational space of commemoration.  It opened in 2022 at the site of a former camp for German refugees from the Eastern territories after the Second World War.

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device over clearly marked trigger points. The museum’s permanent exhibition entitled Refugees at All Times develops a balanced approach between universalizing the experiences of refugees and emphasizing individual stories by refugees who came to Denmark between 1945 and the present, for example from Germany, Hungary, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Syria.

Figure 2: Mirrored experiential room in which visitors are introduced to life-size hologram projections of individual refugees. Permanent exhibition Refugees at All Times. Design BIG – Bjarke Ingels Group & Tinker Imagineers. © and photo Flugt – Refugee Museum of Denmark, 2022.

The elaborate way in which the museum uses technology to create a connective tissue between the lifeworld of the refugees and visitors becomes especially clear in the second room of the permanent exhibition. Sitting in a dark room with multiple mirrors visitors receive an experiential introduction via an audio-visual installation (see Figure 2). In the first half of the four-minute installation, visitors are inundated with well-known media scenes from numerous refugee crises around the world, including the so-called European one in 2015–16. Then there is a sudden shift putting the visitors into direct confrontation with life-size hologram projections of individual refugees. These holograms invite visitors to go on a journey with them through the museum to understand their stories and realize that everybody can become a refugee. From this point on, visitors are potentially challenged in their distant, safe subject- and visitor positions, when encountering the different stages and

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stories from refugees coming to Denmark between 1945 and the present. The mirrors multiply the reflections of the holograms and of the visitors, intensifying the feeling that visitors and refugees belong to the same space and time. Through technology, curators and exhibition designers created a purposeful and affective form of interaction between past and present that challenges visitors to consider not only past but also future stories of refugees. In other words, instead of understanding and experiencing refugee histories and stories that seem to be contained in the past, the exhibition enacts temporalization by which the merging of past, present, and future can potentially transform visitors. Many contributions in this volume further explore how contemporary exhibition designers experiment with similar and other ways to overlay past, present, and future temporal planes more densely to further (or hinder) visitors’ engagement with the histories of genocide and war, flight and migration, and colonialism. In their critical engagement with exhibition projects that center indigenization, explore scapegoating, or commemorate death, our authors show how this kind of “thick” temporalization may destabilize the visitors’ subject positions or grant visitors more space for agency. In this context Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková’s contribution examines how audio narratology guides visitors through the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica and what kind of emotional effect the exhibition’s soundscape imparts on visitors. Slabáková argues that the soundscape works in two opposite directions. While some elements aim to restrict the visitors’ space for critical thinking, similar to the audio-visual installation at the Thiepval Museum, Slabáková also holds open the possibility that the sound installation steers visitor emotions beyond the explicit master narrative of the exhibition. Thus, audio-visual exhibition design that conjures up histories of war, fascism, and resistance affects visitors’ emotional worlds in the present and may even challenge deep-seated assumptions held by national memory cultures – in this case Slovak cultural memory about the uprising. Amy Sodaro’s comparative analysis of the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC and the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama also engages with the emotional impact that museum installations have on their visitors. While both museum narratives create a critical view of the history of slavery in the USA, only the Legacy Museum allows the representations of past violence to radically disrupt the present by underlining the ongoing trauma of slavery’s legacies. Similar to our reading of the installation at the Refugee Museum of Denmark, Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt demonstrates in her chapter, how curators and designers at the Jewish Museum Trondheim utilize techniques of focalization in a Holocaust exhibition to shift the historical exhibition narrative so that visitors may reflect upon the ultimate disconnection between the present and the past. To further advance our thinking about layered temporalities, Daniel Morat

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introduces the concept of pluritemporality in his discussion of the Berlin Global exhibition at the Humboldt Forum. As a capacious concept, pluritemporality captures the synchronic co-existence of multiple temporalities. In line with our argument about the Oksbøl’s Refugee Museum, Rachel Christ-Doane’s analysis of the Salem Witch Museum and M. Elizabeth Weiser’s contribution on exhibiting racial trauma in US-American museums also demonstrate how immersive technologies create a dialogic space between historical events, characters, and visitors that initiate emotional connections between past and present. In her study of the Salem museum’s narrative design, Christ-Doane shows how visitors are drawn into the past on display via direct conversation with historical characters. At the same time, the narrative highlights enduring patterns of scapegoating, thereby transporting visitors back into their own present. Within the museum narrative, this meeting between past and present is mediated by the figure of a fictional witch. Christ-Doane argues that the museum’s creation of a simulated storyworld helps the contemporary audience to better understand the very pattern of stereotyping – whether of women persecuted as witches or of other people. A historical narrative that would have confined itself to the women persecuted in 1692 would not have been able to present such a meta-story. Sanna-Mari Niemi offers a similar argument in her analysis of two Finnish art exhibitions that employ the concept of the clue from crime (fictional) storytelling: artistic interventions and fictional narrative provide a potent meta-reflexive narrative lens for museums’ world- and knowledge-making. Jana Hawig demonstrates how the use of immersive storytelling and the introduction of a fictional character who goes through extreme emotions such as grief can invite visitors to enter an exhibition’s storyworld. The exhibition asks visitors to connect the represented storyworld to their own life experiences, but also maintain a critical distance. Such temporalizing encounters do not only happen in traditional museum buildings, but also in outdoor memory and heritage spaces. Marija Đorđević and Stefan Krankenhagen consider open air museums and memorials from the Yugoslav era. The anachronistic heritage places, the authors argue, ask visitors in the present to insert their bodies into the main narrative of heritage production. Similarly, Selma Ćatović Hughes, Ena Kukić, and Sabina Tanović demonstrate the high stakes involved in critically engaging with Sarajevo’s memory landscape. As architects and designers, they discuss three design proposals that work with the material traits of the Siege of Sarajevo to strengthen visitors’ resilience vis-àvis the traumatic past, allowing for simultaneous remembering and forgetting of traumatic events. Instead of representing history merely to understand the past, these spatial and narrative interventions let visitors, particularly survivors and their families, interact with the meanings of the past for present and future.

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Multiperspectival Storytelling and Difficult Knowledge The second shortcoming of the digital storytelling reenactment in the Sacco room in Thiepval, is its tendency toward stereotypical storytelling which forecloses the potential of expressing the past through individualized stories and multiple perspectives. Unlike our example from Thiepval, the temporary exhibition Burma’s Path to Genocide in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM) in Washington, DC models individual and multiperspectival storytelling about difficult knowledge.6 The exhibition focuses on the violence against the Rohingya, a Muslim minority in Burma (Myanmar), and the forced migration of about 700,000 people to neighboring Bangladesh in 2017. It carefully narrates this violent history through four storylines and portraits of villagers from Maung Nuo. To further understand how technology can merge space and time and invite visitors to become secondary witnesses in digital storytelling, we concentrate on the multiperspectival narrative approach in the exhibition. Visitors meet four main characters in the first room, as enlarged life-size portraits, very similar to upright smartphone selfies staged on easels (see Figure 3). The one-minute audio stories for all characters use an English-speaking voice-over by a female third-person narrator, which overlaps with the first-person narrative in Rohingya language. Emotionally, the narrative draws the visitors to close eye-level contact with all four portrayed men and women. The exhibition continues these four storylines (into which it integrates seven people overall) with a panoramic video collage about the genocide in Burma and subsequent escape of the Rohingya people through various media, including the survivor’s first-person stories, images from Google Earth, some explanatory texts, cell phone footage, and photographs taken by Rohingyas. Finally, the exhibition’s main characters, Showife,7 Jomila, Mohammed, and Sumida reflect upon their lives in the temporary quarters in Bangladesh afterwards. Exhibition space in museums is always already confined by its architecture, and the museum public is also not necessarily ready to engage in reading long, complex texts. These confines become evident when one compares the physical Rohingya exhibition to the digital counterpart that the USHMM features online. Here, the individual stories are longer and include more voices. Website visitors,

 The exhibition, guest-curated by photojournalist Greg Constantine, opened on December 10, 2021 and is still on view in the temporary galleries of the USHMM – here the rooms of the SimonSkjodt Center for the Prevention of Genocide. https://exhibitions.ushmm.org/burmas-path-to-geno cide (June 11, 2023).  In this room, his brother Mohammadul is portrayed as well as part of the same storyline.

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Figure 3: Four portraits of Rohingya people, Showife, Jomila, Mohammed, Sumida. Temporary exhibition Burma’s Path to Genocide, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM). Photo by Stephan Jaeger, January 2023, used with permission of USHMM.

moreover, have access to additional photographs and documents with elaborate captions. However, the effect of temporal and spatial plotting, perspective, and storytelling becomes evident only in the physical exhibition gallery, in which the visitors observe structurally – i.e., non-mimetically – the emotional impact of the massacre on the Rohingya people within the context of the four individual life stories. Whereas the museum is wise to avoid a simplistic empathetic set-up or a didactic universal call for action, the narrative quality of the exhibition affords structural experientiality (Jaeger 2020, 47–60) that does not stereotype the individual stories, but still allows for the structural experience of the human toll of a specific genocide. Visitors seem to enter a space and scenery to emotionally engage with the different real-life stories. The USHMM is able to maintain the individuality of Showife’s, Jomila’s, Mohammed’s, and Sumida’s stories, allowing visitors emotionally and directly to connect to the different life-stories and the feelings they trigger. The storytelling of difficult history in Burma’s Path to Genocide, then, differentiates itself from the narrative approach that the curators chose for the permanent

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exhibition of the ESMA Site Museum in Buenos Aires. As Florencia Larralde Armas’ and Julieta Lampasona’s analysis of the ESMA museum demonstrates in their chapter, the harrowing individual testimonies by a number of detainees, who recount the atrocities committed against them by the Argentinian military dictatorship, eventually merge to represent a collective, homogenous victim voice. Similarly, Kjørholt’s narratological analysis of two recent Norwegian Holocaust exhibitions points out the stark contrast between an open and multilayered narrative on the one hand, and a narrative dominated by an authoritative historiographical voice that controls all stories, on the other. As we have seen in the Rohingya exhibition, such an open approach foregoes a synthetic curatorial or historiographical voice. In her contribution, Maria Kobielska demonstrates by example of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk how an exhibition concept grounded in a strong narrative and experiential approach – displaying a multiplicity of perspectives and a transnational scope – develops considerable narrative resilience to ideological interventions if these are not designed to completely change the narrative structure of the exhibition.

Visitor Co-Narration in Museums The essays in this volume explore the rhetoric of multi-media museum narratives across a plethora of exemplary sites, but they converge on an underlying, though perhaps implicit, consensus that contemporary exhibition practices are at their best when they open up a space for community members as co-curators and visitors as co-narrators (cf. Simon 2011, as discussed above). As museum visitors immerse themselves in thoughtfully (but also sometimes carelessly) designed story worlds, they become drawn into an embodied performative act that is unique to their experience. Meanwhile, the freedom of this enactment and the ways in which visitors “can play a part in producing [an exhibition’s] meaning, challenging the authority of the museum to produce and regulate subjectivity” remains circumscribed by the exhibition’s narrative design (Witcomb 2002, 129). Returning to our thoughts about multiperspectival or multivocal narration, we see the merging of past, present, and future via immersive storytelling as a core tool with which contemporary exhibitions allow visitors to become active participants and co-narrators. Where they adopt such reflexive and interactive forms of narration, museums open up spaces for their audiences to communicate with historical and fictional characters, to reflect upon their positionalities, to intervene critically in the present based on their learning about the past. Numerous contributions to this volume bear out these insights and develop them further. We already

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discussed above how Christ-Doane shows how visitors to the Salem Witch Museum engage through physical and digital postcards with the term “witch hunt” and the practice of scapegoating – thereby participating in practices that afford immersive learning. Hawig analyzes the effects of integrating visitors in a funeral reception by asking them to write sympathy cards or co-author a book of condolences. Mark W. Rectanus traces active visitor co-narration in the Memory Lab and the Sorry Tree exhibits at the Conflictorium in Ahmedabad. Both spaces provide room for visitors to negotiate personal and collective memories and offer a performative space for enacting an apology that supports a process of social repair. Morat discusses participatory projects and multivocality in Berlin Global. Similarly, Jimena Perry demonstrates the need for visitor co-narration in her critical reflection on how the National Museum of Colombia’s reconceptualization of received grand narratives creates new stories of inclusion and diversity. And Đorđević and Krankenhagen describe students experiencing and performing their bodily presence while investigating Yugoslav monuments in video assignments. Taken together, these various forms of co-narration and visitor participation diversify and complicate the authority of the museum institutions themselves. Here, we can already see the dynamics of critical museum practices and decolonial storytelling that will be the focal point of the following section.

Decoloniality and Reparative Museum Practices Our volume attests to the readiness of museum curators, educators, and designers to question traditional positions (and authority) within their own institutions. They have become more attuned to the many ways in which the visitors’ experiences and knowledge contribute to the actualization of difficult museum histories and narratives in the present, mobilizing both the affective and cognitive power of multi-sensorial and multi-temporal museum exhibitions. Carried by a communitarian ethics of care for the past and the present, as well as for one another, the most forward-looking museum practices discussed in this volume are grounded in locally specific cultures of remembering, of mourning, and of sensing futurity (Morse 2020). This ethical dimension of museum work comes into particularly stark relief in the context of decolonial museology. Squarely situated within the realm of difficult knowledge and critical history that we introduced above with reference to Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton, and Roger I. Simon, working through the institutional implication of museums in past and present regimes of coloniality remains an ongoing project in museums across the globe.

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Indeed, in their thought-provoking contribution to our volume, Farai Chabata and Jesmael Mataga emphasize the contemporaneity of coloniality on the African continent. They draw our attention to the persistent vestiges of colonialism as expressions of power “that relies upon oppression, extraction of resources, including natural, cultural, and heritage resources” (151). To counter this persistence, the literary scholar and cultural anthropologist Walter Mignolo calls for civil and epistemic disobedience: “Decolonial thinking,” he writes, “strives to delink itself from the imposed dichotomies articulated in the West, namely the knower and the known, the subject and the object, theory and praxis” (Mignolo 2017, 44). At the same time, Mignolo is careful to insist that decoloniality merely provides a horizon for sociopolitical and cultural projects that can be inhabited in radically different ways; only where that horizon is actualized can indigenous as well as non-indigenous communities find the “vocabulary and the narratives that afford them affirmation” (44–45). As such, decoloniality remains culturally and locally specific, eschewing any “grand narrative” appeal and offering “neither a ‘new’ nor a ‘better’ global design that will supersede previous ones” (45). Several essays in our volume engage with discourses of decoloniality in this vein. From very different geo-political vantage points, they exemplify the breadth and depth of museum projects that critically engage with colonialism and its aftermath. In dialogue with Mignolo, Chabata and Mataga call for “museological disobedience” to radically imagine the future of African museums so that they may serve the heritage narratives and cultural needs of their local and indigenous communities. The active embrace of co-narration and co-stewardship, local traditions and languages, as well as indigenous epistemologies can guide museums to reenliven collections and restore communities that still bear the mark of coloniality. Rather than construe the horizon of decolonialization as an end in itself, however, Chabata and Mataga inscribe African-centered museum practices in a broader ethos of community and sustainability. The work that Chabata and Mataga envision for community museums in Africa has resonance for indigenous museum practices in the historical homelands of settler colonialism, whether in the United States or Canada, Australia or New Zealand. In her incisive analysis of the Ziibiwing Center for Anishinaabe Culture and Lifeways in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, Amy Lonetree elevates the community-centered and collaborative effort led by the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe to build a museum that advances Anishinaabe history, culture, and language (2012, 129). Not unlike the Songlines exhibition we evoked at the beginning of our introduction, the Ziibiwing Center’s permanent exhibition Diba Jimooyuung (Telling our Story) features immersive, mythical storytelling and an elaborate sound installation. It pairs these modes with historically specific dioramas, documents, and artifacts that touch on traumatic histories of ethnic and cultural cleans-

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ing, forced treaty signing, and the violent Indian Boarding School system. While engaging in difficult truth telling, the museum also provides spaces for reflection and healing within its narrative design, an approach that Lonetree finds uniquely successful. Anne Schäfer’s contribution to our volume tracks themes similar to Lonetree’s reading, but introduces yet another unique indigenous museum within a settler colonial context: the Sámi Museum in Karasjok, Norway. In her reading of the museum’s visual narrative through the media of architecture, art, and installations, Schäfer points to the strategy of “displayed withholding,” a term she uses to describe the way in which the museum addresses indigenous visitors with knowledge of Sámi ontology as insiders, while imparting to other visitors the status of outsiders “looking in.” This approach shifts the (de)colonial narrative entirely: while the temporality of exhibitions such as those at the Sámi Museum and the Ziibiwing Center remains deliberately fluid to evoke the continued presence of indigenous cosmology and its deep time connection with the land, the indigenous-centered narrative design at the Sámi museum circumvents – or “withholds” – any reference to the difficult history of colonialism and the violence of forced assimilation. To this end, indigenous governance and democratically shared stewardship are key in both of these community museums. Grounded in community efforts of co-narration, the exhibition narratives affirm and repair Sámi and Anishinaabe cultural bonds and ontologies to secure their futures and sovereignty. On the national level, museums in settler colonial countries face pressing questions about their own complicity in their countries’ history of suppression and destruction of indigenous cultures. To the degree that representative institutions have indeed confronted these questions, what kind of museum narratives, models of co-curatorship, and modes of repair have evolved out of such reckoning? Writing from Aotearoa / New Zealand, Rowan Light offers one case study by discussing an exhibition project in progress at the Tāmaki Paenga Hira / Auckland War Memorial Museum. Entitled Bare our Teeth, the show aims to bring the largely suppressed violence of the internal, colonial wars between settlers and Māoris, known as the “New Zealand Wars,” into the fore of public memory and history discourse. The exhibition deliberately exposes the colonial foundations of the museum itself and bases its narrative design on the lively memory cultures that connect generations of Māoris with the collective and enduring trauma of the colonial wars. At the same time, the exhibition also invites descendants of soldiers who fought for the colonial state to participate in the revision of the colonial war’s memory. In opening a dialogic space for agonistic memory that brings the victims’ perspective to bear on the perspective of the perpetrator (Cento Bull et al. 2019), the Auckland War Memorial Museum probes the possibilities as well as limits of indigenization and reconciliation in New Zealand’s decolonial present. In presenting the memory

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of the colonial war as living memory bound to specific individuals and collectives, the museum offers its visitors a stake in shaping a more expansive and sensible account of national history. Although only indirectly referring to the aftermath of colonialism, Mark W. Rectanus analyzes similar challenges how museums can involve community members in creating narrative and performative spaces of repair in the conflict between Hindus and Muslims and the consequent class and racial discriminations at the Conflictorium in Ahmedabad. Similar to Light’s analysis, this allows the probing of agonistic forces, ruptures of social trauma, and “fragmentary processes of ‘repair’ and memory that cannot erase the scars of oppression” (249). For example, art exhibitions can add aesthetic dimensions to unfold unscripted social space for community engagement in everyday places. For all its global reach, the history of colonialism and efforts at decolonization take locally specific forms, as Mignolo reminds us. Thus, museums on the South American continent face yet another set of traumatic entanglements in histories of colonial violence compared to those in New Zealand or in countries of the global North such as the U.S. or Norway. Considering the revision of the permanent exhibition at the National Museum of Colombia, Jimena Perry foregrounds the specific cultural contexts in which decoloniality has challenged traditional museum work and narratives in Bogotá. Here, decoloniality aligns closely with a human rights discourse as the exhibition explores forms of non-linear history telling against the backdrop of Colombia’s sexual, political, and religious diversity. The exhibition also focuses on immigration to memorialize the victims of the country’s decades-long era of systemic political violence. In their exhibition design and educational program, the curatorial and educational teams deliberately designed reflection spaces for visitors from all social and ethnic strata to sense the connections between their present lives and experiences on the one hand, and national and international histories of liberation and oppression, on the other. In contrast to the narrative design at the War Memorial Museum in Auckland and its emphasis on agonistic memory to challenge colonial memory cultures, the Colombian National Museum invites its diverse audience into the fold of national memory and history through an open, multidirectional approach (Rothberg 2009) that deliberately asks its visitors to relate their histories and life stories to those who have come before or reside next to them within a framework of mutual care and solidarity. In keeping with the decolonial focus of our volume, Emma Bond’s intervention is similarly designed to draw out hitherto neglected or suppressed historical connections to histories of colonialism, empire, and slavery so that they become readable again for the contemporary museum visitor. Her thick description of specific artifacts on display at the Scottish Design Galleries of V&A Dundee and works by contemporary artists engenders new narratives of repair and redress.

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Bond argues for a form of capacious and imaginative readerly engagement with exhibition displays, which allows her to follow the strands that connect a mended piece of woolen underwear and a golf ball with transnational histories of trade in wool and rubber as well as with intimate histories of survival. For Bond, the politically engaged artworks by Scotland-based multidisciplinary artists Alberta Whittle and Sekai Machache are key in developing reparative designs and new museum-centered readings of locally grounded colonial histories. Throughout our volume, our authors show how art and architecture can expand and deepen the museum narration of difficult knowledge so that visitors are empowered to hold this knowledge in the present and bring it into the future. And yet, without the requisite trust in society’s capacity to redress harm and (re)constitute justice, any sense of futurity remains elusive. As M. Elizabeth Weiser reminds us in her essay on racial trauma, museums enjoy more trust as arbiters of truth than political institutions or media outlets, let alone in the “post-truth” era of “alternative facts.” As such, museums bear a particular ethical burden of responsibility. By analyzing the representation of racial trauma in several American museums, Weiser shows how museum narratives can confront the pain and trauma of African Americans as a constituent part of US collective identity, tying its future to an acknowledgment of past violence and injustice. She identifies the rhetorical device of epideixis, a value-driven form of truth telling and restitution, as key to museums’ power to change the narrative about race in America. Where institutions like the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama, the Greenwood Rising Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis, Tennessee take seriously the call to engage an ethos of restorative justice, to adopt “the values that forge collective identity” (232) and thereby to earn their visitors’ trust, Weiser’s reading suggests, museums just may contribute to nudging the arc of history toward a shared sense of futurity.

Museums and Narratives As we have sought to suggest with our introductory foray, exhibitions across the world aspire in complex and differing ways to narrate the past and connect to their visitors’ present and future. In conceptualizing this inaugural volume for the book series “Museums and Narrative,” we aimed for an anthology that, on the one hand, takes up the most recent critical and transformative trends and challenges for museums in rethinking the narration of time, history, and space in areas such as social justice, decolonialization and repair, indigenous knowledge, difficult, contested, and agonistic knowledge/heritage, and community engagement. On the other hand, it has been of particular importance to us to establish a

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volume – and a book series – that combines scholarly interventions from multiple (and sometimes overlapping) academic fields such as literary, memory, media, and design studies, as well as history, anthropology, and cultural studies with insights from museum and heritage practitioners who develop exhibitions, shape the policies of heritage institutions, and run museums’ educational programs. As a consequence, this volume comprises eighteen chapters, some of which offer shorter critical reflections – a practitioner’s introduction to an exhibition, a designer’s project, or a scholarly take on a specific case-study – while other chapters engage at greater length and in more depth with multiple cases and theoretical questions. We have divided this volume in three sections: “Narrative Theory and Temporality,” “Ruptures and Repair,” and “Difficult Memories and Histories.” These section titles indicate a core for each group of six contributions of narratives, museums, and critical histories. All contributions in the first section have a strong interest in reflecting upon the construction of narrative, aspects of temporality, and some aspects of narratology, while the second section is completely centered in narrative challenges of decolonialization and repair. Our final section represents a wider mixture of difficult knowledge themes in exhibitions and monument landscapes. Across these distinct emphases, there are multiple conceptual paths through the book since all eighteen chapters are closely anchored in our overarching concern with museum narrative. A reader might develop completely different paths through this book than our sections suggest by tracking recurring themes such as repair, social justice, trauma, the construction and deconstruction of national narratives, the relation between history, knowledge, and memory, indigenous agency, the performativity of museum narratives, immersive storytelling, narrative and technology, visitor affect, art and storytelling, multivocal or -perspectival narratives, co-narration, and others that we have not had space to consider here. The series “Museums and Memory” invites future authors to develop a wide range of studies of how museums and other heritage institutions – in physical as well as in digital form – engage in narratives and representations, critique or engage in meaning-making. We welcome manuscripts that investigate how museums depict time, history, and space on a local, regional, national, transnational, and global scales, from the Middle Ages to the present. Our series seeks contributions that examine how museums and exhibitions devoted to historical subject matter, heritage, and memorial sites, as well as museums of ideas and utopias (institutions that engage in story-making and representations of the past, present, and future) represent temporal structures and processes. We are delighted that the contributions to this opening volume span the globe but are as open to indepth case studies at the local or regional level as we are to transnational consid-

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erations and approaches. In all, we hope future studies in the series will take this opening volume as an invitation to further address a wide range of issues in the dynamic field of museum studies generally, and with a particular emphasis on how exhibitions organize temporalities and shape museum narratives. Acknowledgments: This opening volume of Museums and Narrative first of all owes its existence to the colleagues who responded to our original call and worked with us to shape its methodology, global scope, and analytical depth through their contributions. We thank them for their insights, critical acumen, and collegiality. At De Gruyter, our particular gratitude goes to Myrto Aspioti for her tireless support in making this volume and the book series possible. We would also like to thank Manuela Gerlof and Lydia J. White, who were instrumental in the early stages of establishing the book series at the publisher, and Stella Diedrich and the De Gruyter design and production team for their support and efficiency in seeing this volume through to publication. Neither this book nor the series that it launches would have been possible without the input of our board members for “Museums and Narrative,” who worked with us in establishing the series and its inaugural volume, and who helped to shape the latter as peer reviewers of individual chapters. Furthermore, we would like to thank all other colleagues who graciously volunteered their time and expertise to peer-review individual chapters. Veronica Cook Williamson and Emma Mikuska-Tinman lent their editorial expertise, which was absolutely instrumental in finalizing the manuscript. We thank them sincerely. Finally, we gratefully acknowledge the Museum of Conflict in Ahmedabad which provided the photograph for our book cover.

Bibliography Austin, Tricia. “Scales of Narrativity.” Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. Ed. Suzanne MacLeod, Laura Hourston Hanks, and Jonathan A. Hale. London: Routledge, 2012. 107–118. Bedford, Leslie. The Art of Museum Exhibitions: How Story and Imagination Create Aesthetic Experiences. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2014. Beier-de Haan, Rosmarie. “Re-staging Histories and Identities.” A Companion to Museum Studies. Ed. Sharon Macdonald. New York: Blackwell, 2006. 186–197. Cento Bull, Anna, Hans Lauge Hansen, Wulf Kansteiner, and Nina Parish. “War Museums as Agonistic Spaces: Possibilities, Opportunities and Constraints.” International Journal of Heritage Studies 25.6 (2019): 611–625. Greenberg, Stephen. “Place, Time, and Memory.” Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. Ed. Suzanne MacLeod, Laura Hourston Hanks, and Jonathan Hale. London: Routledge, 2012. 95–104.

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Gröppel-Wegener, Alke, and Jenny Kidd. Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling. New York: Routledge, 2019. Huhn, Arianna, and Annika Anderson. “Promoting Social Justice through Storytelling in Museums.” Museum & Society 19.3 (2021): 351–368. Hourston Hanks, Laura, Jonathan Hale, and Suzanne MacLeod. “Introduction: Museum Making: The Place of Narrative.” Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. Ed. Suzanne MacLeod, Laura Hourston Hanks, and Jonathan Hale. London: Routledge, 2012. xix–xxiii. Jaeger, Stephan. The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Memory, Narrative, and Experience to Experientiality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Lehrer, Erica, and Cynthia E. Milton. “Introduction: Witnesses to Witnessing.” Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places. Ed. Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton, and Monica Patterson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 1–19. Lonetree, Amy. Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Macdonald, Sharon J. “Museums, National, Postnational and Transcultural Identities.” Museum and Society 1.1 (2003): 1–16. Mignolo, Walter D. “Coloniality is Far from Over, and So Must Be Decoloniality.” Afterall 43 (2017): 39–45. Morse, Nuala. The Museum as a Space of Social Care. London: Routledge, 2021. Rothberg, Michael. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. Sather-Wagstaff, Joy. “Making Polysense of the World: Affect, Memory, Heritage.” Heritage, Affect and Emotion: Politics, Practices and Infrastructures. Ed. Divya P. Tolia-Kelly, Emma Waterton, and Steve Watson. London: Routledge, 2017. 12–29. Shelton, Anthony. “Critical Museology: A Manifesto.” Museum Worlds Advances in Research 1.1 (2013): 7–23. Simon, Roger I.: “Afterword: The Turn to Pedagogy: A Needed Conversation of Curating Difficult Knowledge.” Curating Difficult Knowledge: Violent Pasts in Public Places. Ed. Erica Lehrer, Cynthia E. Milton, and Monica Patterson. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. 193–209. Vergo, Peter, ed. The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books, 1989. Witcomb, Andrea. Re-imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London: Routledge, 2002. Witcomb, Andrea. “Understanding the Role of Affect in Producing a Critical Pedagogy for History Museums.” Museum Management and Curatorship 28.3 (2013): 255–271.

Part I: Narrative Theory and Temporality

Amy Sodaro

“Feeling Truth”: Objects, Embodiment, and Temporality in the National Museum of African American History and Culture (Washington, DC) and the Legacy Museum (Montgomery, Alabama) Introduction In 1881, Frederick Douglass wrote “Slavery is indeed gone, but its shadow still lingers over the country” (573), an observation that remains particularly salient today, as debates over Confederate symbols, critical race theory, reparations, and Black Lives Matter remind us that the past is hardly past. Despite the lingering shadow, it is only relatively recently that museums have been created to address slavery and its ongoing legacies. Two of these museums are the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), which opened in 2016 in Washington, DC, and the Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, which opened in 2018 in Montgomery, Alabama, and was expanded and reopened in 2021. While both of these museums challenge national narratives on race by centering slavery in American history and experience, they have key differences that shape the stories they tell. The NMAAHC was a century in the making and the long, arduous process of its creation led to its place on the National Mall as a federal museum run by the Smithsonian Institution. The 350,000 square foot museum displays over 3,500 artifacts, including a shawl that belonged to famed abolitionist and Underground Railroad conductor Harriet Tubman and the coffin in which Emmett Till, a fifteen-year-old Black boy whose brutal lynching in Mississippi in 1955 helped to galvanize support for the Civil Rights Movement, was buried. These artifacts help the museum narrate centuries of African American history as integral to and reflective of the American story. The Legacy Museum was the brainchild of lawyer and activist Bryan Stevenson and the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which fights injustices in the legal system and created the museum to situate contemporary racial injustice in historical context for a broader audience.1 Though EJI spent six

 For a discussion of aspects of restorative justice in the Legacy Museum, see the chapter by M. Elizabeth Weiser in this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-002

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years conducting research on slavery and lynching that forms the basis for the museum’s narrative, the museum itself, which is entirely privately funded, was created in just 18 months and is a narrative-driven museum using almost no authentic historical artifacts to make its argument. This chapter analyzes how these two museums narrate race, slavery, and memory in the USA. Though both museums attempt to challenge dominant, triumphalist narratives of overcoming racial injustice, I focus on their differences – in scale and scope, funding and resources, but particularly in the role objects and authenticity play in the construction of their narratives. The NMAAHC relies heavily on the aura and materiality of objects to tell its story, while the Legacy Museum, because of its limited resources and the particular argument it makes, has had to find new ways to create affective and embodied encounters with the past. These differences shape not only the museums’ narratives, but also the temporal encounters that these narratives produce in their efforts to more critically and truthfully engage with the long history of racial injustice in the USA.

Museums, Objects, and the Stories They Tell Museums have traditionally been institutions defined by their objects. From their premodern European origins as cabinets of curiosities, through their development as national institutions enacting a “ritual of citizenship” (Duncan 1991) and teaching visitors self-discipline in the “exhibitionary complex” (Bennett 1988), a core function of museums has been the collection, study, and display of objects. Art museums relied upon the Benjaminian aura2 of the authentic work of art, natural history and science museums presented objects as scientific evidence, and anthropology museums displayed “authentic” culture (e.g., Conn 2010). Museums used their objects to narrate, explain, and “legislate” taste and social value to their audiences (Casey 2005). Their early position as elite institutions gave museums a role in society as spaces of authority, objectivity, and legitimacy, which many retain today,3 with the authenticity of their collections contributing to their authority as institutions.  In his influential essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction” (1935/1968), Walter Benjamin argued that when artworks are reproduced mechanically they lose the “aura” – the intangible value and uniqueness – of the original work.  Several widely cited surveys of US museum visitors found that for the majority of those surveyed, museums were considered to be one of the most trustworthy sources of historical information (Merritt 2015, IMPACTS Research 2017). More recently, even as trust has diminished among the US public in many spheres of society, like politics and media, a recent survey by the

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However, over the course of the twentieth century, museum audiences have expanded, and the role and function of the museum has shifted from being “focused primarily inward on the growth, care, and study of its collections,” to an outward focus on “providing primarily education services to the public” (Weil, quoted in Conn 2010, 23). As museums opened their doors to broader, more diverse audiences, they began to work harder to interpret the objects on display, adding text, explanatory panels, and descriptions to help visitors make sense of the objects in more interactive and innovative ways. This shift away from the objects themselves to their interpretation has contributed to the development of a “new museology” (Vergo 1989) that has increasingly moved away from more traditional museological displays to the use of digital technology and other strategies to create interactive and experiential encounters with museums’ collections and narratives – what Valerie Casey has termed the “performing museum” (2005). These new “performing” museums ask visitors to do more than passively absorb information and instead actively take part in learning and making sense of their exhibitions. This has greatly expanded their functions: “redefin[ing] curatorial and outreach practice as extending far beyond the selection and display of instructive samples of knowledge, and now incorporating dimensions such as entertainment, empowerment, experience, ethics, and narrative endeavor” (Andermann & Arnold-de Simine 2012, 5–6). Over the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, museums have become less focused on the object and more on being socially engaged institutions striving for “contemporary relevance” (Conn 2010, 9).4 Perhaps the best illustration of the shifting functions of a museum is the genre of the memorial museum, which emerged in the final decades of the twentieth century as a mode of coming to terms with past violence and atrocity. Memorial museums are hybrid institutions – part museum, harnessing the educative potential of history, and part memorial, relying upon the affect and emotion of memory – that intend to give visitors an experience of the past that transforms their attitudes and beliefs. They thus go much further than simply telling the story of or representing the past; they often “explicitly propose to intervene in, and transform, the wider American Alliance of Museums found that museums ranked 6.4 on a scale of 1–10 for trustworthiness, above the US government (4.5) national news organizations like National Public Radio and The New York Times (4.8), nonprofits and NGOs (5.3), and researchers or scientists (6.1) (Merritt 2021).  This change is encapsulated by recent debates among the International Council of Museums (ICOM) over the definition of the museum; the international body proposed a new definition that goes beyond museums being “in service of society”, instead defining them as “accessible and inclusive”, “foster[ing] diversity and sustainability”, and defined by the “participation of the community” and “knowledge sharing” (ICOM 2022: https://icom.museum/en/resources/standardsguidelines/museum-definition/, March 16, 2023).

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socio-political context in which they have emerged” (Andermann 2012, 72). They also indicate a shift away from history as the dominant narrative mode of museums toward their incorporation of memory, “exemplifying the postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to the horizontal, practice-related notions of memory, place and community” (Andermann & Arnold-de Simine 2012, 7). Yet, even as memorial museums mark a shift in the role of museums from display and interpretation of artifacts to a more performative and experiential form of storytelling, objects remain important to the work that they do. Some of the earliest predecessors of memorial museums emerged at the sites of concentration and labor camps in Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War, such as Majdanek, where a museum opened in 1944, or Auschwitz, where a museum opened in 1947. These sites exhibited objects and artifacts as evidence of what had happened, contributing to the museums’ efforts at truth-telling about the past. Even though today many memorial museums are not located on historic sites of atrocity, they often rely upon the authenticity of objects to provide visitors with a “real” or “authentic” experience that helps connect them to the past. For example, Elizabeth Crooke (2019) writes about the power of seemingly quotidian objects, such as a coat or a handkerchief, when they are used to help narrate the story of Bloody Sunday in the Museum of Free Derry. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, a model for similar museums around the world, displays everything from piles of shoes and other personal belongings, reminiscent of similar displays at Auschwitz, to trees from a forest in Lithuania, bunks from Birkenau barracks, and an actual railcar used in the deportation of Jewish prisoners. Other museums, such as the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, Chile or the Tuol Sleng Genocide Center in Phnom Penh, Cambodia display objects of torture to demonstrate to visitors the brutality of perpetrators. The 9/11 Museum in New York City displays massive artifacts, such as a twisted fire truck and a piece of the World Trade Center radio tower to help evoke the scale of the attack (Sturken 2016), and some memorial museums, particularly well-known are those in Rwanda, display human remains as one of the most potent forms of evidence and authenticity of the violence displayed (e.g., Guyer 2009; Vidal 2004). At the same time, museums, including and especially memorial museums, have sought new, innovative ways to bring the past closer to the present using digital technology. Even those that display objects also tend to incorporate film, audio, projections, and other forms of interactive media into their displays, as well as maintain a robust online presence. And while this was a clear trend before March 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic forced museums around the world into the digital realm, prompting them to offer virtual tours, online programming, apps to provide visitors with virtual experiences, and, in some cases, paving the way for fully online exhibitions and museums. As museums open up again, this

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move to the digital has likely changed their functions forever, moving them even further from a focus on objects and collections toward being institutions aimed at education, community participation, and social change.

The National Museum of African American History and Culture The Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) opened in 2016 on Washington, DC’s National Mall. While today the museum’s existence and location in the heart of the nation’s capital feels inevitable, political, social, and economic vicissitudes of the twentieth century mirrored and shaped the one-hundred-year long struggle to nationally recognize African American accomplishment and oppression, and at many points it seemed the project would never come to fruition. However, the museum’s long journey made it into what it is today: a national, Smithsonian institution that sits adjacent to the Washington Monument encased in a striking bronze corona that references the history and culture of the African diaspora. The triumph of its existence and impressive external structure on the Mall is replicated inside with a stunningly comprehensive five floors of permanent exhibitions and extensive temporary exhibitions and public programming. With the full institutional power of the Smithsonian behind it, the NMAAHC’s massive collection of objects is particularly impressive and is central to the museum’s narrative of the African American experience. The museum began as an effort to build a monument to Black soldiers in Washington, DC in 1915, and from the very beginning, the project was about more than celebrating and preserving the African American experience: it was meant to be transformative – a way to “humanize” Black Americans by showing their accomplishments and contributions to American culture (Wilkens 2016, 36). When the Smithsonian ultimately took over the project in 1992, it ensured the highest levels of museum professionalism and decided in 2005 to hire Lonnie Bunch to be its founding director. Bunch, who went on to serve as the first African American Secretary of the Smithsonian, started his career as a curator at the National Museum of American History and surrounded himself with a team of professional curators, historians, exhibition designers, and architects to develop a world class museum. But the original desire to change hearts and minds was also central to Bunch’s vision for the museum: the museum would be a laboratory for me to test and implement my hopes for what a museum could be in the 21st century [. . .] an institution that was of value both in the tradi-

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tional ways of curating exhibitions, enriching education opportunities, and preserving collections and in nontraditional ways, such as being a safe space where issues of social justice, fairness and racial reconciliation are central to the soul of the museum. (Bunch 2019, 9–10)

From the beginning he saw that the museum must do more than just display artifacts and teach history, but that it must also work to change visitors to become better citizens and work toward social justice and racial reconciliation. Yet, as the team of professionals worked to fill the beautiful building with objects and exhibitions, there was a nagging problem: how to create a collection from nothing. As a longtime curator, earlier in his career Bunch himself had subscribed to a common assumption that there exists a “paucity of objects that illustrate African American history and culture” (Bunch 2019, 90). Just as traditional historical narratives are written by the victors, so museum professionals and the general public have long assumed that there is little extant material culture associated with minoritized groups who have been largely left out of public history. In the early days of the museum’s conception, Bunch and his team wondered whether a collection was even necessary, or whether technology could replace artifacts in telling the museum’s story, particularly in light of the changing roles of museums (Bunch 2019, 92). But Bunch’s experience curating other African American exhibitions for the Smithsonian suggested that one just had to find creative ways to uncover the lost treasures of African American history. Fortunately, he had the resources and reputation of the Smithsonian behind him. In addition to reaching out to collectors, museums, archives, and other historic institutions to mine their collections, Bunch – inspired by the popular PBS program Antiques Roadshow – initiated a program called Save Our African American Treasures. Over several years, this program traveled the country, inviting people to bring their treasures in for consultations with curators with the goal of helping families preserve these objects and understand their symbolic and monetary value. Not only did this program help the museum acquire objects, but it also provided ways to connect with communities: in helping people see the value of their family heirlooms, the museum team built trust with communities and interest in the museum (Bunch 2019, 95). Perhaps more importantly, this project helped to shift ideas about the value of objects and what “belongs” in a museum. For museums do not only seek to collect objects of value, but they themselves ascribe value to objects. As Peter Vergo writes in The New Museology, “In the acquisition of material, of whatever kind, let alone putting the material on public display [. . .] museums make certain choices determined by judgments as to value, significance or monetary worth, judgments [. . .] rooted in our education, our upbringing, our prejudices” (1989, 2). In developing and displaying their collection, Bunch and the curatorial team of

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the NMAAHC challenged traditional notions of what sorts of objects belong in museums: objects like a handmade tin box in which Joseph Trammel kept his freedom papers or a rough-hewn washboard used by enslaved women laundering clothes gain a new meaning as items of public display for the whole nation to see. In addition to these grassroots efforts to build a collection out of nothing, the museum had some high profile acquisitions enabled by its status as a Smithsonian institution. Charles Blockson, a historian and collector who co-founded the African American Museum in Philadelphia, donated a trove of items belonging to Harriet Tubman – her shawl and hymnal are on display – and Joyce Bailey, daughter of fashion designer and founder of the Black Fashion Museum in Harlem, Louis K. Alexander, donated her mother’s collection of objects related to Black fashion, including the dress sewn by Rosa Parks that she was carrying when she was arrested in Montgomery, Alabama, for refusing to move to the back of a (segregated) bus (Bunch 2019, 99). For Bunch, the most meaningful, but also in some ways the most fraught object, is the casket that Emmett Till was buried in.5 Early in his tenure as the new museum director, his friend Mamie Till Mobley had asked him to carry on the memory of Emmett. Though he and his team worried about the ethics of collecting and displaying a casket, ultimately they decided that accepting the donation would be an essential part of carrying Emmett’s memory6 (Bunch 2019, 113). Today the casket is affectively displayed as a dedicated memorial space in the museum, attracting throngs of visitors, many of whom are moved to tears, and underlining that though this is primarily a history museum, memory is infused into its exhibitions, narratives and functions.7 The result of Bunch and his team’s hard work is a breathtaking collection of tens of thousands of objects that are central to telling the museum’s story. Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA), known for their work in similar institutions, such as the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, designed the exhibitions. Using layers of text panels, photographs, documents, videos, and many, many artifacts, the museum tells the story of the African American experience; its history galleries span three underground levels  Till’s body was exhumed in 2005 for an investigation by the Justice Department into whether anyone was involved in Till’s murder other than Roy Bryant and JW Milam, who were tried and acquitted and subsequently confessed to the crime, knowing they could not be tried again. The Justice Department found no one else implicated and Till was reburied, while the original casket was placed in storage until the NMAAHC acquired it in 2009.  While Till’s murder was horrifying, the decision of Mamie Till to have an open-casket funeral so that all could see how brutally he was beaten was a real catalyst for the Civil Rights Movement, infusing it with even more meaning.  For a discussion of the representation of Emmett Till’s story in the National Museum of American History, see the chapter by M. Elizabeth Weiser in this volume.

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and stretch from the beginnings of the Transatlantic Slave Trade up to the election of Barack Obama in 2008. But the sheer scope of this history is not the greatest challenge facing the museum. As a national museum it must tell the story of African American history, most of which is a story of oppression and injustice, as central to American history, which is rooted in patriarchal white supremacy and myths of freedom, equality, and democracy. Further, it must try to reconcile a fundamental contradiction at the heart of representing enslavement: the tension between a focus on the inhumanity and supreme violence of slavery versus one that celebrates African American resistance and agency. The museum is filled with contradictions, which it addresses and tries to resolve through its objects and narratives. The objects on display range from small – a burnt penny that survived the race massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1921, a wedding ring used in over 400 banned weddings, a bonnet worn by an enslaved woman in the cotton fields – to the massive – a prison watch tower, a segregated rail car, a slave cabin. There are the objects that one might expect to see when learning about the history of slavery – such as shackles and an auction block – or segregation – “whites only” signs and KKK hoods. But there are also objects that are unexpected and gain a new meaning on display in this museum. One example are the artifacts from Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia plantation, Monticello, such as Jefferson’s eyeglasses and a pen holder, which are reframed as tools that helped him craft the fundamental paradox of a nation founded on the principle that “all men are created equal” while embracing the institution of slavery. In this way the museum seeks to tell a broad and sweeping national story, but one in which individual lives and stories, largely narrated through objects, help to “humanize” this complicated history. By helping visitors identify with individual experiences, the museum seeks to demonstrate that African American history is US history. The exhibits also display humanizing objects together in ways that advance the museum’s efforts to balance the “terrible” and the “beautiful” (Gardullo & Bunch 2017) – the horrors of slavery and racial oppression with the agency, resilience, and accomplishment of Black Americans. Thus, throughout the exhibition, for every object of violence and torture, such as a whip, is an object of beauty, such as an African sculpture. For every exhibit about oppression, like the display about the many rules that governed enslaved people’s lives, are stories and objects about their subversion – books that enslaved individuals impossibly learned to read and write; musical instruments from churches where enslaved people defied laws against assembly; cooking vessels that demonstrate how enslaved individuals nourished their families despite living in inhuman conditions. The NMAAHC’s exhibition represents and reflects the popular African American expression “making a way out of no way,” a phrase that is repeated throughout its exhibits as a reference to exhibits that emphasize African American resilience and fortitude.

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Figure 1: Point of Pines Cabin, NMAAHC Slavery and Freedom exhibition. Photo: Eric Long, with permission of National Museum of African American History and Culture.

One exhibit that embodies this balance is the Point of Pines slave cabin (see Figure 1). The cabin was built in 1853 to house enslaved people at Point of Pines cotton plantation on Edisto Island, South Carolina and donated to the museum in 2013 (Shah 2018). To visitors, it is unimaginably small, and one can all too easily imagine not only the elements making their way through the gaps between the wooden slats that form its walls but also the cruelty of slavery and constant reminder of the enslaved’s state of bondage. But the cabin is displayed on the cusp of slavery and freedom. As Bunch explains, the cabin was “a space where so many horrible things happen[ed]” but also a “place where people who were enslaved had a chance to live their own lives” (quoted in Shah 2018). On the side of the cabin facing the slavery exhibit, the text explains that such cabins provided “some shelter, but no safety,” yet surrounding the cabin are various household items that would have been used in the cabin to “nourish” and “cultivate.” As one proceeds through the museum’s story of the Civil War and abolition of slavery, the visitor finds herself again at the cabin, this time on the “freedom” side. Here the text tells visitors that after emancipation, African Americans were able to stay with their families, choose where they lived, and earn wages

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for their labor. The Point of Pines cabin, on this side, is re-presented as a symbol of the emergent freedom of African Americans after the war. Many African Americans returned to live in former slave cabins and – although now newly oppressed as sharecroppers – they were able to make these cabins their own, with new walls, doors, paint, and décor. For Bunch this cabin thus represents optimism and resilience: “It’s ripe with hope, because the belief is if you can survive that cabin, there’s a lot more you can survive” (quoted in Shah 2018). Thus, the cabin becomes a central point in reiterating the museum’s efforts to balance the beautiful and terrible, the oppression and resilience of African Americans. However, despite the fact that the museum centers African American history within the larger history of the USA and confronts the horrors of slavery in stark and discomforting ways, the historical exhibition concludes with a section called A Changing America, which ends with the election of Obama in 2008. The long history of slavery and segregation and centuries of struggle for justice and equality thus culminate in the museum with the triumph of the election of America’s first African American president. As visitors emerge from the subterranean dark of historical racial injustice, they are met with massive photographs of the enormous crowd at Obama’s inauguration, magazines and newspapers proclaiming his victory, campaign buttons and signs, and even Michelle Obama’s dress. From here, visitors can ascend to the upper floors that celebrate African American achievements in music, arts, sports, and larger American culture, again illustrated through an astounding array of objects. But the overarching narrative is clear: the long, dark history of racial injustice in the USA is largely behind us and can be relegated to the past, an argument that is underlined by the museum’s careful display of its multitude of objects as relics of this past. Though the museum takes a remarkably critical stance toward the history of race and racism in the USA, in particular for a national museum, it ultimately tells a narrative of racial progress.

Legacy Museum: From Enslavement to Mass Incarceration Just one and a half years after the NMAAHC, the Legacy Museum opened in Montgomery, Alabama, in April 2018. Like the NMAAHC, the Legacy Museum challenges hegemonic narratives of race in the USA by centering slavery and racial injustice in US history, but in many ways the museums are starkly different: where the NMAAHC was a federal project, developed over a century of struggle and planning, costing $540 million, and boasting over 105,000 square feet of exhi-

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bition space, the Legacy Museum was a small, private initiative, created in just 18 months using entirely private funding, and opened in 2018 at just 11,000 square feet. And though the Legacy Museum was expanded and reopened at four times the original size in 2021, it is still a fraction of the size of the NMAAHC and retains its private funding, allowing it to fly under the proverbial political radar.8 Additionally, in part because it is a private institution with significantly fewer resources than the NMAAHC, but also because the museum was created to make an almost legal argument, it narrates this past of racial injustice, violence, and the ongoing legacies of slavery in a way that is very different from the NMAAHC. Lawyer Bryan Stevenson created The Legacy Museum with his activist organization, the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), which fights injustice in the criminal legal system. Over the course of decades of doing this work, Stevenson realized that the roots of such injustice stretch all the way back to the institution of slavery, and he became convinced that the only way to right the present wrongs he witnessed every day was for Americans to better understand this history. What started as extensive research by EJI’s team of attorneys into slavery and lynching in America developed into the Legacy Museum and its sister institution, the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, which commemorates over 4,000 individuals killed in US racial terror lynchings. Together, the museum and memorial are intended to convey this long-silenced history to the American public and to center racial injustice in the American story. However, because it is not a national museum, the Legacy Museum is free to make its own strident argument: that slavery did not end but evolved from racial terror lynchings to segregation and today’s system of mass incarceration. Further departing from more traditional museums, the Legacy Museum was not created by a team of museum professionals, but by EJI attorneys with technological and exhibition design assistance from several different firms, including Google, Madeo, a design studio with an emphasis on “social impact,” and Local Projects, an ”experience design” firm best known for their work on the 9/11 Museum.9 And while the Legacy Museum’s exhibits are not unlike the NMAAHC’s in that they are contemporary, well-designed, and dense with information, conveyed through layers of text, photographs, documents (most of which are reproductions), and many videos, there are virtually no objects in the museum. Challenging notions of museums as primarily institutions defined by objects and demonstrating the shifting roles and strategies of museums in the

 Most of the following analysis is based on the new version of the museum, though I do include references to the original.  EJI worked with Local Projects for the first version of the Legacy Museum but did not work with them on the expanded version, though some of the design elements from the first version have been carried over into the second.

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twenty-first century, the Legacy Museum has found other innovative and creative ways to narrate its story of ongoing racial injustice in the USA. One of the key ways the Legacy Museum works to impact visitors with its narrative is through the authenticity of its location. Slavery shaped the city of Montgomery and the Legacy Museum has videos, maps, and text panels that explain this. However, it is not just its location in the city of Montgomery that the museum emphasizes but the space of the museum itself. In its first iteration, visitors were greeted upon entry with this stark message, painted on the brick wall: You are standing on a site where enslaved people were warehoused. The old brick building, while beautifully renovated into a new museum, evoked the horrors of slavery, as thousands of individuals were warehoused within it before being auctioned as property. When the museum moved to its new, clearly purpose-built home, EJI continued to make the connection between authentic historic site and the story the museum tells. Here the museum tells you that you are on the site of a former cotton warehouse where enslaved people labored. Though the new museum feels another step removed from the authentic historic site, as Stevenson explained on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered: The new museum is [. . .] on a street that was two blocks from the rail station where hundreds of enslaved people landed each day in Montgomery, were put in chains and paraded up that street where they were assessed for purchase, commodified. And I do think there’s something powerful when you’re standing in these spaces learning about this history, knowing that the soil you’re standing on is the same soil where enslaved people sweated [. . .] I think it’s important that the authenticity of this space be a part of the experience. (NPR 2021)

In addition to impressing upon visitors the authenticity of its location, the key object displayed in the museum is meant to further amplify the museum’s argument: the soil collections from sites of lynchings. EJI has documented over 6,500 racial terror lynchings in the USA and has worked with local communities through their Community Remembrance Project to acknowledge and commemorate the violence. An important part of this work is the collection of soil from the sites of lynchings. As Stevenson’s earlier quotation suggests, he sees in soil a connection to the past – to the blood and sweat of those who were enslaved, abused, and killed, and soil has become a metaphor for acknowledgement; it also, in the words of Marita Sturken “is a powerful material means to situate this history [of lynching] within the landscape” (2022, 228). There are no longer bodies that can be respectfully reinterred, so the soil collection serves as a sort of inverse burial, where the ground upon which violence occurred is uprooted and sacralized in its new place. The new Legacy Museum displays over 800 jars of soil, each with a county, a date, and a name, though many are Unknown (see Figure 2). The range of colors and textures is remarkable and the jars are beautiful, but they are also haunting in the materiality of the soil

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Figure 2: Community Remembrance Project soil display. Legacy Museum. Photo and permission by Equal Justice Initiative.

they contain and its connection to this violent past. However, while the soil evokes the authenticity of the places in which lynchings occurred, the soil itself is very much from the present, not the past. The Legacy Museum provides another powerful encounter with the past – and present – to visitors, which again departs from traditional museological displays. Early in the exhibition, visitors enter the slave pens (see Figure 3). In dark, small cells, holograms of enslaved people awaiting their imminent sale on the auction block come to life and speak to visitors as they approach the cells (fading into the background as they walk away): a woman begs to see her children, two terrified children timidly ask if you have seen their mother, a woman describes the horrors of the slave pens, while another sings mournful hymns. Just as the soil stands in for bodies that are no longer present, so the holograms stand in for the millions whose voices have been lost to history. The holograms are an example of what cultural historian Ewa Domanska, in analyzing the powerful absence of the bodies of Argentina’s desaparecidos (the disappeared), refers to as the “non-absent past” (2006, 346). This past “whose absence is manifest” is one “that is somehow still present, that will not go away [ . . . and one] of which we cannot rid ourselves” (2006, 346). The ghostly holograms haunt visitors with their absence. But this haunting goes further, and “situates the past explicitly within the

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Figure 3: Slave Pens. Legacy Museum. Photo and permission by Equal Justice Initiative.

present and signals that it will demand that visitors engage at the level of complicity with the exhibition content” (Sturken 2022, 234). And yet, while these specters of the non-absent past are ethereal and fleeting, a final encounter with the present brings the ghosts full circle. Again departing from traditional museum displays, the exhibition ends with an exhibit on mass incarceration and a simulated prison visitation room in which visitors can “talk” to incarcerated individuals. Taking a seat, visitors pick up a telephone and hear the story of the prisoner on a video screen in front of them. All of the individuals are or were actually imprisoned and their stories are heartbreaking reminders of the injustices of our prison system: a woman describes giving birth to a baby, after being raped by a prison guard, only to have the infant taken from her after less than 24 hours; a young man describes his 18 years in solitary confinement after being sentenced to life in prison at 14 years old. Unlike the ghostly specters in the slave pens, these people are very much alive, telling their stories in high definition and similarly imploring that visitors shoulder some responsibility for this injustice. But their stories of being “disposed, captive and silenced” in the prison system suggests that they might be more akin to “living ghosts” in American society (Hudson 2017, 93). Just as slavery stripped enslaved individuals of their humanity and placed them in cages, so, too does the USA’s contemporary manifestation of slavery discard and dehumanize these individuals.

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As this brief overview demonstrates, the Legacy Museum uses virtually no objects to narrate its story, evidencing the shift in museums’ functions in the early twenty-first century. It has no collection to maintain and display and was instead built around the powerful, almost legal argument that slavery still exists in the USA today, though in a new and less visible form. However, the museum also presents an affective narrative. Through encounters with the past in the authenticity of the place, the jars of soil, and the holograms and prisoner visits, the museum creates an affective experience that departs from previous “object-based epistemology” in museums (Conn 2010). Jacque Micieli-Voutsinas refers to this mode of implicit, emotional learning in spaces like memorial museums as “affective heritage,” which creates for visitors a visceral experience that allows them to not just cognitively process what they are learning, but to “feel truth” (2021, 6). The Legacy Museum envisions itself as an “engine for education about the legacy of racial inequality and for the truth and reconciliation that leads to real solutions to contemporary problems”,10 and through its use of affective elements and a compellingly researched and presented argument, it is indeed a powerful museum. It has been wildly popular, attracting thousands of tourists and helping to revitalize downtown Montgomery; during the pandemic, while many museums struggled to survive the shutdowns and funding cuts, EJI used the lull to create a larger museum that could accommodate the huge audiences it continues to attract. Like the NMAAHC, the Legacy Museum is challenging hegemonic narratives of race in the USA but in ways that dramatically depart from traditional museological functions, perhaps pointing toward the future of museums as they continue to move further from their focus on collections and objects.

Objects, Authenticity, and Temporality Both the NMAAHC and the Legacy Museum are doing something very new in American museology: they place race at the center of US history and force (white) visitors to confront this history and their role within it. As Alison Landsberg writes of the NMAAHC and its unflinching telling of American history centered on racial oppression, “The museum creates the occasion for white people to confront the violence that whites, and white supremacy, have inflicted on blacks” and to “own uncomfortable memories of American whiteness” (2018, 209). Similarly, the Legacy Museum places the burden of responsibility on (white) visitors and communities: the stark narrative and strident argument of the museum force  https://museumandmemorial.eji.org/museum (May 1, 2023).

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visitors to not only confront past racial terror but also to link it to present forms of oppression. This is a radical departure from other US museums that address race. While the USA has over 200 museums of African American culture and history, most tell uplifting narratives of racial progress. Through celebrations of the triumph of the Civil Rights Movement and a focus on heroes like Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks, they sanitize past racial violence and avoid narratives of black victimization in order to fit the “narrative of progress that resonates with more conventional representations of American social values and mores” (Autry 2013, 77). This narrative of progress is muted in the NMAAHC and largely absent in the Legacy Museum. Yet, despite the ways in which they similarly challenge hegemonic historical narratives around race, they have remarkably different modes of narrating this difficult past and the museums themselves feel as though they are from different eras. The NMAAHC opened in the waning days of Obama’s presidency, when much of the nation believed that Hillary Clinton would prevail in the 2016 US presidential election and continue Obama’s legacy; the optimism of this moment is structured into the historical exhibition, in particular with its triumphant culmination in the 2008 election of Obama. While the long and brutal history of racial oppression cannot be denied or minimized, the suggestion is that the worst is behind us. The Legacy Museum, on the other hand, opened in what Alison Landsberg refers to as “post-postracial America” (2018). With Donald Trump’s election in 2016, after a campaign replete with racist rhetoric, followed by the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017, which not only turned deadly but also demonstrated that the highest office in the nation condoned white supremacy and racism, any illusions of a postracial America had been decisively shattered. This post-postracial ethos permeates the Legacy Museum’s powerful narrative; while the museum and EJI clearly have optimism for the future that underpins the work that they do, the historical narrative in the museum resists any celebration of racial progress. But it is not only the precarious times in which these museums opened that places them in what feels like different eras; it is also their exhibition strategies. The NMAAHC’s fairly traditional exhibition design by Ralph Appelbaum Associates underpins the anachronistic feel of the triumphant end to the its historical narrative. Though one of the most prominent exhibition design firms, in particular for memorial museums, even Bunch wondered if RAA might be a bit traditional for the twenty-first century museum he envisioned: “I knew that RAA had mastered the creation of twentieth-century exhibitions, but I was unsure if the firm could help the museum identify and address the challenges of audience and technology that would be at the heart of the twenty-first-century exhibition development” (2019, 169). While the NMAAHC exhibitions have been lauded, ultimately

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the museum hewed to convention; the museum’s dim lighting aimed at preserving its historical objects, the ubiquitous glass vitrines filled with artfully displayed artifacts, and the dense, interpretive text panels feel predictable and static next to those of the Legacy Museum. With its innovative multimedia and interactive elements and narrative approach that emphasizes storytelling over the display of artifacts, the Legacy Museum appears to be challenging RAA’s standards for twentyfirst century memorial museum design. And these widely divergent exhibitionary strategies produce different experiences of temporality in the two museums. Both museums work to connect the past to the present – to demonstrate to visitors that the legacies of slavery continue to shape present US society. In the Legacy Museum there are clear efforts to take the visitor “back in time” for an encounter with the past. The slave pens seek to give visitors an encounter with the ghosts of the past and the horrors they endured. Similarly, the new museum opens with several rooms about the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the first of which is empty with the sounds of waves crashing and a high definition projection of waves crashing all around the visitor. For a few moments the visitor is engulfed in the ocean – the site of a terrifying journey for twelve million Africans and the watery grave of an estimated two million who died on the way. But more often, and even in these experiential encounters, rather than visitors being taken into the past, the past is thrust into the present as an uncomfortable reminder of just how present it remains. The ghostly holograms speak to visitors using the most cutting-edge museum technology, inserting themselves into comfortable historical narratives, such as the belief that slavery was largely a benign institution. And they are echoed by today’s ghosts – the millions who are caught up in the criminal justice system, unjustly locked up, abused, and oppressed because of the “permanent racial hierarchy” that the institution of slavery created. The jars of soil are also interjections of the past into the present. Many believe(d) that the racial terror of America’s past could stay safely buried under decades of amnesia and narratives of racial progress, but EJI has shattered that myth. The jars of soil literally dig up a past that many Americans wish could be forgotten and prominently display it in a way meant to disrupt the present. The NMAAHC also works to connect past and present, primarily by taking visitors into the past in experiential encounters common to memorial museums. The museum has a room on the Transatlantic Slave Trade that is similar to the Legacy Museum’s: in a cramped, dark room with waves crashing in the background, visitors walk along a creaky wooden plank catwalk listening to testimony of individuals who endured the journey. Later the exhibition invites visitors to walk through a segregated rail car to better understand what public transportation was like during the Jim Crow era in the first half of the twentieth century when segregation was legal and the norm throughout the Southern USA. Visitors get to “experi-

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ence” the lack of luggage racks in the “colored” cars and the small restrooms with none of the amenities of the “white” cars. Nearby is a contemporary interpretation of a Woolworth’s lunch counter with an interactive civil rights experience: sitting at the counter, visitors are invited to “step into the shoes of event organizers and participants”11 of the Civil Rights Movement and on touchscreens determine how they would respond to challenges, opportunities, and setbacks while a panoramic projection highlights key moments of the Civil Rights Movement. However, despite these interactive efforts to bring the visitor into the past, the past rarely intervenes in the present. Rather, with the museum’s impressive collection displayed safely behind both glass and layers of interpretation and explanation, with its traditional museum designs that adhere to the norms of displaying the past, and with its overarching temporal narrative, which declares Obama’s election to be the end of African American “history,” the NMAAHC rather effectively leaves the past in the past.

Conclusion Robert Meister, in his book After Evil: The Politics of Human Rights, aptly argues that “The cost of achieving a moral consensus that the past was evil is to reach a political consensus that the evil is past” (2012, 25). Until recently this has been the driving impulse in American public memory and history of slavery; when it has been addressed in museums and other spaces of memory, it is generally portrayed as something belonging to distant history, separate from the present. These new museums are working to rewrite this history and make slavery and its legacies central to the American story. However, to do this they employ dramatically different modes of narration. The NMAAHC, while presenting a breathtaking material history of the African American experience, places its collection carefully behind glass – at a distance not only from visitors but also from the present. In the words of Domanska, the display mechanisms of these objects, rather than demonstrating their connection to present injustices, may instead serve to “neutraliz[e] and tam[e] their threatening otherness [serving as . . . ] a perverse method of disciplining things by way of their domestication” (2006, 346). The objects and their display help to differentiate past and present and ensure that the worst parts of US history remain firmly in the past.

 https://segd.org/segregated-lunch-counter-and-panorama-civil-rights-movement (March 16, 2023).

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In the Legacy Museum, the few objects on display – like the jars of soil – are not historic, but are from the present. These, together with the “manifest absence” of the “non-absent” past, serve as stark reminders of the past’s continued hold on the present (Domanska 2006). In the authenticity of the museum’s location and the ghosts that it invokes for visitors, the Legacy Museum allows the past to interrupt and disrupt any comfortable notion that the past is behind us. In doing so, the Legacy Museum functions as an “activist museum,” that “deploys memory [. . .] as a means to change the contemporary situation” of ongoing racial injustice (Sturken 2022, 254). And yet, despite their different modes of narrating the past, together these two museums indicate that a new discursive space has opened in the USA to more critically and honestly address the violent history and ongoing legacies of slavery. As museums continue to shift and evolve in their functions and roles, they remind us of museums’ potential to challenge hegemonic histories and contribute to meaningful historical dialogue.

Bibliography Andermann, Jens. “Showcasing Dictatorship: Memory and the Museum in Argentina and Chile.” Journal of Educational Media, Memory & Society 4.2 (2012): 69–93. Andermann, Jens, and Silke Arnold-de Simine. “Introduction: Memory, Community and the New Museum.” Theory, Culture & Society 29.1 (2012): 3–13. Autry, Robyn. “The Political Economy of Memory: The Challenges of Representing National Conflict at ‘Identity-Driven’ Museums.” Theory and Society 42 (2013): 57–80. Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Hannah Arendt. New York: Shocken Books, 1968. 217–252. Bennett, Tony. “The Exhibitionary Complex.” New Formations 4 (1988): 73–102. Bunch, Lonnie. A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2019. Casey, Valerie. “Staging Meaning: Performance in the Modern Museum.” TDR / The Drama Review 49.3 (2005): 78–95. Conn, Steve. Do Museums Still Need Objects? Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010. Crooke, Elizabeth. “Memory Politics and Material Culture: Display in the Memorial Museum.” Memory Studies 12.6 (2019): 617–629. Domanska, Ewa. “The Material Presence of the Past.” History and Theory 45.3 (2006): 337–348. Douglass, Frederick. “The Color Line.” The North American Review 132.295 (1881): 567–577. Duncan, Carole. “The Art Museum as a Ritual of Citizenship.” Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Ed. Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1991. 88–103. Gardullo, Paul, and Lonnie Bunch. “Making a Way Out of No Way: the National Museum of African American History and Culture.” History Workshop Journal 84 (2017): 248–256. Guyer, Sarah. “Rwanda’s Bones.” boundary 2 36.2 (2009): 155–175. Hudson, Martin. Ghosts, Landscapes and Social Memory. London: Routledge, 2017.

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IMPACTS Research. “People Trust Museums More Than Newspapers: Here Is Why That Matters Right Now (DATA).” IMPACTS Experience, 2017: https://www.colleendilen.com/2017/04/26/people-trustmuseums-more-than-newspapers-here-is-why-that-matters-right-now-data/ (March 16, 2023). Landsberg, Alison. “Post-Postracial America: On Westworld and the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture.” Cultural Politics 14.2 (2018): 198–215. Meister, Robert. After Evil: A Politics of Human Rights, New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Merritt, Elizabeth. “New Economic Models for Field Wide Research, American Alliance of Museums, August 4, 2015: https://www.aam-us.org/2015/08/04/new-economic-models-for-field-wideresearch/ (March 16, 2023). Merritt, Elizabeth. “Exploring Museums and Trust 2021.” American Alliance of Museums, October 5, 2021: https://www.aam-us.org/2021/10/05/exploring-museums-and-trust-2021/ (March 16, 2023). Micieli-Voutsinas, Jaques. Affective Heritage and the Politics of Memory after 9/11: Curating Trauma at the Memorial Museum. New York: Routledge, 2021. NPR. “Museum tracing legacy of slavery in America marks moment for ‘truth-telling’.” All Things Considered. October 3, 2021: https://www.npr.org/2021/10/03/1042883036/museum-tracinglegacy-of-slavery-in-america-marks-moment-for-truth-telling (March 16, 2023). Shah, Haleema. “This South Carolina Cabin Is Now a Crown Jewel in the Smithsonian Collections.” Smithsonian Magazine, November 2, 2018: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonianinstitution/south-carolina-cabin-has-become-crown-jewel-smithsonian-collections-180970681/ (March 16, 2023). Sturken, Marita. “The Objects That Lived: The 9/11 Museum and Material Transformation.” Memory Studies 9.1 (2016): 13–26. Sturken, Marita. Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Vergo, Peter (ed.). The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books, 1989. Vidal, Claudine. “La Commémoration du Génocide au Rwanda.” Cahiers d’Études Africaines, 175 (2004): 575–592. Wilkens, Robert L. Long Road to Hard Truth: The 100 Year Mission to Create the National Museum of African American History and Culture. Washington, DC: Proud Legacy Publishing, 2016.

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Reading Museum Narratives: A Narratological Approach to the Holocaust Exhibitions at the Jewish Museum Trondheim and the Oslo Jewish Museum Introduction A narrative occurs whenever an account of a sequence of events is presented to a recipient; its basic function is to “‘report’ facts (real or fictive)” (Genette 1980, 161). Cultural theorist Mieke Bal argues that narrative is of fundamental importance for mankind, as it “enables us to make meaning out of the chaotic world and the incomprehensible events taking place in it” (Bal 2002, 10). A constructor selects events from real or imaginary chaos, organizes them in sequences, and presents them in a way that allows a recipient to identify connections, assign causality, and imagine and emotionally engage with them as a story unfolding in time and space. Like cultural memory, narrative is thus simultaneously both a process of shaping and constructing, and the product of this process (Erll 2009). In the twenty-first century, museums are storytellers: constructors and distributors of narratives. They have evolved beyond collection-driven institutions with artifacts that “speak for themselves,” becoming visitor-centered agents of critical storytelling. Contemporary museums use narrativization strategies to address their audience and invite visitors to participate – to immerse themselves in stories, relate to them, and integrate them into their own experiences, ideas, and knowledge (Anderson 2004; Arnold-de Simine 2013; Bedford 2014; Jaeger 2020; Simon 2010, among others). Memory museums are a relatively new addition to contemporary museum types. They are dedicated to recounting traumatic historical events – persecutions, migrations, and violence – to ensure their future remembrance. Because of the emphasis on remembrance, they focus not only on the past events themselves, but also their afterlife: the affective, collective, and cultural processes of remembering the past in the present. In memory museums, visitors enter “memory communities,” social environments created to connect the present to the past (Arnold-de Simine 2012, 22; Arnold-de Simine 2013, 12; Jaeger 2020, 8). Memory museum narratives thus potentially encompass multiple layers of time: the historical event, post-event memories and postmemories (Hirsch 2012), the present act of narration, and the future in the form of didactic goals for future behavior (Jaeger 2020, 26–32). Visitors actively participate in creating these https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-003

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narratives by making connections between the time layers and the attached subjectivities of the people living the event, the people remembering and recounting the event, and the visitors’ own memories and identities. Jewish museums are a sub-genre of memory museums. Worldwide, they are faced with the difficult task of creating a meaningful narrative from the historical events we refer to as the Holocaust, and of placing a narrative of genocide within a larger narrative of Jewish life and culture.1 In Norway, two museums in the cities that have become centers for the Norwegian Jewish communities have taken on this task. Both the Jewish Museum Trondheim, which opened in 1997, and the Oslo Jewish Museum, which opened in 2008, reside in historical buildings that today serve the double role of museum and Jewish cultural center. The museum in Trondheim shares a location with the city’s only active synagogue, while the one in Oslo is housed in a former synagogue that was active from 1921 to 1941.2 Both museums are currently holding Holocaust exhibitions: Hjemme. Borte. Holocaust i Trondheim [Home. Gone. The Holocaust in Trondheim] (Jewish Museum Trondheim 2019) and Husk oss til livet. Jødiske skjebner 1940–45 [Remember Us Unto Life – Jews in Norway 1940–45] (Oslo Jewish Museum 2012). The exhibitions recount the genocide of Norwegian Jews during the Second World War. Of around 2,100 Jews living in Norway at the beginning of the Nazi occupation in 1940, nearly 1,200 escaped the country. In 1942 and 1943, 773 men, women, and children were deported to Nazi death camps; only 38 survived. At the 1946 census, the Norwegian Jewish community numbered 546 individuals. The State Police’s systematic persecution and deportation of Jewish citizens makes Norway the only Scandinavian country that participated in the Nazi regime’s so-called Final Solution (Banik 2021; Bruland & Tangestuen 2011, 587–590). The exhibition Home. Gone occupies a small room connected to the museum’s foyer, which occasionally serves as the venue for Trondheim’s Jewish community’s celebrations. A door separates the exhibition from the foyer, allowing visitors to choose when to engage in Holocaust remembrance. The exhibition design is minimalistic, monochromatic, and makes extensive use of the written word. A white strip of 16 rectangular panels alternately displaying text and images runs along three black walls, creating a linear narrative to be read from left to right. The first panel offers a historical account of the Holocaust in Central Norway and provides context for the following 15 biographies of 16 Jews who lived in Trondheim when the Second World War broke out.3 Each biography includes a written  For a discussion of Holocaust representation in a war museum, see the chapter by Maria Kobielska in this volume.  The synagogue in Trondheim was established in 1925 and renovated and reopened in 1947.  The last biography tells the story of two sisters, Lea and Ragnhild Levin.

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Figure 1: View from entrance door in Home. Gone. © Jewish Museum Trondheim.

account of life before and during the war as well as a pre-1945 family photo. A large white panel to the right of the entrance lists the 125 Jewish citizens of Central and Northern Norway who were murdered in the Holocaust, providing their names as well as their dates and places of birth and death. The only threedimensional exhibit is in the middle of the room: an installation of wooden coat hangers on a horizontal rod placed a few inches higher than a standard closet rod (see Figure 1). The hangers bear the names and logos of Jewish-owned Trondheim businesses from the 1930s and 40s. The exhibition does not make use of audio, moving images, or digital media of any kind, and the coat hangers and family photos are its only historical artifacts.4 Remember Us occupies nearly a third of a large assembly room that the Oslo Jewish Museum and the Jewish cultural center also use to host social and cultural activities. Where Home. Gone is monochromatic and purist, restricting itself to  As a supplement to the exhibition, the museum offers a mobile application featuring an interactive map of the city center, which recounts stories of the Holocaust in Trondheim connected to the wartime addresses of Jewish citizens and Nazi headquarters. The mobile application is not part of this analysis.

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Figure 2: Escape section (detail) in Remember Us. © Oslo Jewish Museum / Bolt Design.

small-scale photos and text, Remember Us is multicolored, large, and multimodal, displaying a variety of material artifacts, texts, and media types. The exhibition recounts the history of the Norwegian Holocaust in three sections. In the middle of the room, a historical report informs visitors about the Holocaust’s political history. Two other thematic sections exhibit the stories of 17 Jewish families on 17 panels dominated by large family photos; each panel employs a different combination of objects, scenography, written text, and audio or audiovisual media. The section to the right of the entrance focuses on the escape of Norwegian Jews to Sweden; a scenographic tableau using birch trunks evokes the landscape they traversed. Several audio and audiovisual testimonies of Holocaust survivors and their helpers and descendants augment this section (see Figure 2). The section to the left memorializes the lives of the people who were murdered, employing a scenography that evokes the private space of family apartments (see Figure 3).

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Figure 3: Memorializing the death victims (detail) in Remember Us. © Oslo Jewish Museum / Bolt Design.

Reading Holocaust Exhibitions through Narratology This chapter provides a comparative narratological analysis of Norway’s two Jewish Museums’ current Holocaust exhibitions, examining both how they construct meaning, and how visitors can be expected to experience and understand them. The analysis is intended to serve as an example, demonstrating how a narratological approach can reveal the complex interrelations of the diverse subjectivities and temporalities at play in memory museums, and showing that the narratological examination of exhibitions has the potential to explain visitors’ experiences and offer curators and designers important insights. Holocaust exhibitions have received academic interest from the fields of memory studies, museum studies, and Holocaust studies, with the former exhibitions at London’s Imperial War Museum (2000) and the Jewish Museum Berlin (2001) draw-

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ing the most scholarly attention.5 Previous research has ranged from visitor surveys and discussions of imagery to analyses of museum architecture and museums’ political and institutional histories (Arnold-de Simine 2012; de Jong 2018; Feller 2021; Gensburger 2019; Hoskins 2003; Jaeger 2020; Popescu 2020). It is a common finding that Holocaust exhibitions tend to be artifact-driven and frequently resemble documentaries, featuring a dark, purist design that can make them appear to be representing a time separate and cut off from post-Holocaust memory (Hoskins 2003, 10). Memory scholar Stephan Jaeger finds a need for research to pay closer attention to the representational techniques used in Holocaust exhibitions (2020, 225); this chapter contributes to supplying that need. Narratology emerged from structuralist literary theory as a means to define, understand, and analyze fictional narratives.6 Structuralists developed its methodology to examine how narratives are shaped, to identify their forms and functions, and to understand how they are invested with temporalities and subjectivities. Classic narratological analyses pose text-internal questions like “who speaks and who sees?,” “how are the time of the narrated events and the time of narration related?,” and “can we trust the narrator?” (Genette 1980). It is important to note that narratology is not concerned with truth value. Narratology does not examine what narratives say, but how they say it; from a narratological point of view, it is irrelevant whether a narrative presents real or fictional events, as they are always viewed as narrative constructs rather than historical facts. Thus, narratology is not suited to judge whether a narrative is historically accurate or meets the requisite ethical standards – aspects that are of crucial importance when recounting the Holocaust. However, it offers insights into the functioning of a narrative that cannot be gained through content-oriented analyses, and that are highly suitable for considering the complex configurations of time and subjectivity that characterize cultural representations and stand at the core of Holocaust narratives. Since the 1990s, Bal and other scholars have been expanding narratology into an interdisciplinary field. Today, the analytical concepts of narratology have evolved beyond their originally strictly literary application and become more sensitive of context, transmediality, and interpretation (Bal 2017; 2019; 2021; Erll 2009; Herman 1999; Ryan 2004). While classic narratology treats narrative as a binary construct of form (discourse) and content (story) (Genette 1980), Bal’s introductory Narratology (2017 [1985]) defines narrative as text, story, and fabula:

 Both museums are now showing new permanent Holocaust exhibitions (Berlin since 2020 and London since 2021).  Among the pioneer studies were Tzvetan Todorov’s Grammaire du Décaméron (1969) and Gérard Genette’s extremely influential Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method (1980 [1972]).

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A narrative text is a text in which the agent or subject conveys to an addressee (‘tells’ the reader, viewer, or listener) a story in a medium, such as language, imagery, sound, buildings, or a combination thereof. A story is the content of that text and produces a particular manifestation, inflection, and “colouring” of a fabula. A fabula is a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or experienced by actors. (Bal 2017, 5)

Bal’s definition allows the analytical distinction between three levels of temporalities and human agencies, all of which interact with the addressee’s subjectivity in the process of creating meaning. Whereas the text is material and observable, story and fabula are theoretical constructs created in the act of reading.

Fabula The fabula (the series of events, or plot) is the most abstract component of a narrative.7 It is a chronologically ordered sequence of events, times, places, and actors that are logically and causally connected, and is constructed by a reader’s – or museum visitor’s – deductive imagination, like the synopses we give after watching a movie, reading a book, or going on a journey. The fabula of Home. Gone is the rise and destruction of the Jewish community in Trondheim. Its elements are introduced in the first panel’s historical account and then repeated, with slight variations, in the succeeding biographical panels. Briefly summarized, the fabula events are “immigration to Norway,” “settlement,” “confiscation of property,” “arrest and internment,” “escape,” “deportation,” “murder,” “survival,” and “homecoming.” These events occur in places like “the city,” “the outskirts,” “the private apartment,” “the shop,” “the prison camp,” and “the cargo ship.” They are caused or experienced by anonymized groups of actors including “Jews,” “Norwegian Jews,” “Jewish women and children,” “Norwegian police,” “Norwegian Nazis,” “the occupying power,” and “the Nazis.” A few named individual actors accompany these groups: the subjects of the biographies. All fabula elements occur within a closed, dated span of time: from 1814, when the Norwegian constitution banned Jews, to the time immediately after liberation in 1945.8

 A fabula is composed of four elements: events (defined as transitions from one state to another), actors (the events’ subjects), time (the time the events take) and place (where the events occur).  Several biographies conclude with one or two sentences briefly summarizing the biographee’s life after 1945, but none of the exhibition narrative’s actual, transitional events are set during the post-war period.

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The elements of Home. Gone’s fabula are also recognizable in Remember Us. However, despite the similarities, there are several vital differences. First, Remember Us has a larger number of individualized actors (named individual Jewish Norwegians, Norwegian Nazis, Norwegian resistance fighters, neighbors, and helpers) and fewer anonymized actor groups (such as “the Nazis”). Second, “the family” is a key actor, while in Home. Gone, the family holds little agency. Third, and most importantly, the fabula time differs: While the Jewish Museum Trondheim’s Holocaust exhibition has a closed timespan that ends with liberation in 1945, the fabula of Remember Us includes the event “remembering,” and thus the post-war period, leaving fabula time open with an undefined end point.

Text The fabula is constructed through reading the text, the only material narrative component. By Bal’s definition, “text” denotes any finite, structured whole composed of signs (Bal 2017, 5). While a novel’s text takes the form of written language, a museum exhibition’s text is multimodal and usually combines written texts, images, sounds, material objects, and spatial arrangement.9 A novel must be read in linear order, but the exhibition’s media only loosely relate to each other (Arnold-de Simine 2012, 16; Jaeger 2020, 42), and “reading” an exhibition means moving freely in a curated multimodal space. Notably, while the two Norwegian Holocaust exhibitions share many fabula elements, their texts are quite dissimilar and invite very different “reading” experiences. One important difference lies in the exhibitions’ media specificities and text types. Home. Gone relies heavily on written language. On three walls, panels alternately display written text and images. Their arrangement encourages a linear reading of both the individual panels and the entire exhibition. Every panel (one historical account and 15 biographies) presents an independent documentary-like narrative that follows the same structure: a short, written text from a historical source (quotes from letters, testimonies, memoirs, advertisements, diaries, and more), a curated chronological report in written form, and – on the biography panels – a family photo. The photos are authentic artifacts from the past, some in

 The museum has been defined as a “multimedia platform on which different medial practices can be combined: [. . .] objects, [. . .] texts, images, and audiovisual representations in a spatial arrangement” (Arnold-de Simine 2012, 16). It is worth mentioning that it is debated whether museum exhibitions can be seen as text. Some researchers argue that exhibitions are mainly defined by the non-textual features materiality and site specificity (see Spiessens & Decroupet 2022).

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their original frames, some taken from family albums. However, no attempt is made to display the original typography and materiality of the quoted texts; visitors must read the text to discover whether it was taken from a newspaper, a diary, or a different source. The central installation of coat hangers and the list of names on the fourth wall depart from the panels’ linear and chronological structure. They refer to each other through symmetry of numbers – the 125 coat hangers correspond to the 125 local Holocaust victims who lost their lives (although this only becomes clear in guided tours or if the visitor goes to the effort of counting the hangers). Like the photos and quoted texts, the hangers and list of names refer to a historical reality outside of the text; the hangers are even authentic historical artifacts. On a text-internal level, the hangers and list articulate the fabula events of extermination and death. The list does this literally, by naming the historical victims, while the installation employs metonym (the inscriptions on the hangers refer to shops owned by some of the victims) and metaphor (the emptiness of the hangers is an image of the genocide). Home. Gone occupies a closed room that has no function other than recounting the Holocaust. By contrast, Remember Us encompasses a space with multiple functions, with no clear indication of where the Holocaust narrative begins and ends. While written text and a linear structure dominate Home. Gone, the audiovisual characterizes Remember Us, which is loosely organized in three sections. Only the middle section is chronologically structured; it provides a historical report of the Norwegian Holocaust mainly through written texts (official documents, newspaper facsimiles) and historical photos. The other two sections are more multimodal and episodic in their articulation of two topics and fabula events: escape (to the right) and extermination (to the left). In line with contemporary expectations of a Holocaust exhibition (de Jong 2018), the genres testimony and memoir play a crucial role, especially in the escape section’s text. The exhibition’s narrative embeds several testimonies by means of audio and video interviews. Published memoirs and testimonies are displayed as artifacts. Curated text is used sparingly, mainly to contextualize artifacts from pre-war everyday life. Another reason for the different “reading” experiences of the two Holocaust exhibitions lies in their voices. The voice of a narrative – its narrator – is not identical with its author (or, in the case of an exhibition, its museum, designer, or curator). A narrator is the agent or subject “that ‘utters’ the text; that is its technical, medium-bound source” (Bal 2021, 24). Whether explicitly referred to or not, the narrator’s position is always part of the text and influences how readers – and museum visitors – conceive of the narrative. A single authoritative narrator dominates the text of Home. Gone and takes an external subsequent position, recounting the event after it has occurred from a “neutral” or “objective” point out-

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side of time and place.10 The narrator gives a chronological, documentary-like report of first the Holocaust in Central Norway in general, and then some individuals’ lives. Through the consistent use of past tense, past dates, and the text’s lack of the pronouns “I” and “we,” the narrator creates a sense of distance. The temporal void between narrator and narrated events is also manifest in the black and white photos and wooden coat hangers. Faded, outdated, and old: These artifacts can be read as remnants of a distant past. Thus, the narrator creates the story of a closed and finished past, without temporal connections to the visitors’ present. Remember Us, by contrast, features multiple voices and a story that has not ended. The embedded testimonies provide the text with a number of personal narrators; in the video and audio interviews, visitors experience stories told by Holocaust survivors, Norwegian helpers, family members, and other witnesses. The many narrators give the text a polyphonic quality: Instead of telling a single authoritative story, the text presents multiple unfinished and non-hierarchically arranged fragments. In Home. Gone, the narrator’s presence is barely perceptible – but in Remember Us, the act of narration becomes an important part of the narrative. While the personal narrators recount events in the past and are all subsequent, their relationship to and view of these events differ: Some narrate their personal experiences with war and persecution, others speak of growing up with the Holocaust as a family memory. Their varied points of narration bring several temporalities to the narrative and put emphasis on “remembering” as the key fabula event.

Story The personal narrators of Remember Us are characters in the narrative and their individual faces and voices imbue them with subjectivity; they invite visitors to establish emotional connections to the narrated events. As characters, they belong to the story. The story is the narrative component that lends the fabula interest and subjective color by means of anachronisms – chronological deviations – and focalizations. This is where characters come to life and a narrative’s aesthetic and rhetoric effects come into play (Bal 2017, 65). While fabulas are always chro-

 Genette distinguishes between four narrator positions. The subsequent position is the most frequent by far (Genette 1980, 217). The others are: prior (generally in future tense, as in prophecies or weather forecasts), simultaneously (in the present, the narration is contemporaneous with the event, as in sports journalism), and interpolated (the narration takes place in between events, as in diaries and letters).

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nological, most stories deviate from strictly linear chronology, showing anachronic irregularities.11 The story can also feature a divergence between narrator and focalizer: The agent who speaks, the narrator, is not necessarily identical with the agent of perception or interpretation, the focalizer, through whose senses the story is filtered. Focalization refers to the “relations between the elements [of the fabula] presented and the vision through which they are presented” (Bal 2017, 133). Even though narrators recount the story, focalization determines how readers imagine and create it. What does the focalizer pay attention to, from which location are the events perceived, and how close do readers get to it? Is the focalization congruent with the narrator’s judgment? In Remember Us, the testimonies enrich the story by means of both focalization and anachronism. The exhibition shows audio and video of the narrators’ voices and faces, given their testimonies, allowing them to come to life as characters. Every personal narrator is the focalizer of their interview – the subjective lens through which the story is experienced. Visitors who engage with the testimonies do not only “read” a story of an individual’s experience of persecution but are invited to immerse themselves in this experience. When giving a testimony, a subject explicitly refers to the present activity of remembering the past. The act of remembering, and so the act of narration, thus becomes a key feature of the testimony. Furthermore, every testimony provides a series of leaps between the time of narration and the time of the narrated events. This creates irregularities of frequency, rhythm, and order in the narration that establish unexpected connections between the different layers of time. A story featuring time leaps demands more from readers than a chronological one does; it creates “empty spaces” the readers must actively fill (Iser 1978), and it requires them to refer to their own experiences of past and present in order to do so. The exhibition’s extermination section provides another example of story shaping. Its panels juxtapose enlarged family photos of Holocaust victims, their furniture and keepsakes from before the Holocaust, and small pictures of what their wartime homes’ addresses looked like as of the 2010s. The effect of enlarging and zooming in (focalization) and of arranging different times side by side (anachronism) is twofold. The large images of people, the small pictures of residences, and the inclusion of personal belongings color the story with intimacy and emphasize the characters’ humanity and vulnerability while giving visitors a look into their private lives. Simultaneously, the display highlights that the recounted story of past events is part of the present: the affected families’  There are three kinds of anachronisms: Order (the story can present events in nonchronological sequences); rhythm (the story can slow down, speed up or even leave out time); and frequency (the numerical relationship between the events in the fabula and the representation of the events in the story).

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memories are still “alive” in today’s city. In short, focalization and anachronisms in the testimonies and memorial panels bring visitors into close contact with past subjective experiences and invite them to view the past as multilayered, unfinished, and part of the present. By engaging with the story, visitors become co-producers of the exhibition’s Holocaust narrative and build a “memory community” where past and present meet (Arnold-de Simine 2013). The open and multilayered story of Remember Us stands in contrast to the story of Home. Gone. Here, an external subsequent narrator tells an authoritative story in curated written texts – the historical account and biographies. Even though the biographies are focalized on individuals, these story characters are viewed from a distance. There is minimal use of internal focalization, and the exhibition omits nearly all direct experiences and subjectivities from the story. All biographies feature the same order, the same rhythm, the same frequency. Because they also share the same fabula, the stories of these nine men, four women and three girls become almost identical both structurally and semantically. Ironically, the repetition has an anonymizing effect, turning every individual’s unique life into a story resembling all the others. On the other hand, the repetition also illustrates that the Norwegian Holocaust evolved like a “script,” and underlines how genocide impacts humans’ lives equally, regardless of social status. So far, the comparative analysis has shown the linearity, closed narrative structure, and monophony of the Holocaust exhibition in the Jewish Museum Trondheim. But linear narratives also have empty spaces for readers to fill, and regardless of how linear an exhibition’s structure is, visitors are not forced to read it like a book. They can dwell on details, experience the sequences in various orders, and find agency in unexpected text elements. A close reading of a short text illustrates this point. Home. Gone provides few voices other than the external narrator, but the very first written paragraph in the exhibition gives voice to Holocaust survivor Robert Savosnick. It quotes from a letter to his mother and brother from May 20, 1945: “I finally have the opportunity to write a few words to you. Unfortunately, only 5–6 Norwegian Jews are alive. All the others are dead. It is a strange feeling to be free again after almost three years of hell. Send my regards to everyone I know. Warmest wishes, Robert”12 (Jewish Museum Trondheim). The message is short and sparse, resembling a telegram. Nevertheless, it is a narrative in its own right: An agent (Robert, the letter’s author and personal character-bound narrator) conveys a story (of the Norwegian Holocaust, narrated  “Endelig har jeg anledning til å skrive nogen ord til dere. Dessverre er vi bare 5–6 norske jøder i live. De andre er alle døde. Det er en merkelig følelse igjen å være fri efter nesten 3 års helvede. Hils alle bekjendte. Hjerteligste hilsen fra Robert” (English translation by the Jewish Museum Trondheim).

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shortly after the event and focalized through the mind of a camp survivor) to an addressee (his mother and brother, as well as any letter reader) through a medium (written text) that produces a particular manifestation of a fabula, which consists of the event of the Holocaust and the event of writing (Bal 2017, 5). The short letter provides a counterpoint to the external narrator’s discourse. The internal focalization through the mind of a camp survivor offers a subjective and affective interpretation of the Holocaust – mourning the Norwegian Jews who have not survived. The story is non-chronological and links the time of past events with the present time of narration: It begins with the narration event in the here and now, proceeds to briefly summarize the preceding three years, and then links the past experiences to present emotions. Focalizing the story through the author’s personal experiences and feelings and explicitly addressing a “you” invite readers/visitors to engage with the story. Several other quoted written texts possess similar story qualities to Robert’s letter, but it is primarily the visual text – the photos and the coat hanger installation – that contributes to a subjective coloring of the fabula in Home. Gone. In her seminal study on writing and visual culture after the Holocaust, cultural memory scholar Marianne Hirsch argues that: “When we look at photographic images from a lost past world, especially one that has been annihilated by force, we look not only for information and confirmation, but for an intimate material and affective connection that would transmit the affective quality of the events” (2012, 38). In line with Hirsch’s claim, the photos’ focalization through the photographer – who is temporally and spatially close to the motif – brings visitors closer to the characters and forms an affective connection. The photos are intimately focalized on the characters’ everyday lives (social gatherings, weddings, work, play, posing in a photographer’s studio), accentuating the uniqueness of each life and story, and establishing a contraposition to the narrator’s distance as well as the narrated atrocities. On the level of text, the photos’ visual age and outdatedness contribute to the narrative sealing of the past as a closed universe – but on the story level, they simultaneously create starting points that invite visitors’ emotional engagement. The main focalization object in Home. Gone is the installation of empty coat hangers. Its function, like the photos, is partly to authenticate the past. However, unlike the photos, the hangers are not behind glass as archival artifacts. The installation is also not a spatial representation of a place in the fabula, like the scenography of Remember Us. Rather, it is an artistic three-dimensional visual construction: On a rod attached to the ceiling, 125 slightly illuminated hangers appear to float in the air in the middle of a dark room, with the lighting and the room’s bareness focalizing the hangers’ emptiness. Bal finds that a visual art object can be turned into a story by its formal and material aspects (2021, 16). The installation recalls an

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object which was and is part of everyday existence – a wardrobe; however, it abstracts the wardrobe and situates it out of place. By alluding to a wardrobe, the installation connotes human intimacy, while the absence of coats and jackets symbolically references the lost lives. In the intertextual context of Holocaust iconography, it can be read as the inversion of the well-established image of a pile of shoes or clothes, symbolizing irrevocable loss. The installation is an ambiguous combination of the material and the symbolic, and simultaneously connotes intimacy and loss. Both connotations contribute to giving life to the story and invite – even persuade – visitors to affectively engage with the narrative. However, the emphasis on loss also strengthens the exhibition’s predominant use of distant focalization, which serves to maintain a narrative with a definitive end. The visitors’ affective engagement does not extend to seeing the story as part of their own present. In memorializing the Holocaust victims by emphasizing the ultimate disconnection between past and present, Home. Gone follows the opposite strategy of Remember Us, which memorializes them by displaying connections between times.

Narratology, Museum Narratives, and Reading in Context Home. Gone tells a closed and mainly single-voiced story through the genre of biography; the exhibition’s title alludes to an aborted narrative pattern by omitting the last stage of the classic tripartite plot “home – gone – returning home” that structures literary genres like the Bildungsroman, the travelogue, or the children’s novel. Remember Us tells its story in fragments, episodes, and memories, making no sharp distinctions between “then” and “now.” Unlike Home. Gone, which almost seems like a story without characters, Remember Us includes a number of characters and narrators. Its focalization on families also gives agency to the collective. The narrative of escaping, surviving, and remembering the Holocaust is told as a story of human cooperation. In terms of literary genre, the exhibition most resembles the collective or epistolary novel, genres suited for expressing polyphony, multi-subjectivity, and complex spatiotemporal connections. In Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum, museum scholar Andrea Witcomb argues that many museums offer only the curator’s or institution’s point of view, using linear exhibition narratives that lead visitors to follow a specific path. She calls for museums to “move away from a didactic, hierarchical model of communication towards an understanding of exhibition narratives as polysemic and open ended” (Witcomb 2003, 130). Narratological analysis reveals that a linear, closed exhibition narrative like that of Home. Gone can also encom-

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pass polysemic elements and leave space for visitors’ active co-production (Iser 1978). However, only Remember Us includes postmemories, a crucial feature memory museums employ in order to create memory communities that allow visitors to engage their personal experiences of time, connecting the past to their own present or personal memories. So far, memory museum narratives are narratologically understudied. In fact, narrative theory seldom even lists the museum exhibition as a narrative, despite viewing narrative as an inclusive concept that encompasses many genres and media types.13 Bal, who identifies a multitude of different media, text types, and art forms as narratives, does not include the memory museum exhibition among her examples. As this chapter has shown, narratology can provide useful insights and new perspectives into museum narratives. Few exhibition narratives are completely linear; most include more than one voice, several focalizers, and anachronisms that deviate from chronology. Detailed close readings of history and memory exhibitions as rhetorical and aesthetic media can contribute to understanding not only how visitors read them, but also how curators construct and design them as narratives of complex intersections between different layers of meaning, time, and subjectivity. There is a downside to narratology’s close and text-internal view, however: It does not take the narrative’s actual authors, readers, and contexts into account. Thus, the exhibition analysis in this chapter has not considered the specific contextual circumstances of “reading” in a museum but has simply transposed the idea of a reader of literary fiction onto a museum visitor. “Reading” a museum exhibition occurs in a different context than reading – for instance – a novel. While fiction reading is frequently an individual experience that takes place in private, museum visits are social and bound to a specific physical place. The museum scholars John Falk and Lynn Dierking’s contextual model of learning in the museum finds that three overlapping contexts affect the museum experience: the personal, the sociocultural, and the physical (Falk & Dierking 2013, 26–28). Visitors come to a museum with different personal backgrounds, expectations, motivations, and narratives that inform their “reading.” The museum institution, the social situation of the visit (as a tourist on vacation? with a school class? as part of a guided tour?), and society’s cultural narratives and memories also shape the visi-

 For instance, the anthologies Narrative Across Media (Ryan 2004) and The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories (Dinnen & Warhol 2018) analyze narratives in images, graphic novels, film, reality TV, music, digital media, videogames, and podcasts, but not the museum. Museum exhibitions are also not discussed in After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future (Lothe et al. 2012).

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tor experience. Not least, the physical setting – the building and its architectural spaces – strongly influences “how visitors move [. . .], what they observe, and what they remember” (Falk & Dierking 2013, 28). When these contexts are taken into account, the narrative of a Jewish museum’s Holocaust exhibition consists of several interrelated intertexts: the exhibition narrative, cultural narratives of the significance of visiting a museum, cultural memories of the Holocaust, cultural narratives of Jewish identity, local narratives that include the particular museum, and each individual visitor’s narratives of personal and cultural expectations, experiences, knowledge, and memories. Norway’s two Jewish museums were founded by their cities’ Jewish Societies as private institutions dedicated to preserving and communicating Norwegian Jewish culture, rites, history, and traditions. They maintain the cultural heritage of one of the country’s five national minorities and receive funding from Norwegian authorities, as detailed in the 2020 policy National Minorities in Norway.14 As the museums’ histories show, their Holocaust exhibitions are engaged in three interrelated cultural narratives: a narrative of the Norwegian Holocaust, a narrative of a national minority’s cultural history, and a national narrative of modern Norway’s multiculturalism. The Jewish Museum in Trondheim opened in 1997 as the first Jewish Museum in Norway – a milestone in Norwegian Holocaust remembrance. Its opening coincided with the unveiling of Norway’s first Holocaust memorial in a public urban space: the Cissi Klein memorial statue, located in a nearby park. Both initiatives were part of Trondheim’s one-thousandth anniversary celebration and resulted from the Norwegian public’s growing concern about the Holocaust (Reitan 2016, 176–177; Storeide 2019, 470). The Oslo Jewish Museum opened in 2008, during the Year of Wergeland – Norway’s celebration of the 200th anniversary of poet and intellectual Henrik Wergeland’s birth. National icon Wergeland played an important part in building nineteenth-century Norway’s national identity and is credited for the abolishment of the so-called “Jew clause” in 1851.15 Remember Us opened on November 26, 2012, the seventieth anniversary of the deportation of Jews from Norway. Earlier that year, on January 27 – International Holocaust Remembrance Day – the Norwegian Prime Minister had given a belated official apology for Norway’s participation in the Holocaust.

 In recent years, the museums have also received funding through government policies against antisemitism. Compare the Norwegian government’s measure “Maintain the Increased Level of Funding for the Jewish Museums” in two Action Plans Against Antisemitism (2017 and 2020).  The second paragraph of the Norwegian constitution of 1814 excluded Jews from access to the kingdom.

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Since the mid-1990s, the memory of the Norwegian Holocaust has spread through and partially challenged Norway’s national narrative of the Second World War, which is an important part of the country’s national identity (Bruland & Tangestuen 2011; Storeide 2019). In recent years, Norway’s strong resistance hero narrative has increasingly come into conflict with the Holocaust memory. Journalist Marte Michelet’s book Hva visste hjemmefronten? [What Did the Norwegian Resistance Know?] (2018), which examines the resistance movement’s role in the persecution of Norwegian Jews, sparked intense public and academic debate and brought Norwegian citizens’ and organizations’ role in the Holocaust under scrutiny. Books, movies, television series, and art projects have also contributed to an increased public awareness of the persecution of Norwegian Jews – and of the significance and relevance of these past events for present society.16 Today, many Norwegian museum visitors will experience the Holocaust exhibitions in light of these recent cultural memories. Given the Norwegian Jewish Museums’ important political and symbolic role as intersections of the interrelated narratives of the Norwegian Holocaust, Jewish cultural history in Norway, and modern Norway’s multiculturalism, it is strange that their Holocaust exhibitions have not met with greater interest in public discourse concerning their narratives and how they align with positions in current debates. This chapter’s narratolgical analysis of how the Jewish museums’ Holocaust exhibitions articulate subjectivities and temporalities intends to lay the groundwork for further research on how these – and other countries’ – Jewish museums participate in culture’s larger historical and social narratives.

Bibliography Action Plan Against Antisemitism 2016–2020. Regjeringen [Norwegian Government]. https://www.regjer ingen.no/contentassets/dd258c081e6048e2ad0cac9617abf778/action-plan-against-antisemitism. pdf. 2017 (February 14, 2023). Anderson, Gail (ed.). Reinventing the Museum: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Paradigm Shift. Walnut Creek: Altamira Press, 2004.

 To mention but a few: Simon Stranger’s bestselling novel Leksikon om lys og mørke [Keep Saying Their Names] 2018, Eirik Svensson’s drama film Den største forbrytelsen [Betrayed] 2020, Johanne Helgeland’s family drama Flukten over grensen [The Crossing] 2020, the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s television series Last: jøder [Cargo: Jews] 2022, and the exhibition of the artist Victor Lind’s works in the Haugar Art Museum Friheten må gjestfri være [Freedom Needs Hospitality] 2022.

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Arnold-de Simine, Silke. “Memory Museum and Museum Text: Intermediality in Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz.” Theory, Culture & Society 29.2 (2012): 14–35. Arnold-de Simine, Silke. Mediating Memory in the Museum: Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. Bal, Mieke. Travelling Concepts in the Humanities: A Rough Guide. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002. Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. 4th ed., Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. Bal, Mieke. “The Point of Narratology. Part 2.” Interdisciplinary Description of Complex Systems 17. 2–A (2019): 242–258. Bal, Mieke. Narratology in Practice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2021. Banik, Vibeke Kieding. Holocaust i Norge. https://snl.no/Holocaust_i_Norge. 2021 (January 10, 2023). Bedford, Leslie. The Art of Museum Exhibitions: How Story and Imagination Create Aesthetic Experiences. London: Routledge, 2014. Bruland, Bjarte, and Mats Tangestuen. “The Norwegian Holocaust: Changing Views and Representations.” Scandinavian Journal of History 36.5 (2011): 587–604. Dinnen, Zara, and Robyn Warhol. The Edinburgh Companion to Contemporary Narrative Theories. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018. Erll, Astrid. “Narratology and Cultural Memory.” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Ed. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2009. 212–227. Falk, John, and Lynn Dierking. The Museum Experience Revisited. Walnut Creek: Routledge, 2013. Feller, Yaniv. “Whose Museum Is It? Jewish Museums and Indigenous Theory.” Comparative Studies in Society and History 63.4 (2021): 798–824. Genette, Gérard. Narrative Discourse. An Essay in Method. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980. Gensburger, Sarah. “Visiting History, Witnessing Memory: A Study of a Holocaust Exhibition in Paris in 2012.” Memory Studies 12.6 (2019): 630–645. Handlingsplan mot antisemittisme 2021–2023 – en videreføring. Regjeringen [Norwegian Government]. https://www.regjeringen.no/no/dokumenter/handlingsplan-mot-antisemittisme/id2830165/. 2020 (February 14, 2023). Herman, David (ed.). Narratologies: New Perspectives on Narrative Analysis. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1999. Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012. Hoskins, Andrew. “Signs of the Holocaust: Exhibiting Memory in a Mediated Age.” Media, Culture & Society 25.1 (2003): 7–22. Iser, Wolfgang. The Act of Reading: A Theory of Aesthetic Response. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978. Jaeger, Stephan. The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Jewish Museum Trondheim. Hjemme. Borte. Holocaust i Trondheim. 2019. Museum exhibition. Jong, Steffi de. The Witness as Object. New York: Berghahn Books, 2018. Lothe, Jakob, James Phelan, and Susan Rubin Suleiman. After Testimony: The Ethics and Aesthetics of Holocaust Narrative for the Future. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2012. National Minorities in Norway – A Comprehensive Policy. White Paper No. 12. Stortinget [Norwegian Parliament]. https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/white-paper-no.-12-20202021/ id2814676/. 2020–2021 (February 14, 2022). Oslo Jewish Museum. Husk oss til livet: Jødiske skjebner 1940–45. 2012. Museum exhibition.

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Popescu, Diana I. “The Potency of Design in Holocaust Exhibitions: A Case Study of the Imperial War Museum’s Holocaust Exhibition (2000).” Museum & Society 18.2 (2020): 218–242. Reitan, Jon. Møter med Holocaust: Norske perspektiver på tilintetgjørelsens historiekultur. Trondheim: NTNU, 2016. Rothberg, Michael. Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2000. Ryan, Marie-Laure (ed.). Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0, 2010. Spiessens, Anneleen, and Sophie Decroupet. “Translating Spaces and Memories of Migration: The Case of the Red Star Line Museum.” Perspectives (2022): 1–21. Storeide, Anette H. “Local and National Memories of WWII in a Transnational Age: The Case of Norway.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 32 (2019): 459–474. Witcomb, Andrea. Re-Imagining the Museum: Beyond the Mausoleum. London: Routledge, 2003.

Daniel Morat

The Telling of Many Stories: Multivocality and Pluritemporality in Berlin Global at the Humboldt Forum Introduction In the summer of 2021, after long years of planning and construction (and an additional delay due to the coronavirus pandemic), the Humboldt Forum in Berlin opened its doors to the public. The Humboldt Forum is a cultural center with exhibition galleries and spaces for talks, conferences, and educational programs as well as music and theatre performances, set in the (partly) reconstructed city palace at the heart of Berlin, opposite the famous Museum Island. On roughly two thirds of the exhibition space, the collections of the Ethnological Museum and the Museum for Asian Art are on display (both belonging to the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz = Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation). The rest of the exhibition space features an exhibition operated by the City Museum of Berlin, called Berlin Global, an exhibition by the Humboldt University of Berlin, and temporary exhibitions1 as well as exhibitions on the history of the site organized by the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss (Foundation for the Humboldt Forum in the Berlin Palace), which is also responsible for the cultural program.2 Already prior to its opening, the Humboldt Forum had been a highly controversial cultural project. This has to do both with its architectural form and its museum content. It occupies the site of the former Palast der Republik (Palace of the Republic) – seat of the GDR parliament and cultural center of East Berlin which had been erected at the site of the demolished palace of the Hohenzollern dynasty in the 1970s. In the early 2000s, the German Bundestag decided to tear down the Palast der Republik and to build a new edifice with the outer appearance (at least on three of the four facades) of the former Hohenzollern palace. This decision was preceded by intensive debates about the political and architectural heritage of the GDR and the cultural and political self-understanding of the newly unified German nation in the 1990s (cf. Binder 2009; Costabile-Heming 2017). The idea to house the

 For a discussion of the temporary exhibition Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, hosted by the Humboldt Forum, see the opening section of the Introduction to this volume by Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger.  For the different partners involved in the Humboldt Forum and its rather complicated setup, see their web presentation: https://www.humboldtforum.org/en/ (May 4, 2023). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-004

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ethnological collections of the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz there and to name the new museum and cultural space after the brothers Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt was born in the context of these debates in an effort to appease the critics of the reconstruction and to demonstrate the cosmopolitanism of the new Germany. It was precisely this plan, however, that sparked new controversy, advanced especially by postcolonial activists, who criticized the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz for not dealing with the colonial provenance of large parts of the ethnological collections in a responsible manner. Showcasing looted art from the former colonies in the reconstructed palace of the former colonial masters seemed like a particular form of impudence. This is how the Humboldt Forum became a focal point in ongoing debates not only about the provenance and restitution of ethnological collections but about the legacy of German colonialism more generally (cf. Bach 2019; Morat 2019; Sieg 2021, 49–56). This background information is important in order to understand the particular setup of Berlin Global, the exhibition I want to focus on in this short reflection. I was part of the curatorial team that Paul Spies, then newly appointed director of the City Museum of Berlin and chief curator for the Berlin exhibition at the Humboldt Forum, assembled in 2016. At that time, the controversy around the Humboldt Forum was already in progress and formed the starting point for our discussions. Early in the process, we agreed that our exhibition should react to this controversy and openly address its crucial points such as colonialism and racism, thus functioning as an “agonistic intervention” (Cento Bull & Clarke 2021) into the Humboldt Forum itself – a concept we did not use at the time, but which aptly characterizes our intentions.3 A few basic decisions were taken in order to meet these intentions: 1.) The exhibition was not to focus on Berlin alone, but – in accordance with the idea that the Humboldt Forum should be a space for the “cultures of the world” in which the “opportunities and risks of globalization” could be discussed – on Berlin’s place in an interconnected, globalized world. Hence the title Berlin Global (Flierl & Parzinger 2009, 10). 2.) Even though this decision was informed by recent trends in the field of global history, the exhibition should not be regarded as a primarily historical exhibition. Rather, our starting point was Berlin today and we went back in history only in order to understand our current situation and the challenges for the future. One consequence of this was organizing the exhibition not chronologically, but topically, with each hall being dedicated to a topic that we regarded

 Thanks to Irene Hilden and Andrei Zavadski for drawing my attention to this concept. Cf. Zavadski & Hilden forthcoming.

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as characteristic of Berlin today. These topics are “Revolution,” “Free Space,” “Borders,” “Entertainment,” “War,” “Fashion,” and “Entanglement.” 3.) An exhibition that focuses on the diversity and multivocality of a globalized urban society should also reflect this multivocality at the level of the people involved in it. We therefore invited a plurality of other people – artists, experts, activists – to collaborate on the exhibition, following the model of a participatory museum sketched out by Nina Simon (2010) and others. 4.) Finally, since we did not have a particular collection to showcase, our exhibition should not be centered around objects in display cases. Rather, we wanted to create an immersive experience with multi-media installations and with exhibits to touch and to interact with. This multisensory and interactive approach was also intended to be a way to activate and engage visitors to allow connection with the exhibition and with other visitors on different levels. As one of the curators, I am not in a very good position to judge whether we have been successful in implementing all these ideas and whether the exhibition actually works in these intended ways. What I want to do instead on the following pages is to reflect on the theoretical implications of these curatorial decisions with regard to questions of storytelling and narratology. Some of these theoretical implications have been part of our curatorial discussions, some of them only became clear to me by looking back on the results of our work, and some of them are still not very clear to me and would need further investigation and reflection. I will organize my thoughts in two steps by talking first about multivocality and then about pluritemporality.

Multivocality Multivocality is one of the central catchwords of the recent museum discussion, together with “participation and debate, democratization and polyphony” (Bose et. al. 2012, 9).4 It came up in the context of the so-called “new museology,” which has been discussed since the 1990s and which has increasingly found its way into museum practice in the last ten to twenty years. The new museology, according to Susan Kamel and Christine Gerbich, “emerged in response to demands for accessibility, representation, and participation of those who are marginalized because of their gender, skin color, sexual orientation, level of education, health, or social origins” (Kamel & Gerbich 2014, 23). Thus, as Nora Sternfeld approvingly  All translations are my own if not otherwise noted.

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quotes Chantal Mouffe, the demand for multivocality in the museum aims to give voice to “all those who are silenced within the framework of the existing hegemony” (Sternfeld 2018, 61). A common way to achieve multivocality in the museum is to implement participatory projects. In her influential book on the subject, Nina Simon distinguishes between contributory, collaborative, co-creative, and hosted participation projects: In contributory projects, visitors are solicited to provide limited and specified objects, actions, or ideas to an institutionally controlled process. [. . .] In collaborative projects, visitors are invited to serve as active partners in the creation of institutional projects that are originated and ultimately controlled by the institution. [. . .] In co-creative projects, community members work together with institutional staff members from the beginning to define the project’s goals and to generate the program or exhibit based on community interests. [. . .] Hosted projects are ones in which the institution turns over a portion of its facilities and/or resources to present programs developed and implemented by public groups or casual visitors. (Simon 2010, 187)

For Berlin Global, we have carried out several participatory projects that can be attributed to all four of these levels (or a combination of them). The hosted projects consist of the so-called “free spaces” (“Freiflächen”): three demarcated areas within the exhibition which function as small temporary exhibition spaces and which are curated by external groups or initiatives (see Figure 1). There is an open call for proposals for these free spaces. A jury of experts and activists, appointed by the City Museum, decides on the projects to be featured there. A common critique of many participatory projects is often that the institutional framework in which they operate is still determined by the museum itself and thus not really put into question. Instead of actually deconstructing the “existing hegemony,” therefore, participation supposedly risks remaining an “empty gesture” (Asche et al. 2020, 37). It is true that also in the case of Berlin Global, members of the institution (in this case the curatorial team and the City Museum of Berlin) were involved in all stages of the participation projects and that even the free spaces are not completely free in the sense that they have to fit into the framework of Berlin Global. Put differently: The external partners operated with different degrees of autonomy vis-à-vis the museum professionals (depending on the contributory, collaborative, co-creative, or hosted character of the participation project), but they were never completely free to do whatever they wanted (cf. Fakler 2022). There was always some form of institutional control or guideline. In my mind, this does not necessarily mean that these participatory projects remain “empty gestures,” though. Even if the institutional power structure of the museum is not put into question by participation, its interpretative power is. The external partners really were free to express their views and contribute their stories to the exhibition in their own ways. So, from a curatorial point of view, the

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Figure 1: Free Space “Citizens with Equal Rights” in Berlin Global, curated by the Documentation and Cultural Center of German Sinti and Roma. © Dokumentations- und Kulturzentrum Deutscher Sinti und Roma / Stadtmuseum Berlin / Kulturprojekte Berlin. Photo by Michael Setzpfandt.

question is how these different stories relate to each other. Do they form a coherent whole or do they remain in mere juxtaposition? Of course, one would have to ask whether coherence is a valid objective for a multivocal exhibition in the first place. In their assessment of Berlin Global, however, Andrei Zavadski and Irene Hilden come to the conclusion that it does have some kind of coherence in the social justice message it puts across to its visitors, which means on the other hand that it lacks controversy and contradictions. In their view, the curators orchestrated the multivocality of the exhibition in a way that produces a form of “consensual multiperspectivity – a representation of voices that ‘sing’ more or less in unison” (Zavadski & Hilden forthcoming). One could debate whether this is a good or a bad thing, whether more dissonance would have been beneficial or detrimental. As one of the curators, I can say that it was one of our goals to put the different stories in rela-

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tion, to make them resonate with each other and have them speak to the same central theme of the exhibitions, i.e., the global interconnectedness of Berlin in past and present. From an activist point of view, the exhibition was also meant to function as a platform for the representation of the diversity of Berlin’s urban society (cf. Macdonald 2022). But even if we can say that the different stories told in Berlin Global speak to a common theme and amount to a common social justice message, this still leaves the question unanswered of how they relate to each other from a narratological point of view. Do the many stories, in the end, produce a single narrative? In order to answer this question, we have to turn to the problem of the different temporalities at play in Berlin Global.

Pluritemporality Whereas multivocality is, as we have seen, an important keyword in current museum debates, pluritemporality is not. You would not even consider it an established concept in museology at all. To talk about temporalities in the plural, however, has become more and more common among historians and philosophers of history in the context of recent debates about historical time and different regimes of historicity (cf. Colla 2021; Hauber 2021; Tamm & Olivier 2019). The later notion goes back to French historian François Hartog and his 2003 book on Régimes d’historicité: Présentisme et expérience du temps, translated into English in 2015 (Hartog 2015). In Hartog’s theory, a regime of historicity is characterized by the relationship between past, present, and future, in which one of them is dominant. This idea can already be regarded as a way to “pluralize the notion of time by clarifying that the relationship between past, present and future varies over times and cultures” (Lorenz 2019, 23). According to Hartog, the most recent regime of historicity in the western world, the one we still live in, is presentism, which is characterized by the all-encompassing dominance of the present in relation to past and future. In this regime, Hartog argues, we do not consider the present a mere transitory moment in the linear progression of time from the past into an open future. Rather we seem to be stuck in the present, unable to envision a promising future, and therefore also unable to identify historical progress in the past. We can only see past and future as mere extensions of the present. As becomes apparent from this short summary, Hartog is very critical of presentism and laments the abandonment of a historical consciousness that is based on the concept of linear time. His notion of presentism has not remained unchallenged, though, and other theorists of history have gone further in breaking up the concept of one single historical time. One of these theorists is Achim Landwehr. In his 2016

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book Die anwesende Abwesenheit der Vergangenheit (which unfortunately has not been translated into English yet), he introduces his notion of “Pluritemporalität” (pluritemporality) to capture the co-existence of multiple temporalities in the present (Landwehr 2016, 156). Landwehr “considers the present as the only perspective from which different temporal horizons can be conceived. Thus every past is necessarily the present’s past; every future is the present’s future” and “the present entails multiple pasts and futures” (Hauber 2021, 94). To describe the multiple ways in which the present can relate both to the past and the future, Landwehr uses the notion of “chronoferences” (Landwehr 2016, 149–165; Landwehr & Winnerling 2019). In Landwehr’s model of historiography, we therefore no longer develop historical narratives in the search of causality, but we analyze chronoferences, i.e., the different ways in which present times relate and have related to past and future times, because: “Das Historische ist kein Nacheinander, es ist ein Durcheinander,” which roughly translates as: The historical is not sequential, it is muddled (Landwehr 2016, 158). When developing our curatorial ideas for Berlin Global, we discussed neither Hartog nor Landwehr, but looking at the results of our work, one could apply both concepts of presentism and pluritemporality to describe the exhibition. While designing it, we were openly presentist in the sense that present day Berlin was always the starting point for our considerations. All historical examples in the exhibition were meant to have a contemporary relevance, but we did not integrate them into one historical narrative (for instance one of an increasing globalization). We rather argue in the exhibition that different forms of global interconnectedness can be found in different moments of Berlin’s past and present. This principle can be illustrated by two examples for which I was co-responsible: the hall on “Entertainment” and the one on “War.” In both cases, we started with rather general propositions: first, that entertainment culture is an arena for cultural exchange and has been since the late nineteenth century, and second, that war has always been a great mobilizer of people and objects and has often taken them to places they were not necessarily supposed to go. In both halls, we assembled a number of examples from Berlin history that illustrate these propositions and that can be related to present day Berlin, but we did not put them into chronological order. In both halls, “the historical is not sequential, it is muddled,” as Landwehr would have it. In the hall on war, an information panel lists the wars conducted by Germans in the twentieth century (the colonial wars at the beginning of the century, the First World War, and the Second World War) in chronological order, including the military missions abroad that Germany has taken part in since 1994 until today. In the rest of the hall, different aspects of all these wars are presented with a special focus on people (soldiers, prisoners of war, victims of deportation, refugees etc.) and objects driven out of or brought to Berlin by war

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Figure 2: The hall on war in Berlin Global © Stadtmuseum Berlin and Kulturprojekte Berlin. Photo by Anne Preussel.

(see Figure 2). One media installation depicts traces of war in contemporary Berlin (such as war graves, monuments, bunkers, street names etc.). Judging from visitor feedback and press reviews, this pluritemporal way of telling different war stories from Berlin without organizing them in a chronological narrative irritates a lot of people. Many who expect to find a historical narrative in an exhibition such as Berlin Global interpret the mere juxtaposition of these different war stories as a form of equalization or leveling of historical differences (cf. Möller 2021) – an interpretation we never intended as curators and one which, in my opinion, cannot really be read out of the exhibition texts and exhibits. It shows, however, that a non-linear presentation of history is quite unfamiliar to many and that thinking in linear historical categories is still deeply rooted in the minds of many museum visitors (maybe unlike what François Hartog would have expected). I have to admit, though, that this principle of pluritemporal storytelling it not explained very well to the visitors – mostly because we did not really think it through as curators in the first place. As a result of this, pluritemporality functions differently in the different halls of the exhibition. Some of them offer at least partly chronological narratives, such as the succession of the 1848, 1918, and 1989 revolutions in the hall on “Revolution” or the chronological overview of the

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Berlin fashion industry from the eighteenth century to the present in the one on “Fashion.” Others concentrate almost completely on contemporary Berlin and integrate only glimpses into the past, such as the halls on “Borders” or “Entanglement.” So, in fact, there is a plurality of pluritemporal relations at work in Berlin Global, which may admittedly confuse some of the visitors.

Conclusion In conclusion, one could say that while on the level of multivocality Berlin Global produces a kind of unison, of coherence, on the level of pluritemporality it does not. The many stories told may all contribute to the same social justice message, but they do not amount to one single historical narrative. Even though this was intentional, it was not conceptualized by us as curators on a theoretical level in the same way as the ideas of multivocality and participation. While the latter can be regarded as well-established museological concepts by now, the concept of pluritemporality in the museum needs more exploration, both on the level of museological theory and of curatorial practice. Developed further, pluritemporal storytelling might prove to be a valid way to break with linear narratives of progress and to “unsettle and disrupt existing accounts of the past” in order to tackle difficult public heritages (such as the heritage of the Humboldt Forum) (Macdonald 2009, 93).

Bibliography Asche, Aarina, Daniela Döring, and Nora Sternfeld. “‘The Radical Democratic Museum’: A Conversation about the Potentials of a New Museum Definition.” Museological Review 24 (2020): 34–41. Bach, Jonathan. “Colonial Pasts in Germany’s Present.” German Politics and Society 37.4 (2019): 58–73. Binder, Beate. Streitfall Stadtmitte: Der Berliner Schlossplatz. Cologne: Böhlau, 2009. Bose, Friedrich von, Kerstin Poehls, Franka Schneider, and Annett Schulze (eds.). Museum X: Zur Neuvermessung eines mehrdimensionalen Raumes. Berlin: Panama, 2012. Cento Bull, Anna, and David Clarke. “Agonistic Interventions into Public Commemorative Art: An Innovative Form of Counter-Memorial Practice?” Constellations 28.2 (2021): 192–206. Colla, Marcus. “The Spectre of the Present: Time, Presentism and the Writing of Contemporary History.” Contemporary European History 30 (2021): 124–135. Costabile-Heming, Carol Anne. “The Reconstructed City Palace and Humboldt Forum in Berlin: Restoring Architectural Identity or Distorting the Memory of Historic Spaces?” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 25.4 (2017): 441–454. Fakler, Zita Luise. Vielstimmig verflochten? Vielstimmigkeit in der Ausstellung „Berlin Global“ im Humboldt Forum. MA-Thesis, FU Berlin, 2022, https://refubium.fu-berlin.de/handle/fub188/36279.

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Flierl, Thomas, and Hermann Parzinger. “Humboldt Forum Berlin: The Project – The Point of Departure.” Die kulturelle Mitte der Hauptstadt: Projekt Humboldt-Forum in Berlin. Ed. Thomas Flierl and Hermann Parzinger. Berlin: Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung, 2009. 10–11. Hartog, François. Regimes of Historicity: Presentism and the Experiences of Time. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015 [French original 2003]. Hauber, Konrad. “The Theoretical Past: New Perspectives on History and Temporality.” German Historical Institute London Bulletin 43.1 (2021): 87–101. Kamel, Susan, and Christine Gerbich (eds.). Experimentierfeld Museum: Internationale Perspektiven auf Museum, Islam und Inklusion. Bielefeld: transcript, 2014. Landwehr, Achim. Die anwesende Abwesenheit der Vergangenheit: Essay zur Geschichtstheorie. Frankfurt/ Main: Fischer Verlag, 2016. Landwehr, Achim, and Tobias Winnerling. “Chronisms: On the Past and Future of the Relation of Times.” Rethinking History 23.4 (2019): 435–455. Lorenz, Chris. “Out of Time? Some Critical Reflections on François Hartog’s Presentism.” Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. Ed. Marek Tamm and Laurent Olivier. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. 23–42. Macdonald, Sharon. “Unsettling Memories: Intervention and Controversy over Difficult Public Heritage.” Heritage and Identity: Engagement and Demission in the Contemporary World. Ed. Marta Anico and Elsa Peralta. London: Routledge, 2009. 93–104. Macdonald, Sharon. “Diversity Max*: Multiple Differences in Exhibition-Making in Berlin Global in the Humboldt Forum.” Doing Diversity in Museums and Heritage: A Berlin Ethnography. Ed. Sharon Macdonald. Bielefeld: transcript, 2022. 173–191. Morat, Daniel. “Katalysator wider Willen: Das Humboldt Forum in Berlin und die deutsche Kolonialvergangenheit.” Zeithistorische Forschungen/Studies in Contemporary History 16.1 (2019): 140–153. Möller, Johan Michael. “Humboldt Forum: Die Antwort auf die postkoloniale Debatte bleibt man in Berlin schuldig.” Neue Zürcher Zeitung, July 21, 2021. Sieg, Katrin. Decolonizing German and European History at the Museum. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2021. Simon, Nina. The Participatory Museum. Santa Cruz, CA: Museum 2.0, 2010. Sternfeld, Nora. Das radikaldemokratische Museum. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2018. Tamm, Marek, and Laurent Olivier (eds.). Rethinking Historical Time: New Approaches to Presentism. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019. Zavadski, Andrei, and Irene Hilden. “The Museum as a Choir. Visitor Reactions to the Multivocality at the Humboldt Forum’s Berlin Global.” Museum and Society (forthcoming).

Sanna-Mari Niemi

Museum Objects as Clues in Fictional Detective Stories: Story-led Art Exhibitions Helsinki Noir – A Crime to Solve and Before the Night – Tornio Noir as Case Studies Introduction In solving a problem of this sort, the grand thing is to be able to reason backwards. (Sherlock Holmes in Doyle 2016 [1887], 161)

Museums and detective work have several intersections, as for an oft-heard metaphor. Both in detective fiction and in museums, there are objects of knowledge to be read and used as evidence. In his well-known analysis on the history of the public museum, Tony Bennett draws an analogy between detective fiction and the modern historical museum as “backtellers”,1 that is as “narrative machineries” constructing events backwards from a result (2002 [1995], 178–179). Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes might call this “reasoning backwards” (2016 [1887], 161). But what happens when these two fields are put together in a more tangible way, in the form of a museum exhibition created around, and as, a crime fiction narrative? More specifically, how does it affect the interpretation of museum objects to re-contextualize and display them as part of a fictional murder mystery?2 The crime fiction genre has proven to be both immensely popular and versatile, taking hybrid form(at)s both within and outside the literary medium (Duerre Humann 2020). Especially during the last decade, museums, in their search for new narrative strategies, have also taken to increasingly experiment with the genre, which has led to creation of story-led exhibitions, escape rooms, theatrical events, and digital storytelling projects. This phenomenon provides an example of how museums can use fictional storytelling toward several aims, including visitor engagement, interactivity, and increasing both diversity and institutional self-reflection in interpreting museum collections (this line of argument is further elaborated in Niemi 2021). Here, my analysis shows how fictional storytelling can draw critical attention to the processes of object-related meaning-production in museums.  Bennett takes the idea and term of “backteller” from Thomas Huxley’s 1882 essay on Voltaire: “On the Method of Zadig: Retrospective Prophecy as a Function of Science”.  For a discussion of the use of fiction in museum exhibitions, see also the chapter by Jana Hawig in this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-005

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In this chapter, I focus on the relationships between museum artifacts and (crime) fictional storytelling by looking at two Finnish art museum exhibitions designed as fictional mystery narratives that visitors were encouraged to solve during their visit: Helsinki Noir. A Crime to Solve (September 17, 2015 to January 9, 2017) by the Amos Anderson Art Museum,3 and Before the Night – Tornio Noir (March 12, 2021 to January 30, 2022) by the Aine Art Museum.4 Even though the latter exhibition is openly indebted to the former’s original concept, they both show significant and unusual relationships between fictional narrative and museum artifacts.5 In both exhibitions, the script was an “inside job”: in the Amos Anderson Art Museum, the story was created by museum curator Susanna Luojus (also responsible for the imaginative exhibition concept and curation), and in the Aine Art Museum, by educational curator Anita Alamaunu (with the exhibition team curating the artworks).6 It is noteworthy that art museums as a museum type are familiar with discussing subjective responses to artworks, their aesthetics and interpretations, which in part facilitates experimenting with creative, fictional museum narratives and alternative image-text relationships. My analysis builds around a concept that plays an integral part in crime fiction: the clue. Jesper Gulddal describes it as “the means by which the detective solves the crime, the device that keeps the plot together, the interface that draws in the reader” (2020, 194). In a similar vein, museum objects are not only a unifying and curiosityfeeding element of museum exhibitions, but equally carry complex significations that call for interpretation, and are part of a meaning-making process. By combining intermedial narrative theory, detective fiction criticism, and museum studies, I examine the narrative roles and functions of artworks as clues in the two case study exhibitions. I analyze the interconnections between museum objects and clues on several levels. Firstly, on the level of the story and the exhibition as a multi-channeled text, I explore how the exhibitions re-contextualized museum objects as potential fictional clues, and what kind of a reading strategy this sug-

 The Amos Anderson Art Museum building was closed in 2017 and reopened as a house museum, Amos Andersons Hem, in 2023. The Föreningen Konstsamfundet, founded by Amos Anderson, opened a new art museum, Amos Rex, in new premises in 2018.  Henceforth, I refer to the exhibitions with their headings: Helsinki Noir and Before the Night.  Already the subtitle Tornio Noir is a direct reference to the concept of Helsinki Noir, even more so as Before the Night represents classical detective fiction, instead of the noir subgenre. Helsinki Noir, for its part, shares elements of both classical and noir traditions (see also Niemi 2021).  Helsinki Noir exhibition team: Susanna Luojus, Katariina Timonen, Mia Kivinen, Johanna Storm, Kari Siltala, Tuomas Laatikainen, Jussi Piironen, Anna-Maria Wiljanen, and Minna Luoma. Before the Night exhibition team: Anita Alamaunu, Amanda Hakoköngäs, Jari Hannuniemi, Virpi Kanniainen, and Mikko Saarenpää.

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gested to museum visitors. I use the term reader-visitor to emphasize the active role of visitors in experiencing, participating (both physically and mentally) in, and interpreting the exhibition narratives. A mystery plot offered novel motivation for looking at the features, details, and techniques of artworks as visitors could try to read them with the purpose of solving the cases. Furthermore, reader-visitors faced the challenge of distinguishing real clues from red herrings (Gulddal 2020, 195). As part of my analysis, I classify the clues, both textual and other, provided in the exhibitions and analyze their functions. Secondly, inspired by Gulddal (2020), I consider the epistemic implication of the clue in classical detective fiction of a “readable world” where objects are connected to knowledge: “the logic of the clue involves an ontology in the sense of an understanding of how the world is ordered and how its elements – people, actions, objects – interconnect to form a coherent whole” (Gulddal 2020, 197). I argue that this aspect of the clue has a wider resonance with museum history and the ways in which objects function as part of collections and displays. The relevance of the analogy between the detective and historian has been demonstrated by e.g., Carlo Ginzburg (1989 [1986]). The close relations between emerging methods in scientific thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the rise of detective fiction through Doyle’s works, and the development of the modern museum have also been acknowledged by Bennett (2002 [1995]: 177–179). Here, I am particularly interested in the duplication of the clue/object-based reading-writing task: museums not only interpret objects but also seek to display them in ways that would be legible to a variety of visitors, not just specialists. Both in the fields of crime fiction and museums alike, scholars have embraced and critically challenged the readability of the world through clues/objects (Gulddal 2020, 199–200; HooperGreenhill 2000, 3–4, 49–50, 114–115). In Helsinki Noir, the fact that the story lacks a conventional, overarching closure further complicates the issue of readability. I begin at the art museum crime scenes and give a brief introduction to the two exhibitions and how the crime fiction plot added affectivity to the museum visit. Then, along with an examination of the concept of the clue itself, I analyze the different types and functions of clues in the exhibitions. Finally, I take the discussion to a more abstract level, considering what the clue and its implications can inform us about the idea of a readable world and its meaning from a museum-historical viewpoint.

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Museum Exhibitions as Affective Scenes of Mystery November was misty and damp, but, on the night of the last Thursday of the month, the city’s undulating tin roofs had been coated in a thin veil of white lace. [. . .] Very early in the morning, a body dressed in light-coloured clothing had been found washed up on the shore by Kaivopuisto Park. Floating in the murky water was a long-legged young woman in a short dress and silk stockings, her hair spread out like a fan. (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 44) On the morning of Friday, May 13, the body of a female was found in a house located on Puutarhankatu street. The body was identified as the widow of merchant K.V. Anniainen. In preliminary visual inspection, a blow on the head was observed. No certain results of the autopsy or cause of death are available at this point. The investigation is ongoing. (Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021, 49–50)

Albeit being a surprising element to begin a museum exhibition narrative with, the discovery of a dead female body is a conventional way of beginning a crime fiction story (Bronfen 1992). The two exhibitions follow a classical formula in their plot structures by introducing a sinister result, and the suite of the exhibition becomes a story of detection – and an attempt to reconstruct the “hidden or lost story” of the crime (Hühn 1987, 451). Upon entering, visitors received a booklet with the exhibition story presented in several chapters.7 In Helsinki Noir, the exhibition itinerary consisted of marked chapters so that the text, artworks, scenography, and audio soundscapes played together. In Before the Night, the grouping of artworks was partly thematic (e.g., main characters, crime scene, suspects), instead of purely following the chronology of the text. Both stories are rooted in local history. Thus, fictional narratives provided a way to present historically accurate details in an entertaining form, besides giving curatorial motivation to display less-known or previously unseen artworks together. Making a bow to the Golden Age of detective fiction, Helsinki Noir is set in rapidly modernizing 1930s Helsinki and Before the Night in 1920s Tornio, a Nordic “backwater village” celebrating its 300th anniversary (Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021, 49). In Helsinki Noir, the choice of era is consistent with displaying mainly early twentieth century modernist art. In Before the Night, the museum used a transhistorical curatorial strategy, showing artworks from various eras and movements side-by-side (Wittocx et al. 2018). The museums also had different

 The booklet Helsinki Noir: A Deadly Proposal (Luojus 2015) consists of 64 pages in three languages (Finnish, Swedish, and English), the actual story being 21 pages long in English. The trilingual booklet Before the Night: Tornio Noir (Alamaunu 2021) has 62 pages altogether, the English story taking 16 pages.

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approaches to using well-known artworks in central character roles. Whereas in Helsinki Noir, the curator considered anonymity of the models vital to avoid cognitive dissonance when making the paintings represent characters in a crime fiction narrative, Before the Night featured a relatively well-known Finnish artist Gunnar Berndtson’s Self-portrait (1890) as the widow’s smooth-talking suitor. This can be seen as one of the exhibition’s humorous elements to keep the murder plot on a lighter level.8 Upon entering Helsinki Noir, visitors literally stepped into the mystery: in a dark space, they encountered contemporary artist Jarno Vesala’s purpose-built installation Behind the Curtain (2015, see Figure 1), where the corpse of a young woman floated on sea waves. “Who is this long-legged lovely, and what has occurred undercover of the shadowy stone city blocks?” asks the booklet’s back cover text (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015). In Before the Night, the story begins with a request for help by a wealthy, vigorous, but distressed widow fearing a mystical death threat based on tarot cards, and her being dismissed as a hysteric by the cynical detective. Soon, in chapter 2, detective A. Maunu learns of the widow’s murder from a newspaper piece (see the citation above, Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021) and, full of remorse, sets to solve the unclear case.9 Reflecting current museum trends emphasizing engagement, this kind of a story-led “whodunit” exhibition concept calls upon visitors’ interactivity as an intellectual and dialogic mental process, instead of a mechanical or technical one (Ravelli 2006, 70; Roppola 2012, 44–47). In addition to puzzle-solving, the affective nature of crime fiction can be linked with the genre’s potential for increasing personal engagement in museums (see e.g., Breu 2020). Among the primary affects (here, used synonymously with emotion) that crime fiction produces is curiosity, a desire to know, which is likely to create a drive for visiting a mystery-led exhibition in its entirety, as well as to read (through all senses) attentively for potential clues (Breu 2020, 244; Niemi 2021). Furthermore, emotional engagement in a museum exhibition narrative can become a means to draw attention to various social and political issues. Particularly in Helsinki Noir, the story elements could raise e.g., empathy, pity, or even indifference toward the victim, and thereby lead to a reflection over themes such as loneliness and related vulnerability to cruel treatment. On the other hand, the exhibitions missed an opportunity of being more critical toward a generic crime

 Another complex discussion would evolve around museums’ ethical responsibilities toward their collections and the artistic license accompanying fictional museum narratives.  The character names are mostly allusions to museum’s personnel (e.g., the detective’s name points to the exhibition author), an open inside joke accentuating the humorous aspects of the story.

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fiction motif they both utilized: representing central female characters as naïve and beautiful victims, further accentuated by representing their bodies as artworks (Bronfen 1992). In an art museum setting, instead of reproducing them, clichéd or problematic gender representations could have for instance been critically contrasted with the increasingly recognized need to rethink the canon of art history from a more pluralistic perspective. Among the main affects in Helsinki Noir, the story evoked pity for the victim by letting reader-visitors first know about her death and afterwards learn about her past misfortunes, personal loss, and simple dreams of family life. The private, sentimental correspondence between the couple and visual representations of them through artworks were further ways of making the characters livelier. Affects also connected with clues, as can be seen in the two alternative endings the museum gave to its partially open-ended mystery: one alluded to by the museum and another by a visitor’s epilogue provided as an insert in the exhibition booklet (Luojus 2015) after a writing competition (Syrjänen 2016). The hopefulness and rapture of a young woman in love make it easy to imagine the dread, disappointment, and shame when her suitor turns out to be a conman and are suggestive of the former ending option: suicide. In the visitor’s ending, the trickster’s jealous wife drowned the victim. I deepen this analysis in the following section, where I examine further the nexus between clues and museum objects.

Reading Artworks for and as Clues The literal origin of the term clue, or “clew” as used by Poe in his pioneering Dupin stories, comes from the mythological ball of thread that Ariadne gave to Theseus to help him out of the Minotaur’s labyrinth and has since come to stand for something that helps solve a problem (Irwin 1996 [1994], 176–177; Gulddal 2020, 194–195). According to Gulddal, the clue can be understood in two principal ways: roughly speaking, it can refer to any type of information that might help with an investigation, whereas for a more technical definition, it is a “textual enigma” that the detective needs to actively interpret (Gulddal 2020, 194). As Gulddal points out, clues come in many forms: they can be material or immaterial, the latter category including e.g., “utterances, gestures, facial expressions, glances and actions,” and – which classical detectives often underline – psychological profiles (2020, 195). Clues typically seem trivial, loose “trifles,” until the detective deduces a pattern that connects them into a logical chain of events (Roth 1995, 193–194). Moreover, according to a generic convention that Roth calls “the para-

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dox of the obvious,” anything seeming obviously true or significant usually turns out to be the opposite (1995, 179). Hühn suggests crime fiction can be productively interpreted as an intertwining reading-writing process, in which the detective and criminal – and on a higher level, author and reader – contest about the “possession of meaning” (1987, 456, 459). Clues can be seen as part of such understanding of the crime as a text, a story that can be read by deciphering and attesting correct meaning to potential signs (Hühn 1987, 454; see also Eco 1983; Gulddal 2020, 195; Irwin 1996 [1994], 414). Whereas the detective aims at reading the crime correctly, the criminal manipulates signs around it to mislead the detective (Hühn 1987, 454). Other suspects typically complicate the detective’s reading when trying to protect their secrets (Hühn 1987, 456). For instance, in Helsinki Noir, the main suspect refuses to “accede to revealing where he had spent the rest of the evening” (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 63). In Before the Night, the poorhouse manager helps the destitute “by hook or by crook,” and only admits this after some pressuring (Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021, 46, 53). An interesting intuitional-institutional discrepancy can be noted: in detective fiction, clues are purposefully hidden among other details and red herrings, false clues that exist to deliberately cast the detective – or reader – off the scent. In contrast, museum professionals generally aim at contextualizing objects so that their connections would be meaningful, providing enough interpretative and accurate information for their visitors.10 The puzzle-exhibition concept changes the set-up curiously. As potential clues, artworks in the exhibitions became multifaceted hermeneutic objects. Instead of – or in addition to – cultural or art history, their interpretation and meanings were linked to a chain of other clues, details of the fictional crimes, suspects, alibis and so on.11 This gave reader-visitors a motivation to look differently. In detective fiction, almost any detail might be a clue, which, in a museum exhibition, brings along pros and cons. On the one hand, this is likely to increase attention, but on the other, it can lead to an intentional reading style, in which artworks are reduced mainly to their plot-functional value (Gulddal 2020, 195; Hühn 1987, 454). In general, reading the exhibitions was quite demanding, as reader-visitors had to switch between media, looking at both textual and concrete objects.

 See e.g., the ICOM Code of Ethics for Museums (2017, 25), https://icom.museum/en/resources/ standards-guidelines/code-of-ethics/ (July 13, 2022).  In addition to fictional text, both museums used traditional, brief object labels (with title, artist, technique, and collection) to equally enable a more traditional viewing experience. Moreover, at times, the titles of the artworks helped making connections between artworks and the fictional text, as the examples in this chapter show.

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Next, I examine the most significant clues and red herrings in the two exhibitions. Helsinki Noir is a classic story of a crime of seduction. The central clues are both material and immaterial. Firstly, many abstract clues speak of dreams and ideals, particularly the victim Kaarina Vehmakoski’s earnest wish to marry and start a family. She has been looking for a well-established husband from the Golf Casino and even answered a newspaper advertisement. When the well-mannered and “in every way a respectable” candidate, Mr. Kramer, replies and starts courting her, Vehmakoski is blind to ill omens – although they abound (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 51). Secondly, multiple signs point toward the centrality of money: Vehmakoski’s deposited inheritance, a photograph Kramer has taken in front of a luxury car, meetings in the expensive Café Esplanad and Swedish Theater, and Vehmakoski receiving a silk scarf that is unlikely to be from the fine department store Stockmann after all. Kramer takes Vehmakoski’s inherited ring with promises to enhance it “with four finely cut gemstones” for their engagement, later regretting about “the goldsmith’s tardiness” and talking about ordering a suitable pendant to go with it (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 54, 59). Toward the end, the plot even features an embezzlement of 100,000 Finnish Marks from the bank where Vehmakoski worked. One conventional category of clues is textual, related to e.g., a poem, song, or letter, but if it is an actual text, it is usually partial, damaged, or coded (Roth, 1995, 192–193). In Helsinki Noir, a large part of the correspondence of the victim and her suitor is given for reader-visitors to read as evidence. Later, a significant discovery is made when a ripped photograph and a torn letter of confession of the conman are found in the bin of the bank (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 60–62). Yet, these only lead to partial answers. Throughout Helsinki Noir one finds clues as to how masterly the trickster rewrites reality, using ambiguity of everyday signs to keep up appearances and deceive the victim. A key inspiration – and for those knowing the history, an ample source for intertextual clues – for the story was a historic crime wave by Finland’s most famous conman, Ruben Oskar Auervaara, whose surname has become a commonplace Finnish term for a crime of seduction.12 I suggest the fictionalization emphasizes the pervasiveness and timelessness of romance scams. Moving on to the mystery of Before the Night, a valuable artwork is the motive for the crime, initially planned as a theft, but when the widow, returning early from a soirée, witnesses this attempted theft, the thief murders her. The main material clues are the two switched artworks, a substitute painting hanging  The link shows not just in the style and details of the crime, but also in the fictional correspondence and newspaper advertisement being based on Auervaara’s (1906–1964) real letters. In the final exhibition room of Helsinki Noir (after the last scene of the story), the museum displayed documentary material about his criminal career.

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askew at the crime scene, and the original in possession of the criminal. Other important clues include the contradictory testimonies of the maid and her fiancé, the painter Poukama. Cat hair on the couch in the victim’s salon further consolidates the incriminating presence of Poukama. Before the Night includes multiple red herrings. On the crime scene, objects speak of the presence of many suspects. One of them is a tarot card, connected with a warning of death passing “before nightfall,” as alluded in the exhibition title (Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021, 57). Yet, the fortune-teller has nothing to do with the crime. On the contrary, she helps the investigator in solidifying his inference of a switched painting. A nocturnal speeding car is another bluff: plotwise, it enables the parodic incorporation of the Aine Art Museum’s founder Veli Aine’s fictional cameo as a toddler whose father sells luxury automobiles. Furthermore, the name of the victim’s suitor is highly suspicious: literally, “Se/veri Rotta” stands in Finnish for “That/blood Rat.” It can be read as a textual red herring, although Rotta does turn out to be dishonest, broke, alcoholic, and aiming to gain financially by marrying the widow. Next, I elaborate upon some of these clues, red herrings, and the relation between text and artworks. The victim’s body is an essential clue in detective fiction. As Gill Plain puts it, it becomes a “corpse-as-text” with signs of the crime written all over it (2001, 12–13). Therefore, it is fascinating to see how the victims were presented via, or as, artworks in the exhibitions. In Helsinki Noir, visitors could gain additional information about the crime by reading the symbolism in the first installation (see Figure 1): in front of the projection of the body, the installation featured a table with a mirror and some letters that soon prove to be an integral part of the plot. Readers-visitors were thus in a privileged position compared to the police, who saw the corpse surrounded by less informative miscellanea: The victim had nothing with her that might have made identification easier, and combing the immediate area produced nothing but hundreds of cigarette butts, an assortment of tickets and scraps of paper discoloured by the sea, and other everyday detritus. (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 44)

The material signs on the body and in its surroundings are scarce for the police to read.13 The victim’s identity is revealed to them and reader-visitors from chapter 2 onwards, when a young “brunette,” Elsa Rikman, comes to the police station to report her roommate Kaarina Vehmakoski missing. In addition to other descriptions, a unique physical attribute confirms the identification: “a birthmark on her left

 Incompetence of the official police is a typical detective fiction convention (see e.g., Roth 1995, 179). In both exhibitions, the police are unable to solve the mystery of the death in its entirety.

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Figure 1: Exhibition view from Helsinki Noir showing Jarno Vesala’s work Behind the Curtain (2015). Mixed media including a video projection, audio elements, and selected objects. In the background of the installation, the projection shows the victim’s corpse floating on waves. © Amos Rex Archives. Photo by Stella Ojala.

thigh” (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 45–46). Through the following chapters, consisting of flashbacks related to Rikman’s interviews alternating with the story of the police work, reader-visitors gain gradual information about the victim and her final weeks. Before the Night represents the crime scene, the “imposing wooden house” of the “vigorous widow” of a local merchant, as a combination of text and images in the booklet and displayed artworks (Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021, 46, 50). The booklet contains a drawing of the victim’s house from the outside and a floor plan, similarly to some of Agatha Christie’s novels (Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021, 12–13). In general, Christie’s classical detective stories are a major influence behind Before the Night, which Alamaunu has also pointed out in various interviews. The victim’s death in Before the Night is presented in a symbolic way, through a memento mori painting with a fan, an egg, and a skull (Björn Nyman: Still life I, 1973), a bronze statue of a lying figure (Antti Neuvonen: Reclining, 1964), and a woodcut of a lying yellow boy (Ina Colliander: Yellow Boy, 1952). The three artworks together give a distanced depiction of death. Yet, some clues of the crime persist: a closed fan referring to the widow returning home from Tornio’s 300th

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jubilee too early for the perpetrator’s original plan, and even more suggestively, there are two “lying” figures associated with the death, to play with the polysemy of the English term. Instead of embodying just the victim, the two artworks can thus be interpreted as pointing toward the perpetrator(s), too. The text describes the murder scene as follows: The scene of the crime exuded prosperity, but also a sense of history. Despite the elegant setting, the place looked unkempt, there was dust in the corners and cat hair on the couch. In the salon there were signs of uninvited visitors, the paintings on the walls were askew, a chair was knocked over, though nothing of value seemed to have been stolen. Despite her wealth, the widow was known for her interest in trinkets and decorative items rather than valuable, authentic pieces. Even the artworks on the walls did not seem expensive. On the table at the parlour, there was a haphazard assortment of dried flowers, an aid leaflet, a tarot card, and a braided bracelet. (Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021, 50–51)

This dense paragraph contains plenty of information regarding the mystery. It features many material signs, such as the items on the table, each belonging to a different suspect from the victim’s circle of acquaintances. Dust, cat hair, and an unkempt impression are suggestive, as are the knocked chair and the blow on the victim’s head. The elements in the paragraph relate to the displayed artworks. An elaborate flowery chair symbolizes the furnishing of the salon, with a black cat lurking over it on the wall (Frans Toikkanen: Prowler, 1973, mezzotint). Art museums rarely use fictional storytelling to evoke an impression of their collection pieces as “trinkets and decorative items” rather than actually valuable pieces. Again, an example of exhibition author Alamaunu’s sense of humour. As the above-cited paragraph alludes, one artwork on the museum wall hung askew. In Paavo Tolonen’s naivistic oil painting Self-Portrait: Painter from an Undeveloped Area (1970), a beret-wearing toddler in a ruffle-collared white dress sits on a chair, holding brushes. The painting has an equal-tone blue background, but the back of the chair becomes a hole showing gradient colors, as if revealing a landscape opening behind the young “painter.” In the entirety of the painting, the chair back resembles a keyhole. This painting and how it was hung indeed presented a key clue to the mystery, but the museum also faced a surprise: several times during the temporary exhibition, visitors wanted to straighten the painting on the wall. The museum had to add an extra “do not touch” sign next to it. So persistent is the convention of museal display, that more than one visitor failed to see the skewed angle of the painting as part of the means within the exhibition’s narrative toolkit. A particularly interesting question around fictional storytelling in museum exhibitions is the nature of various exhibition elements in relation to narrative perspective. Are the many artworks to be interpreted as mimetic, in the sense that they describe the actual world of the story, or are they, for instance, illustrations of characters’ dreams, opinions, or even their lies? To what extent can one trust their

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own eyes, and how can one tell if the perspective changes during the exhibition? Both of the case study exhibitions show interesting examples of how display assumes elements of inner focalization. In Helsinki Noir, the ambiguous interplay between text and display produces a red herring in chapter 5, which portrays the suitor Kramer in a red room with the correspondence of the two “lovebirds” (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 52). The Clocksmith by Yrjö Ollila (1921, oil on canvas, collection of the Finnish National Gallery) depicts a smartly dressed and subtly smiling man. The painting is horizontally surrounded by ticking clocks, seemingly affirming his story of being a clocksmith and owning a precision-mechanics company (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 50). Later, as his real character as a trickster is revealed, the portraiture ensemble can be re-visited as a red herring (an aspect accentuated by the red color of the room) – whether one regards it as reinforcing the ruse by the so-called “instrument factory owner Kramer,” or dreaming by Vehmakoski (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 63; Niemi 2021, 442). In addition to text, artworks in Helsinki Noir provided clues through both symbolism and titles. In the chapters where the couple plans their future home, many of the displayed paintings offer idyllic, warm-tinted, still rural (read: untarnished) scenes from Kulosaari island and elsewhere in Helsinki (e.g., Eero Järnefelt: The Island of Happiness and Love, 1934). Notably, many of the paintings associated with these plans, up until the dark revelation of the truth, are still lifes: highly organized set-ups, both literally and symbolically. Following the route forward, they gradually change from flowery arrangements toward increasingly obscure ones (e.g., Birger Carlstedt: Weird Arrangement, 1942; Hjalmar Karlsson: Disarray, 1940), finally turning into a surreal and nightmarish atmosphere (Birger Carlstedt: Nightmare, 1945 and Horror, 1929). Tuomas von Boehm’s painting Marionette (1948) tellingly compares with the trickster’s role as a manipulative “puppeteer” (Niemi 2021, 442). In Before the Night, there is also a moment when the display particularly reflects internal impressions of the protagonist, investigator Maunu. It occurs when Maunu visits the atelier of an up-and-coming artist, fiancé to the victim’s maid, to question him (see Figure 2). The booklet text sets the scene as follows: “The small room was full of paintings and sketches. Most of these are not very good, investigator Maunu noted with his unerring taste in art” (Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021, 58). In fact, the text features free indirect discourse, such as here, throughout the story. In the exhibition, the atelier scene features pictures but also several empty frames on the wall. The empty golden frames are thus used as a way to symbolize the detective’s opinion about the non-existent artistic value of most of the paintings. They also make the actual clue more discernible: in the cramped atelier of a painter with limited skills and means hangs an artwork by Pablo Picasso (Artist and Child, undated print, collection of the Kemi Art Museum). It fea-

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Figure 2: Exhibition view from Before the Night: Tornio Noir. View of the fictional artist Poukama’s atelier. Photo by Sanna-Mari Niemi 2022, used with permission of the Aine Art Museum.

tures an adult painter, a chair, and a small child in a slightly similar frontal position (through analogy) to the skewed painting in the victim’s salon. Hence, the exhibition presents a good example of the classic “The Purloined Letter” scheme, as the key clue – the stolen artwork – is hidden in plain sight (Poe 1998 [1844]). When the artist lets slip that “the woman [i.e., victim] had no taste [. . .] paintings in the parlour were garish kitsch,” although both he and the maid have previously purported that the artist never came any further in the house than the kitchen door, the rest of the couple’s intrigue is easy for the investigator to deduce (Alamaunu, Before the Night, 2021, 58). To note an intertextual reference, a valuable artwork appears as a murder motive also in Christie’s After the Funeral (2014 [1953]), where a Vermeer is hidden by the artistically skilled murderer overpainting it. Furthermore, both perpetrators have a similar reasoning for their crime: the victim neither understood nor appreciated art enough, so the painting ought not be left with such an uninitiated person – as compared to the perpetrator, obviously more of a connoisseur, and therefore entitled to monetize the painting (Christie 2014 [1953], 296–297). Using a plot around art connoisseurship gains an added level of significance – not

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without irony – in an art museum. In a classical, Poirotesque fashion, the investigator Maunu reveals the story of the crime by gathering all suspects in the salon. The ending of Helsinki Noir is less definite, as already mentioned. The story has a partial dénouement, where the conman is caught, and it is suggested that his victim committed the bank embezzlement. Yet, her death remains unsolved. The Amos Anderson Art Museum invited reader-visitors to draw their own conclusions based on the clues and organized a writing contest for young people. The winning text was subsequently annexed to the exhibition booklet as an epilogue. Thus, the museum gave two potential solutions to the mystery. The first alternative, hinted by the museum, linked the story explicitly to Auervaara’s crimes by displaying historical documents and a documentary film as an afterword in a separate space after the fictional exhibition story. One of his victims committed suicide. A similar fate seems feasible based on Vehmakoski’s character descriptions in the booklet (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015): she is described as a “meticulous, reliable and diligent” (46) person, “calm, steady nature [. . .] and unfailingly obliging” (48), and “in every respect a decent and attractive girl” (61). She had a “devout wish to start her own family with a good man by her side” (49), and shattering of all her dreams so cruelly, without any close relatives living, could have been too much. In the visitor ending (Syrjänen 2016), attention was given to the fact that Kramer was seen with another woman, suggesting a double life. It also used Kramer’s letter of confession in an interesting way: after a frank confession, the “forgiving, understanding, fair angel” Vehmakoski (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 62) would have forgiven the conman, and he would have wanted to desert his earlier family – a wife and a baby girl – to live with Vehmakoski. Kramer’s jealous wife thus drowned her (Syrjänen 2016).14 In the final part of this chapter, I explore connections between objects/clues and meaning-making on a metalevel by tracing parallels between classical detective fiction and museum narratives.

 Several writing contest responses had also drawn clues from Vehmakoski’s roommate’s character. Elsa Rikman was the one holding nearly all information of Vehmakoski, and was frequently present on the couple’s dates as a chaperone. It is up for the reader, whether e.g., the following line in Kramer’s letter is a clue or red herring: “both of us [Kramer and Vehmakoski] being able to rely on Elsa’s friendship” (Luojus, Helsinki Noir, 2015, 61).

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Readability as a Shared Idea(l) [W]ords and objects are pointless if they do not carry intelligible meaning. (Pearce 2002 [1995], 14)

I suggest that by applying a crime fiction plot as narrative strategy, Helsinki Noir and Before the Night raise considerations about the potential (il-)legibility of objects and artworks in museums. Particularly, the open-endedness and writing competition of Helsinki Noir emphasize the ambiguity of reading clues/objects, as well as seeing visitors as having an active part in the interpretative process, even as co-authors (see also Niemi, 2021). Thus, the exhibitions speak of the indeterminate nature of interpretation, while also problematizing the ideal of readability as it appears in classic detective fiction. The Oxford English Dictionary defines readability as the quality of a text being “easy to understand and enjoyable to read.”15 Here, I use the term mainly in the former sense of comprehensibility/intelligibility of a text to a reader, be it a detective solving a crime or a museum visitor making sense of a museum exhibition as text (Ravelli 2006) – or even the combination of these two. Moreover, I argue that the practice of searching for knowledge of the world through reading various material and immaterial signs (clues) is a shared feature between detective and museum work. In museums, readability can be approached from three main perspectives: firstly, in the sense of understanding the world through objects and displays, secondly, through museum exhibition texts (e.g., their clarity and tone), and thirdly, via a more recent notion of museum itself as text, including museum messages on the level of both exhibition and institution (Ravelli 2006). According to Gulddal, the concept of clue in classic detective fiction implies a claim of the world as “an orderly place that can be read and understood in much the same way as a book” (2020, 199). A famous illustration, which Gulddal also refers to, appears in the first Sherlock Holmes mystery, A Study in Scarlet, where the skeptical Watson reads a magazine article by Holmes praising the wonders of systematic observation and analysis: So all life is a great chain, the nature of which is known wherever we are shown a single link of it. [. . .] By a man’s fingernails, by his coat-sleeve, by his foot, by his trouser-knees, by the callosities of his forefinger and thumb, by his expression, by his shirt-cuffs – by each of these things a man’s calling is plainly revealed. (Doyle 2016 [1887], 28)

An idea that the world and its social structures would be understandable through observation, logic, and disciplinary methods affords an oft-noted link between de-

 https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/158852?redirectedFrom=readability#eid (May 10, 2023).

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tectives and scientific thinking (also museums). Umberto Eco (1983) provides an interesting theory of abduction (retroduction) that is helpful to the current discussion. Its premise lies in approaching “universes as if they were texts and [. . .] texts as if they were universes” (Eco 1983, 205).16 The model casts light upon both criminal detection and, more generally, scientific discovery: both instances read (im-)material signs – clues – to form abductions, or hypotheses, for future testing, thereby to reach knowledge of the world.17 Eco’s model also highlights the importance of context for unifying single facts into a sequential text. Interestingly to my discussion on readability, museum collections have been explicitly compared with language: Susan Pearce suggests that both can be viewed as “communication systems through which society is constituted” (1992, 144–145; 2002 [1995]). The meanings of collection objects, like words, are always context- and culture-specific and interconnected with other objects or words (Pearce 2002 [1995], 14). Bennett also analyses exhibition practices through the trope of legibility, using the term “double-levelled vision” to explain how collection objects are “seen through” (emphasis in the original) as part of a larger network of meaning (2002 [1995], 35–36). Whereas in the Renaissance studioli this readerly vision was practically reserved for those whose power the collections represented, since the late eighteenth century, modern museums have aimed at increasing “public legibility” of their exhibitions through organization, contextualization, and labelling of artifacts (Bennett 2002 [1995], 35–36, 42). Naturally, attitudes toward readability of the world as reflected in exhibitions, as well as museum texts and the overall narrative design of exhibitions, have changed over the centuries: critical insight has been brought through e.g., visitor studies, the so-called “New Museology,” postmodernism with its skepticism toward grand narratives, postcolonialism, and more recently, intersectional thinking.18 Moreover, prosaic factors such as funding and visitor numbers and a general quest for relevance equally encourage contemporary museums to seek fresh approaches to narratives, also through fiction. The clear-cut readability of clues in classic detective fiction has been challenged in several crime fiction subgenres: hard-boiled, metaphysical, and the police procedural (Gulddal 2020, 194, 199–200). Likewise, contemporary curatorial strategies address increasingly self-reflexively the multiplicity and ambiguity of interpreting collections, as well as consider the participation of reader-visitors,

 By universes, Eco means “worlds such as the one which scientists use to explain the laws” (Eco 1983, 204).  In addition to clues, Eco (1983, 210–212) lists imprints and symptoms as possible signs toward abduction.  It would be impossible to give an exhaustive bibliography for these complex issues within the limits of this chapter, but e.g., MacLeod et al. (2012) touch upon some of them.

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along with material objects themselves, in the meaning-making processes.19 I argue that, similarly to artist interventions, fictional narratives are one way to add institutional critique and (meta-)reflection on museum exhibitions and to consider how museums shape object-related knowledge through choices, omissions, display techniques, and various narrative strategies. Moreover, I suggest that detective fiction in museums highlights, on the one hand, reader-visitors’ roles as co-authors in meaning-production, and on the other hand, how context changes the reading of single objects and their interrelationships. Sometimes fiction also gives museum exhibitions more of that second dictionary meaning of readability: enjoyment.

Conclusion As seen through the concept of the clue, the detective fiction genre affords an institutional (meta-)reflection on museums’ historical way of connecting objects to knowledge and meaning. Both detectives and museums use clues – material or immaterial – to read the world through retroduction and as evidence. In light of previous theoretical discussions over the genre of detective fiction (e.g., Hühn 1987), utilizing a classical detective fiction plot in a museum exhibition extends a playful invitation to participate in a contest over meaning-making on multiple levels: criminal vs. detective, author vs. reader, museum vs. reader-visitor. By drawing a concrete parallel between museum objects and clues, the art exhibitions Helsinki Noir. A Crime to Solve and Before the Night – Tornio Noir not only challenged reader-visitors with a puzzle, but also reminded of the subjectivity and constructedness behind museum narratives, as well as the ambiguity of interpretation. As such, they help to make it more visible how museums produce, mediate, and shape object-related knowledge through narrative choices. The same objects can both act in and be read as part of many contexts and stories. Subsequent information, such as new research, changes our perceptions of them, just like in a criminal investigation. Open-endedness of the fictional plot and the writing contest of Helsinki Noir further emphasize the ambiguity of reading clues/ objects, as well as seeing reader-visitors as active participants in the interpretative process, even as co-authors.

 A noteworthy and interdisciplinary trend around objects and episteme is the new materialism, which considers objects themselves as “lively” actors in knowledge-production beyond a strictly anthropocentric vision (see e.g., Muller & Langill 2022).

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Bibliography Alamaunu, Anita. Before the Night – Tornio Noir. Trans. Maija Myllylä. Tornio: Aine Art Museum, 2021. Before the Night – Tornio Noir. Exhibition displayed March 12, 2021 to January 30, 2022 in the Aine Art Museum, Tornio, Finland. Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics. London: Routledge, 2002 [1995]. Breu, Christopher. “Affect.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020. 244–251. Bronfen, Elisabeth. Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. New York: Routledge, 1992. Christie, Agatha. After the Funeral. London: HarperCollins, 2014 [1953]. Doyle, Arthur Conan. A Study in Scarlet [1887] & The Sign of the Four [1890]. London: Macmillan Collector’s Library, 2016. Duerre Humann, Heather. “Hybridisations.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020. 57–64. Eco, Umberto. “Horns, Hooves, Insteps: Some Hypotheses on Three Types of Abduction.” The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. Ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1983. 198–220. Ginzburg, Carlo. Clues, Myths, and the Historical Method. Trans. John and Anne Tedeschi. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989 [1986]. Gulddal, Jesper. “Clues.” The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction. Ed. Janice Allan, Jesper Gulddal, Stewart King, and Andrew Pepper. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2020. 194–201. Helsinki Noir. A Crime to Solve. Exhibition displayed September 17, 2015 to January 9, 2017 in the Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki, Finland. Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean. Museums and the Interpretation of Visual Culture. London: Routledge, 2000. Hühn, Peter. “The Detective as Reader: Narrativity and Reading Concepts in Detective Fiction.” Modern Fiction Studies 33.3 (1987): 451–466. Irwin, John T. The Mystery to a Solution. Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996 [1994]. Luojus, Susanna. Helsinki Noir: A Deadly Proposal. Trans. Michael Garner. Helsinki: Amos Anderson Art Museum publication, new series vol. 98, 2015. MacLeod, Suzanne, Laura Hourston Hanks, and Jonathan Hale (eds.). Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012. Muller, Lizzie, and Caroline Seck Langill (eds.). Curating Lively Objects: Exhibitions beyond Disciplines. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2022. Niemi, Sanna-Mari. “Entering the Mystery: Helsinki Noir, a Fictional Detective Story Created in a Museum Space.” Museum Studies: Bridging Theory and Practice. Ed. Nina Robbins, Suzie Thomas, Minna Tuominen, and Anna Wessman. University of Jyväskylä and ICOFOM, 2021. 431–543. Pearce, Susan M. Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study. London: Leicester University Press, 1992. Pearce, Susan M. On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition. London: Routledge, 2002 [1995]. Plain, Gill. Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction: Gender, Sexuality and the Body. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2001. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Purloined Letter” [1844]. Selected Tales. Ed. David Van Leer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. 249–265.

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Ravelli, Louise J. Museum Texts: Communication Frameworks. Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2006. Roppola, Tiina. Designing for the Museum Visitor Experience. New York: Routledge, 2012. Roth, Marty. Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1995. Syrjänen, Sophia. “Epilogue.” Winning Text of the Amos Anderson Art Museum’s Writing Competition for Young People, 2016, insert in the exhibition booklet, Susanna Luojus. Helsinki Noir: A Deadly Proposal. Trans. Michael Garner. Helsinki: Amos Anderson Art Museum publication, new series vol. 98, 2015. Wittocx, Eva, Ann Demeester, Peter Carpreau, Melanie Bühler, and Xander Karskens (eds.). The Transhistorical Museum: Mapping the Field. Amsterdam: Valiz, with Frans Hals Museum, Haarlem and M-Museum, Leuven, 2018.

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Narrating Grief: The Storytelling Strategy and its Immersive Potential in Pia Says Goodbye (Dortmund) Introduction Death is seldom part of our everyday lives, although it concerns us all. Without personally experiencing an accident or severe illness, without becoming a caregiver to a sick relative, most people postpone rationally contemplating their own mortality – even though they know death is inevitable. The death of a loved one, as well as the processing of that death, is often a radical and incisive experience. People react to death emotionally in the form of grief and mourn in their familiar customs. For professionals who work with dying and mourning people, death is omnipresent; they develop coping strategies in order to perform their work, which they often perceive as rewarding. This chapter examines how exhibitions can thematize personal and occupational processes and practices of grief and mourning by utilizing the communication and interpretation strategy1 of storytelling: how can storytelling be applied in an exhibition on death and grief? What effect does this have on visitors? I approach these questions in two ways: first, I examine the narratological format of the temporary exhibition Pia says Goodbye, which presents us with possibilities on how to build an exhibition story that immerses the visitor in subject matter on death and grief. Second, I present the results of a visitor evaluation carried out in Pia says Goodbye that, using qualitative empirical data, helps us understand the impact of storytelling. Pia says Goodbye was curated and exhibited by the DASA Working World Exhibition in Dortmund (Germany) as part of a research project examining the impact of storytelling in exhibitions. It aimed to shed light on a working world under extreme emotional conditions and allow visitors to reflect on their own relationship with death. The exhibition team created a strong narrative arch encompassing the entire exhibition, namely, the story of a teenage girl named Pia who loses her grandmother and subsequently deals with the funeral proceedings and coping with her grief.

 The term “communication and interpretation strategy” explicitly integrates curating, design, and communication in exhibition making. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-006

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In addition to defining a storytelling strategy for exhibitions, the DASA research team also performed a summative evaluation of the impact of storytelling on visitors’ learning experiences. The evaluation used a mixed methods approach of quantitative and qualitative methods to review the effects of the exhibition’s narrative strategy. This evaluation aimed to gain insights into visitors’ reactions and personal references to a fictional2 exhibition story.3 This chapter is divided into three main sections: in the first, it defines the concept of immersive storytelling based on a narratological apparatus and reflects upon the challenges of exhibiting death and grief; it then describes the ways in which storytelling is conceptualized and performed in the actual exhibition; lastly, it presents empirical findings on visitors’ reactions to immersive storytelling in the exhibition, and categorizes the different types of visitors’ immersive involvement.4

Immersive Storytelling The English term “storytelling” has many possible applications in the making and analyzing of exhibitions. Here, it is not understood in the initial sense of the word (to tell a story to someone) but as an interpretive strategy that has been introduced, e.g., to corporate communication, marketing, advertising, or psychology. The key characteristics are usually the same: communicators turn a rather nonnarrative content into a narrative using storytelling. They pursue a particular communicative goal, often to address a target group of people in a specific way, i.e., personally and emotionally. In the context of corporate communication, storytelling “is defined as an active story management and transmission with selected addressees, a defined context, and a carefully chosen code” (Podnar 2015, 97). How can such active story management and transmission be achieved in exhibitions? Exhibitions that work closely with a storytelling strategy implement typical narrative elements to increase narrativity. In doing so, they employ the advantages offered using narratives, such as a reduction of complexity, connection to recipients’ lives, or the provision of entertainment (see e.g., Wolf 2002,

 For a discussion of the use of fiction in museum exhibitions, see also the chapter by SannaMari Niemi in this volume.  This chapter’s author performed multiple roles in this: as project leader of the research project, she both curated Pia says Goodbye, and planned and conducted the evaluation research with the research team. She is also the author of an ongoing Ph.D. thesis that deals with the foundational research of the storytelling strategy in museum exhibitions.  For a discussion of immersive storytelling, see also the chapter by Rachel Christ-Doane in this volume.

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32–34). Therefore, in the context of the museum, storytelling is a communication and interpretation strategy that aims to improve recipients’ experiences. In order to understand the narratological possibilities that exhibitions hold, we must connect with recipients in a relevant and cautious way; this especially holds true when dealing with an emotional and personal topic like grief. Media-specific characteristics – such as the spatial unfolding of the story and non-linear and interactive reception – play a crucial role in an exhibition’s narration. It is therefore necessary to find a narratological concept that meets those requirements. Marie-Laure Ryan describes four dimensions that allow for the assembly of many forms of narrative definitions independent of the medium of communication: the spatial dimension (“narrative must be about a world populated by individuated existents”), the temporal dimension (e.g., “this world must be situated in time and undergo significant transformations”), the mental dimension (e.g., “some of the participants in the events must be intelligent agents who have a mental life and react emotionally to the states of the world”) and the formal and pragmatic dimension (“the story must communicate something meaningful to the recipient”) (Ryan 2006, 8). The more a narration fulfills the objectives of these four dimensions, the more it displays narrativity. The spatial and temporal dimensions mainly apply to immersive storytelling in exhibitions: visitors actively create the story by walking through the exhibition space. By doing so, they physically enter the narrative space with its existents (characters, objects, interactives, etc.) and set the pace for their own temporal reception. The formal/pragmatic dimension relates to visitors’ needs: a comprehensible, relevant, and authentic exhibition narrative provides the basis for an immersive experience. To further understand the visitor reception process of narration in an exhibition, it is helpful to employ the concept of immersion.5 It allows visitors to have a lasting and dignified involvement with grief. The Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory defines narrative immersion as “a simulative process” which addresses “a mentally projected world, i.e., a holistic set of mental representations foregrounding phenomenological and spatial properties perspectively organized” (Schaeffer & Vultur 2005, 238). Stephen Bitgood defines this “simulative immersion” as “the degree to which an exhibit effectively involves, absorbs, engrosses, or creates for visitors the experience of a particular time and place” (1990, 284). He also identifies several factors that contribute to immersive exhibition experiences: Bitgood highlights the “use of physical space (dimensionality)” as mandatory, although it  The concept of immersion was not key in the creation of the exhibition design of Pia says Goodbye but was later introduced to this research project, based on the findings of the evaluation study, discussed in the final main section of this chapter. Emotionalization, however was a key concept for the exhibition design.

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is unclear how encompassing this space must be; “Multisensory stimulation” or “Lighting Effects” may also enhance the feeling of immersion; as well as “Authenticity or object realism” or “Mental Imagery” (1990, 288). He defined these factors some time ago in the early 1990s and has since admitted that some were not thoroughly evaluated at the time (1990, 288–292). However, these are first indicators of how immersion can be enhanced in exhibitions. A key feature of simulated immersion is the fact that visitors are still aware of the illusion; they can still “experienc[e] at least part of the actual environment” (Bitgood 1990, 284). This is essential for exhibitions, due to the fact that they are fundamentally utilitarian: “[the story] is subordinated to another goal, such as making a point in a speech or sermon” (Ryan 2006, 13–14). Therefore, exhibition narratives do not exist for mere pleasure but have an educational impact and serve a higher institutional purpose. Even though they may facilitate simulative immersion, they are still expected to keep a “critical distance”: “Surely you may blow away visitors with a mixed media fairy tale, but the decisive question still remains whether they were able to relate to it. Whether they could become part of it without losing their own identity. Immersion with critical distance, in other words” (Kossmann et al. 2012, 86). When visitors can relate to an encounter with grief without losing their own identity in a “holistic set of mental representations” (Schaeffer & Vultur 2005, 238), and instead maintain a critical distance, this can potentially lead to a strong and (positive) emotional experience. I have just examined the theoretical background of storytelling – the “how” of telling stories in exhibitions. This next paragraph looks into the “what” – the topic of death and grief. Death, in its ultimateness, is a popular event in stories and has been a widespread incident in fictional narrations for thousands of years. Geoffrey Gorer (1955) described the “Pornography of Death,” meaning the contemporary contradiction of death being a taboo in American society while at the same time being constantly present in media consumption. Recently, there has been a shift toward a greater visibility of death and self-determination in dying, with discussions about assisted dying, health care proxies etc. There has also been a specialization of treatment with the appearance of palliative care and the associated optimization of dying (Streeck 2017). Death is experienced as personal loss, and death’s strong emotionalization is seen as the “result of the affective enhancement of personal relationships in modern forms of families and friendships”6 (Schützeichel 2017, 115). In addition to this individualization, the experience of losing a loved one is uniquely intense and earth-shattering. By narrat-

 „Resultat der affektiven Aufwertung personaler Beziehungen in den modernen Familien- und Freundschaftsformen“, author’s translation.

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ing the fictional fate of a grieving person, recipients consume a personal destiny, develop empathy, and maintain a certain distance (“It’s just a story!”). Exhibitions are not only a predominantly visual medium but are also interactive: they allow visitors’ deep – and unpredictable – involvement. In this complex medium, plain technical challenges arise through the exhibition of narrative processes. Exhibition contents are spread over different media and arranged through different rooms. A comprehensive narration promises to create a meta-level of interpretation that allows visitors to connect the different exhibition elements, merging them into a new meaningful entity and differentiating it from the archival display (Thiemeyer 2013, 486). The topic’s sensitivity, individuality, and emotionality are crucial in exhibiting grief and mourning. The following narrative objectives utilize the potential of exhibitions to tell stories sensitively, while at the same time they allow visitors to comprehend the stories in an emotional way or to even connect to them experientially. As discussed above, the research I present in this chapter points to four elements that exhibition narratives are built upon – loosely based on Ryan’s narrative dimensions. They include narrative space, plot, character, and visitor. Space corresponds to the exhibition medium as a predominantly spatial and visual experience. Plot and character are intertwined with the exhibition’s content, filling the space with action and creating a temporal dimension. Visitors finalize exhibition narrations through their participatory perception.7 To understand how exhibitions build stories that allow for immersion in mourning, certain narrative objectives can be described as corresponding to the aforementioned four elements in order to enhance the storytelling experience. The narrative space consists of a multimedia depiction of events (spatial, auditory, visual, interactive, object-based, textual). The events are repeated in different sensory modalities, preferably in the form of “embedded narratives,” a term borrowed from game design: “essential narrative information must be redundantly presented across a range of spaces and artifacts” (Jenkins 2004, 126). The places of the events relate to everyday knowledge for visitors and in some ways visible or imaginable8 to allow quick and easy orientation. As visitors do not expect (complex) narratives in exhibitions, the plots ideally draw on typical patterns (cf. Booker 2005). The main character is introduced, clearly and visibly, and subject to noticeable changes throughout the exhibition. Lastly, visitors may extract personal value as they contribute to the exhibition, take something away for their own use and get chances to reflect on their lives – all while maintaining a critical distance.

 To draw on Ryan’s narrative modes, exhibition narrations are participatory (mostly) on a discourse level: the visitor decides the order of the story’s presentation (2006, 14).  See the concept of “evocative spaces” (Jenkins 2004, 123).

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Two important aspects arise here: these objectives help narrate grief, allowing visitors to connect their own world to an incisive experience; however, they do not exclusively apply to narrative exhibitions on grief. Second, these objectives are suggestions – not conditions – to make stories more accessible and natural to visitors. This strategy aims to use the exhibition’s content and message in order to deepen visitors’ emotional involvement and personal references. In summary, storytelling implies a strategically applied, communicative goal that can be achieved through narrative objectives. Such objectives became the foundation in designing the exhibition Pia says Goodbye, outlined in the next section.

Storytelling in Pia says Goodbye From 2019 to 2020, DASA put on the temporary exhibition Pia says Goodbye: An Exhibition on the Work with Death and Grief to serve as an entry point to grief, especially for those who had never dealt with their own mortality or experienced the loss of a loved one. Its target audience was families with children over ten and teenage school groups. The visitors were encouraged to reflect on their own attitudes and connect with their own experiences surrounding grief. The exhibition also offered a platform for these teens to debate different ways that people can prepare for and cope with loss. Furthermore, the exhibition team integrated professionals that deal with death and grief. The DASA Working World Exhibition (DASA Arbeitswelt Ausstellung) is the permanent educational facility of the German Federal Institute of Occupational Safety and Health (Bundesanstalt für Arbeitsschutz und Arbeitsmedizin). Based in Dortmund (Germany), in one of the Ruhr area’s former centers of coal mining and steel production, this facility seeks to answer questions about the value and shape of work in today’s society. One of its further mandates is to provide career orientation. DASA focuses on developing scenographic and interactive exhibitions to connect a diverse audience to often abstract and intangible topics relating to the world of work. The exhibition is centered upon a character (17-year-old Pia), an easily identifiable plot, and immersive narrative spaces. Pia functions as an anchor point for the visitors to empathize with grief; her story allows them to witness an unexpected loss with all its implications. Pia’s grandmother Ruth dies suddenly overnight and Pia and her father have to manage the funeral preparations, while simultaneously going through the grieving process. Visitors accompany Pia through six rooms, from the moment she receives news of her grandmother’s death, through the funeral service, up until a few months following her loss.

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Pia lives a regular teenage life. She quarrels with her father, enjoys hanging out with her friends, and is into goth subculture. She is about to finish school and is overwhelmed by her career choices. Pia and the other characters are played by actors. They appear in the form of large moving image projections, videos (talking heads), audio dialogues (listening stations), and still images (scenic graphics on the walls, photographs with graphic elements). The events follow a “Voyage and Return” plotline (Booker 2005): Ruth’s unexpected death disrupts Pia’s life; she metaphorically and physically enters a new world – the unknown world of grief –, comes into contact with professionals who become mentors, and returns to her old life, grownup and mature. Visitors to the exhibition do not simply see Pia; they physically enter her world – her story defines the content and design of each of the six rooms. In order to translate the individual and impalpable process of grieving onto an exhibition space, the exhibition team chose to visualize Pia’s feelings by employing a fourstaged grieving model, developed by theologist Yorick Spiegel (1972). This model guides the rooms’ themes. The four stages are shock, control, regression, and adaptation. Shock is the first reaction to the news of somebody’s death. It can last between a few hours to a few days. This is followed by the stage of control, which can last up to seven days. Control can be observed in two different facets: mourners control themselves at a time of pragmatic decision-making, and professionals control the planning and execution of the funeral. The regression phase takes anywhere from four to ten weeks and is “the most critical period” (Spiegel 1972, 68). This is when mourners find their way back to everyday life without the deceased. The final stage is adaptation; it characterizes a return to their adjusted everyday life and is supposed to last between six and twelve months (Spiegel 1972, ch. 3). This model of grief in stages stands at odds with the grieving process as a personal experience, as mentioned above. Furthermore, recent research has demonstrated the existence of varied trajectories of grief and reactions to trauma: resilience, recovery, chronic dysfunction, and delayed grief or trauma (Bonanno 2009). However, using the stage model to exhibit grief helped the exhibition team develop Pia’s fictional voyage, especially by enabling them to place events on a temporal timeline. This model process exemplified one objective for a strong narrative: the exhibition is not about grief but Pia’s grief. This narrative simplification helped visitors immediately grasp the events of the plot, allowing them to position themselves more easily. Now we will go through the six rooms of the exhibition:

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Figure 1: Pia’s room at the beginning of the exhibition: She is in shock; her world is shattered. Pia says Goodbye, DASA Working World Exhibition, 2020. Photo by Patricia Dobrijevic, DASA. Art Direction/Illustration by Romina Birzer.

Room 1: Pia’s Room – “No, No, No!” Visitors enter Pia’s bedroom and find themselves in the middle of a conflict: Pia’s father has just informed her of her grandmother’s death (the dialogue is transmitted through a listening station). Ruth was already in a nursing home, but her death surprises Pia. She is in shock and cannot believe it. The room is entirely black and the furniture is out of place, symbolizing the change in Pia’s world: her bed and floor lamp hang on the wall, her chair is oversized (see Figure 1). Her mirror is broken,9 as if Pia just smashed her fist in it, next to the lettering “No, No, No!” on the wall. There is a large projection of Pia crying and a recording of her stating her shock playing over the speakers, underlining her emotions. The visitors are given clues about the relationship between Pia and her grandmother through objects in the room, such as personal belongings, a handwritten diary, documents on the desk, and Instagram pictures on a tablet. The news of Ruth’s death overshadows the room’s atmosphere.  For a more detailed analysis of items in Pia says Goodbye, see Hawig 2022.

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Room 2: Nursing Home – “What happens with granny’s stuff?” Pia and her father visit Ruth’s room in the nursing home. It was here she was found dead by a geriatric nurse. It is this nurse who talks to the visitors and Pia about this experience and his routine at work (talking head). The physician who recorded Ruth’s death comforts Pia and talks about her own coping strategies (talking head). Aside from gaining insight into Ruth’s life in the nursing home, depicted through her hospital bed and other exhibits, visitors also learn about her past and what people might remember her by (memory wall). The mourning stage of control characterizes this room as well as the one following it. Pia is functional and makes decisions with her father.

Room 3: Funeral Home – “Granny would have loved colors” Pia and her father make preparations for Ruth’s funeral and which involves many decisions with the undertaker. The atmosphere is rather calm; light grey and white dominate the room. Pia and her father struggle to decide on flower and music arrangements, as Ruth did not communicate any wishes before her passing.

Room 4: Memorial Service – “Just once more . . .” Visitors are invited to sit down and participate in Ruth’s memorial service. As the funeral speaker gives a eulogy, Pia vents her emotions (media projection). This room shows the peak of Pia’s grief. Three out of four walls display large moving projections that inform about the room’s atmosphere. Visitors may choose the atmosphere they prefer using a media terminal, experimenting with different moods they feel are suitable for the occasion: waves of the ocean (= the atmosphere of “melancholy”), butterflies (“hope”), ice crystals (“desperation”), and rather aggressive drawings in purple and black (“deep mourning”).

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Figure 2: The artwork depicting Pia’s grief after room 5 Funeral Reception. It shows several months of her grieving process before visitors enter the last room. Pia says Goodbye, DASA Working World Exhibition, 2020. Photo by Patricia Dobrijevic, DASA. Art Direction/Illustration by Romina Birzer.

Room 5: Funeral Reception – “I said Goodbye to Granny. I am so exhausted” In the funeral reception10 room, two rows of white tables invite visitors to sit together with every character at the meal following the wake. The walls are decorated with flowers, giving the room a friendly and relieving feeling. Some listening stations have been placed in coffee mugs on the table, in which the characters give an account of how they experienced the funeral. In the transition between the fifth and the final room, the visitor travels weeks into the future. This is depicted through a large-scale graphic displaying Pia’s many emotions (see Figure 2). Her emotions evolve from despair to sadness and, finally, to hope. This part of the exhibition represents Pia experiencing the stage of regression in the grieving process.

 The original German term used in the exhibition was “Leichenschmauss”, which literally translates as “funeral feast”.

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Figure 3: Pia’s room at the end of the exhibition, where she recalls her past experiences with grief. The armchair reminds her of Ruth. Pia says Goodbye, DASA Working World Exhibition, 2020. Photo by Patricia Dobrijevic, DASA. Art Direction/Illustration by Romina Birzer.

Room 6: Pia’s Room – “Can you see me sometimes? Can you hear me?” The visitors find themselves in Pia’s room once more. It looks different now; the colors are lighter than in the first room, and everything is tidy. A few months have passed since her grandmother’s death, and Pia has entered the stage of adaptation: she accepts Ruth’s death and remembers her frequently while getting on with her life (talking head) (see Figure 3). She has traveled to New York City with her best friend and found a trainee position as an occupational therapist – inspired by her encounters with the physician and the nurse at her grandmother’s nursing home (documents on the desk). Pia speaks to the visitors directly for the first time in the exhibition, reflecting on her experience of grief and the ways in which it made her grow. She inherited Ruth’s armchair to remember her by. To challenge Pia’s predefined story of grief, many exhibition elements ask the visitors to reflect on their own attitudes toward their mortality and loss of their loved ones. These interventions are well-placed throughout the story’s plot, and

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come in the form of interactive multimedia stations on aging and preparing your own death. They pose questions to the visitors such as “How will you look when you are old?” “How much does a burial cost?” Some of the questions also thematize grieving the loss of a loved one, for example: “What do you say all too rarely?” Furthermore, the exhibition uses short texts to stimulate visitor self-reflection, especially at the meal following the wake: plates display questions, inviting visitors to take a seat and discuss them; e.g., “Would your life change if you knew when you will die?” Other analog stations invite visitors to write sympathy cards or sign the book of condolences. The latter is used as a guest book for visitors to both reflect on their own experiences of loss, as well as to console Pia. In this way, the lines of reality and fiction are blurred. The exhibition encourages visitors to connect to the events in Pia’s world, reminisce about their past experiences, and look into their future. Those reflective elements provide environmental feedback and prompt mental imagery throughout the exhibition, in order to enhance the immersive experience. The questions directed at visitors help the exhibition maintain a critical distance by questioning the events shown in Pia’s story. In this section, I have demonstrated that Pia says Goodbye integrated multiple narrative objectives based on the dimensions of space, plot, character, and visitor. The exhibition provided a narrative setting where visitors could identify with Pia, emotionally connect to her, and detect references to their own lives.

Evaluation Study: Effects of Immersive Storytelling on Visitors This section uses qualitative empirical data to ascertain the narrative effects of Pia says Goodbye. This exhibition was part of a long-term research project using an evaluation. Three expectations by the DASA Working World Exhibition team framed the exhibition narrative: visitors consume/perceive the fictional story, immerse themselves in it, and reflect on the events through the lens of their personal lives. The research team – which consisted of DASA employees, including the author of this chapter – conducted five different methods in a two-stage process to tackle the exhibition’s complexity and measure its impact: First, we collected data for the purposes of gaining insight into visitor behavior and the overall quality of the exhibition. In order to ascertain this, we conducted a tablet questionnaire (182 participants), as well as our own visitor observations (non-participatory, 72 subjects). Additionally, external museum experts analyzed the exhibition by using the “Judging Exhibitions” framework by Serrell to assess its quality (2006). In the second stage of our research process, we collected qualitative data, which offered both a complementary and

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more in-depth understanding of visitor learning experiences (Kuckartz 2014, 58). In this phase, we utilized the approach of the “Museum Learning Collaborative” (Leinhardt & Knutson 2004). Using this method, we collected data from guided interviews (15 participants) and participatory visitor observations (ten groups). This chapter primarily refers to data from the latter source. Here, small groups of visitors carried a dictaphone that recorded their dialogue throughout their visit in the exhibition. At the same time, our team took notes on how visitors used the exhibition without interfering. Before and after the tour, visitors answered questions about their expectations and experiences in the exhibition. Again, visitors talked to each other, not to the researcher.11 The data from transcriptions and observation profiles does not give representative numbers on the impact of storytelling. Instead, it allows for an inductive process, including theory building. The findings of all five methods led to the hypothesis that the impact of storytelling in exhibitions unfolds in five different dimensions: structure, personal life connection, identification, emotionalization, and immersion. Since the exhibition’s narrative structures its content, it allows for a personal involvement by triggering visitors into drawing connections with their own personal experiences. This creates an emotional and immersive experience. The findings also assume that these dimensions exist in every exhibition narration – however, to different degrees. They can have positive and negative effects on the visitors, depending on their interests, motivations, and the duration of their visit (Hawig et al. 2023, ch. 6.1). The cases discussed below demonstrate a wide spectrum in visitors’ processes of perception and learning experiences regarding the narrative depiction of grief. They summarize some of our key research findings of the various dimensions of visitor impact and provide insight into the immersive potential of the narrative exhibition design. Two study participants, Anna and Alina12 (14 and 15 years old), matched the exhibition’s target group and had little previous contact with death. In contrast, the participants Christa and Christel (86 and 74) looked back on many life experiences and happily shared them with each other in the exhibition. A family, consisting of Michael (39) and Michaela (41), along with their three children (13, 10, and 8), revealed a very different group dynamic. The parents worked as transmitters for Pia’s experiences: the children explored, while the parents explained. As mentioned above, immersion is one of the five dimensions of visitor impact identified in our visitor evaluation. In this chapter, I integrate the dimension of immersion as part of the storytelling strategy, while analyzing the further dimensions of identification, personal life connection, and emotionalization. I do so

 Here, this was the author of this chapter.  The names of all participants are pseudonyms.

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in order to illustrate different possible manifestations of an immersive storytelling experience: How did visitors identify with Pia’s story? What kind of relevant connections did they make? What emotions did they feel?13 The dimension of identification enhanced visitors’ intensive involvement with the exhibition’s narrative. Many visitors were either able to identify with Pia or generally with the events depicted in her story. Additionally, visitors showed empathy and understanding toward her fate. Anna and Alina showed many moments of identification; Anna even discovered that she liked listening to the same music as Pia. In contrast, Christa and Christel found it hard to identify with our story’s heroine. They mentioned many times that the exhibition was for younger people. Despite this, they empathized with Pia’s situation as they were the same age when their grandmothers died; the connections they drew to the events shown are evident in their many anecdotes. The situation described below illustrates how these two different pairs of participants engaged with the artwork showing Pia’s mourning stage of regression (see Figure 2).14 Even though Anna and Alina did not realize that it depicted Pia’s emotions over a time span of several months, they described them as an “ideal process” of grief. Anna drew a connection between Pia’s emotions and the light atmosphere in room 5, the Funeral Reception: I thought that especially the second last, where she exhales, [. . .]. I thought that fitted really well, just because its, [. . .] like a kind of release from this grief, because the atmosphere was more relaxed, and everyone is happier (Anna & Alina 2020).

In contrast, Christa and Christel did not like the depiction of grief in the artwork (see Figure 2). To them, it lacked authenticity and did not align with their own understandings of grief – they could not identify with Pia’s situation here: Christel: “Grief.” Well, to me, this is not exactly grief that I see photographed here. To me, this is bad acting (laughs). Christa: Yes, it is a bit badly staged. [. . .] Christel: Grief, you know, it is more, something scattered. You carry it inside yourself. [. . .] Grief to me is just a tree, for example. I can immerse myself in it and, you know? Or a single person in front of a wider background à la Caspar David Friedrich (laughs) or something like that. [. . .]

 All visitor quotations are the author’s translations from German to English.  The researcher showed the artwork to the groups on a poster in the post-tour talk entitled “Grief.”

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Christa: The memories! [. . .] Well these, images and the other things, well, what does one possibly have from their grandmother? Christel: But small things, well, I’d say, like this armchair, like the one depicted here, are important, too. That you always have small moments of memory. [. . .] Christa: Well, my grandmother never had an armchair on her own. Everyone used the armchair (laughs). Christel: No, mine either (laughs) (Christa & Christel 2020).

Although Christa and Christel did not perceive Pia as authentic, the artwork depicting Pia’s grief and their lack of identification with it inspired the two women to share their strategies for dealing with grief long-term. They had many selective moments of identification as they connected to elements throughout the exhibition (e.g., to Pia’s emotional expression “No, No, No!” on the wall, see Figure 1). As shown above, Bitgood mentioned authenticity as an essential factor for immersion. In the case of this exhibition, the perception of authenticity by some visitors resulted in the subsequent reaction of empathy and understanding. In this way, authenticity supported their immersive experience. In contrast, visitors who felt that authenticity was lacking during their visit expressed some moments of irritation. Nevertheless, such moments still offered them the possibility for immersion into grief when they drew connections to their own past experiences. This phenomenon is outlined below. The exhibition depicts a few key events and stages in Pia’s process of grief in an easily recognizable way (personal life connection). Visitors drew connections between these stages and their personal lives and found that they were familiar with the process represented. They found the exhibition’s content and Pia’s depicted mental imagery relevant. Most visitors had previous experiences with death and grief (86%, tablet questionnaire), and many shared these in the exhibition. Although the trigger point for visitors sharing their past experiences is hard to identify, it is apparent that numerous exhibition elements triggered memories of the visitors’ pasts: both narrative elements, such as the large projections of Pia, her personal belongings, and the listening stations, as well as visitor-orientated ones, such as interactive elements (e.g., “How much does a burial cost?”) or the questions on the plates. The study showed that the room design was a significant factor in the visitor’s comprehension of the story and its content. Most visitors chose the design (51%) and atmosphere (67%) of the rooms as the medium that gave them the most information in the tablet survey, corresponding to Bitgood’s first factor of simulative immersion: the use of physical space. The interior design allowed visitors to position themselves within Pia’s world and to perceive the

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events shown. This finding underlines the importance of exhibition design when transmitting messages through stories in exhibitions. As shown above, Christa and Christel shared numerous mourning experiences from their pasts. Regarding pragmatic decisions, they referred mainly to the death of Christa’s husband. Christa had to make arrangements and start over after decades of marriage; Christel praised the way Christa dealt with her loss and made funeral arrangements. The two women also shared coping strategies for internal grief, which they felt were missing in the exhibition. Independently of each other, they wrote a letter to a deceased friend and teenage love respectively and delivered them to their gravesites. They highly recommended this way to say goodbye to someone. During their time in the exhibition, other visitors found guidance for the case of future losses. Michaela used the exhibition to prepare her children for future losses they might experience. She told them that if somebody dies, they are “not alone with this” (in room 6 Pia’s Room, listening to Pia’s talking head, see Figure 3): Right now, she [Pia] explains how important the memorial service was for her, where for example, the priest talks about the deceased and where you can say goodbye. (Pause) [. . .] It is always good to talk about things. Or, if others talk about this and you can listen to it, to be at peace with yourself with what you experienced (Michael & Michaela 2020).

Although Michaela falsely identified the person giving the eulogy as a priest, she highlighted priests’ roles in dealing with grief in a professional capacity in order to prepare her children. Anna and Alina also identified seeking out professional guidance as a way to cope with future experiences of loss; they liked the physician as an “ordinary woman, you know, like me” for explaining how to cope with grief in the future (Anna & Alina 2020). While Christa and Christel did not support the armchair (see Figure 3) as a token of remembrance, Michaela connected emotionally with Pia. She used the armchair to explain Pia’s strategy of remembering her grandmother in a child-friendly way. Alina’s experience of room 5 Funeral Reception changed her attitude toward meals after a wake to commemorate the deceased. She remembered a funeral she had previously attended and remembered finding it strange to celebrate on that occasion. The exhibition and especially the arrangement of the room, (including the information text) changed her mind: “because now they [mourners] can talk about it again or that the grey grief turns a bit into something colorful. They can drive home on that day and their last thoughts are not about this grey mist” (Anna & Alina 2020). In the exhibition, the participants chose and shared the role of professionals, tokens of remembrance, and talking to someone about their feelings, as different coping strategies. These are only examples of the countless moments where visitors were able to draw connections relevant to their own experiences in the exhibition – which, in turn, enhanced their immersive tour of the exhibition.

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On a deeper level of immersion, visitors identified with parts of the story and got emotionally involved (emotionalization). Quantitative data showed that more than half of the visitors (58%) were greatly, emotionally touched by Pia’s story. The strongest emotions experienced in the exhibition were grief (29%), sympathy (26%), and interest (17%) (tablet questionnaire). Our team observed several emotional reactions from visitors, caused by the atmosphere of the exhibition. Anna and Alina showed a range of emotions during their visit, including joy, sadness, sympathy, and astonishment. They expressed multiple times that they felt for Pia and identified with her room; especially her broken mirror as the symbol of her first moments of grief (see Figure 1): Anna: I find the mirror kind of [. . .] This whole situation, it describes it somehow (laughs). [. . .] But I don’t know what the chair means [. . .] Maybe because she feels so small, you know? And feels crushed by all of this. Alina: The bed also looks so big [. . .]. Yes, and to let off steam, maybe you even smash the mirror (Anna & Alina 2020).

They even discussed whether Pia was a real person. This shows that the two girls experienced Pia’s emotional portrayal as very authentic and took a deep dive into her emotional world. The events depicted in the exhibition especially touched Christa. In two separate instances, she mentioned that she did not expect to share such intimate moments from her life. Just before leaving the exhibition, she told Christel about one of them in room 6 Pia’s Room. She described what she found most comforting when her mother died: Christa: Well, at the end of the exhibition, I would like to say that the greatest comfort bestowed on me when my mother died [voice breaks, tears up] was the offer to simply sit next to me and to just endure this with me. Christel: Yes, yes. That’s right, yes. It is wonderful if you have someone who is there at that moment. Christa: Yes. That was a consolation to me. Not to be alone. [. . .] Christel: Because you can forget words at this moment anyway. Words cannot comfort someone; they can palliate or [. . .]. Christa: All right, with that, I’m finished. Christel: Yes, right. Now we go back to life, right? Yes. Where can we exit? (Christa & Christel 2020).

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The abrupt end to the discussion on Christa’s part implies that she wanted to share this experience but not linger over it too long. Michaela identified several emotional moments in Pia’s story and shared them with their children. For example, in Pia’s first room, she made them aware of Pia’s emotional struggle and how it manifested itself in the room design. She stated that this room was a good starting point for getting involved with the topic. Michaela appreciated the opportunities the exhibition provided to talk to her children about grief and to prepare them emotionally and practically. Both parents understood Pia’s emotional world and projected the events into their personal lives. Their role as parents took precedence over their involvement with the story. The visitors that our team observed reacted to the emotional atmosphere in several ways. Some were immersed in Pia’s emotions, mirrored them, and greatly empathized with her. Others used the emotional situations as a communication platform. Triggered by the exhibition’s emotions, they had a chance to exchange views on intimate topics or communicate with their children.

Conclusion This chapter investigated the narrative objectives of exhibiting death and grief and the effects of immersive storytelling on visitors. It described the case study of Pia says Goodbye, which used a specific storytelling strategy that implemented a set of narrative objectives based on a narratological concept. The narrative dimensions, space, plot, figure, and visitors, as well as their objectives, set the foundation for the exhibition’s immersive potential. The visitor evaluation, exemplified here by qualitative data from three different cases, demonstrates different dimensions of the impact of storytelling. The data collected by our team shows that storytelling mostly met our expectations: Visitors could perceive the story, in some cases, by intensively feeling sympathy with Pia’s grief. Even for visitors who did not find the depiction of Pia’s story authentic, it allowed them to find themselves on a timeline of events and to position themselves in relation to it. They were able to make connections to past personal experiences and possible future occurrences. Our two expectations about the visitor experience, that they would perceive the story and content, as well as draw connections with their personal lives, were mostly confirmed. Additionally, the data showed several levels of immersion, which were dependent on the visitor: for some, like Anna and Alina, a strong narrative can be an identification point – especially when tailored to a target group. Furthermore, a lack of shared characteristics does not automatically lead to strict non-identification on

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the side of the visitor, as shown by Christa and Christel. They connected with the events of the story and Pia’s emotions. However, they kept a critical distance to the narration and even actively distanced themselves from it. Michaela immersed herself in the narration but only partly for herself; she acted as a facilitator and provided mental imagery of future losses for her children. This chapter covered the positive effects of storytelling to demonstrate its possibilities and potentials in exhibitions dealing with grief. However, not all visitors who participated in the evaluation, were immersed in the story. The negative effects the exhibition had on the visitors challenged its narrative design; such as rejecting a more profound involvement with the exhibition due to a lack of authenticity or identification. This study helps us understand the potential of immersive narratives in communicating difficult topics. Narration can emotionalize visitors to an exhibition, promote the transfer of its content to their personal lives, and allow them to identify or connect with characters and events – with all the positive and negative implications. The implemented storytelling strategy in our case study allowed the exhibition to narrate a difficult emotional topic through immersion into Pia’s life and accompanying her while she “said goodbye” to her granny Ruth. Pia’s story was fictional and entirely constructed. Makers of historical or factual exhibitions might find it challenging to narrate difficult content immersively. This chapter reveals, however, that exhibitions have the potential to lead visitors into a narrative world that they can engage with and, at the same time, distance themselves from. Exhibition makers can apply this insight in fictional or factual, historical or modern topics. It is crucial to remember the target group when implementing this communication strategy. When meeting their interests, needs, and expectations, storytelling in exhibitions can realize its positive immersive potential. At the same time, visitors quickly feel alienated by stories that they do not feel are authentic. Despite these limitations, these are first findings heading toward an empirical visitor analysis on the connection between exhibition narration and its potential for immersion.

Bibliography Anna & Alina. Participatory Observation. Conducted by Jana Hawig, June 30, 2020. Bitgood, Stephen. “The Role of Simulated Immersion.” Technical Report 90–20 (1990): 283–295. Bonanno, George. The Other Side of Sadness: What the New Science of Bereavement Tells Us about Life after Loss. New York: Basic Books, 2009. Booker, Christopher. The Seven Basic Plots: Why We Tell Stories. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2005. Christa & Christel. Participatory Observation. Conducted by Jana Hawig, June 29, 2020.

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Gorer, Geoffrey. “The Pornography of Death.” Death, Grief, and Mourning. Ed. Geoffrey Gorer. New York: Doubleday, 1955. 192–209. Hawig, Jana, Sarah-Louise Rehahn, Laura Schäfer, and Charlotte Schröder. Potenziale und Grenzen des Storytelling als Vermittlungsstrategie in Ausstellungen. https://www.dasa-dortmund.de/angebotetermine/angebote-fuer-fachbesucher/forschungsprojekt-pia-sagt-lebwohl-1. Dortmund, 2023 (March 10, 2023). Hawig, Jana. “Dinge in Storytelling-Ausstellungen am Beispiel von Pia sagt Lebwohl.” Alte Dinge – neue Werte: Musealisierung und Inwertsetzung von Objekten. Ed. Michael Farrenkopf, Katerina Filippidou, Torsten Meyer, Stefan Przigoda, Achim Saupe, and Tobias Schade. Göttingen: Wallstein, 2022. 217–234. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game. Ed. Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. 113–130. Kossmann, Herman, Suzanne Mulder, Frank den Oudsten, and Pieter Kiewiet de Jonge. Narrative Spaces: On the Art of Exhibiting. Rotterdam: 010 Publishers, 2012. Kuckartz, Udo. Mixed Methods: Methodologie, Forschungsdesigns und Analyseverfahren. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2014. Leinhardt, Gaea, and Karen Knutson. Listening in on Museum Conversations. Lanham: Altamira Press, 2004. Michael & Michaela. Participatory Observation. Conducted by Jana Hawig, July 12, 2020. Podnar, Klement. Corporate Communication. London: Routledge, 2015. Ryan, Marie-Laure. Avatars of Story. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006. Schaeffer, Jean-Marie, and Ioana Vultur. “Immersion.” Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory. Ed. David Herman, Manfred Jahn, and Marie-Laure Ryan. London: Routledge, 2005. 237–239. Schützeichel, Rainer. “Sinnwelten des Trauerns: Eine Analyse der Professionalisierung von Trauerarbeit.” Zur Soziologie des Sterbens: Aktuelle theoretische und empirische Beiträge. Ed. Nina Jakoby and Michaela Thönnes. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017. 113–134. Serrell, Beverly. Judging Exhibitions: A Framework for Assessing Excellence. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press, 2006. Spiegel, Yorick. Prozess des Trauerns. Gütersloh: Kaiser, 1972. Streeck, Nina. “Sterben, wie man gelebt hat: Die Optimierung des Lebensendes.” Zur Soziologie des Sterbens: Aktuelle theoretische und empirische Beiträge. Ed. Nina Jakoby and Michaela Thönnes. Wiesbaden: Springer VS, 2017. 29–48. Thiemeyer, Thomas. “Simultane Narration: Erzählen im Museum.” Kultur Wissen Narration: Perspektiven Transdisziplinärer Erzählforschung für die Kulturwissenschaften. Ed. Alexandra Strohmaier. Bielefeld: transcript, 2013. 479–488. Wolf, Werner. “Das Problem der Narrativität in Literatur, bildender Kunst und Musik: Ein Beitrag zu einer intermedialen Erzähltheorie.” Erzähltheorie transgenerisch, intermedial, interdisziplinär. Ed. Vera Nünning and Ansgar Nünning. Trier: Wissenschaftlicher Verlag, 2002. 23–104.

Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková

Sounds, Narrative, and Emotions in Historical Exhibitions: The Case of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica Introduction Starting several decades ago, historical museums and exhibitions ceased to be silent places in which visitors carefully observe historical artifacts displayed in glass showcases and read a singular historical truth offered up on exhibition panels. Since the late 1990s, the discipline of history has turned its focus toward the body: the sensuous and emotional. This turn has contributed to a radical change in how historical museums present, represent, and explain the past. Both the rise of digital technologies, as well as an unprecedented memory boom, have challenged the traditional idea of museums as visually oriented places.1 Multisensory experiences formed an integral part of a museum visit in the early stages of the genre’s history; however, museum makers generally regarded catering to nonvisual senses as uncivilized and even potentially damaging to exhibitions in the nineteenth century (Classen 2007, 907). War museums, particularly over the past few decades, have attracted visitors by immersing them in the soundscapes (Schafer 1977) of battlefields and the commotion of war.2 Recently, some museums have even introduced elements that appeal to visitors’ additional senses, such as smell and taste, in order to enhance their experiences and stir emotions. Historians have stressed the importance of our senses: they expand our understanding of the past and their exclusion leaves us impoverished (Smith 2021). The curatorial strategy of creating visitor fascination through sensory re-enactments of the past, however, has the potential to turn into a pure commercial one; Jay Winter has called this “total immersion history” (2019, 255). Visitors are brought into contact with the past through simulated senses and emotions. In cases like these, exhibitions fail to make evident to their visitors that they cannot feel, smell, taste, touch or hear like people did in the past.

 This chapter was supported by the Czech Science Foundation, grant number 22-34342S.  The use of phonograph recordings in exhibitions was recommended as early as 1904 (Griffits 2008, 235). https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-007

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This study corresponds to a new attempt to view history of war through a different lens. Sensory history has developed an alternative approach to depicting past events based on bodily and emotional experience. This new approach questions the visual bias that has long dominated both the disciplines of history and of museum practice. It challenges the belief in the visual as the vehicle of truth, reason, and intellect and reevaluates the Cartesian paradigm of the opposition between the mind (associated with the visual) and the body (associated with the other senses). My analysis reveals the ways in which sensory perception forms an integral part of the museum experience and how sensory representations can create narratives of the past that convey their own meanings. This chapter aims to reflect on the use of sound in historical exhibitions through the case study of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising in Banská Bystrica. The town of Banská Bystrica was the epicenter of the uprising that lasted 61 days in the summer of 1944, until it was bloodily suppressed by German occupation forces. I argue that sound, a rational but still a complementary sense (Classen & Howes 2006),3 not only creates a critical part of an exhibition’s narrative but can also be understood as a narrative in and of itself. It enhances, transmits, and even disrupts visual narrative, complementing an exhibition’s story. Sound is a key component in affecting visitors, orienting the exhibition’s overall atmosphere.

Sounds and Museums In this section, I employ the concept of audionarratology to reflect upon the role and function of sound in historical exhibitions. Audionarratology, operating at the interface of sound and narrative, is a new area of research which promises to overcome the visual bias of classical narrative theory. Oral media – sounds and voices – have been at the margins of both classical narratology and historical research whereby the fact that narrative and sound dovetail has been neglected. Audionarratology emphasizes that “sound, voice and music carry (narrative) meaning in their own right” (Mildorf & Kinzel 2016, 19). We remember a weapon, for example, not only because we can see it, but also because we can hear it.

 The hierarchy of the senses, introduced by Aristotle, has traditionally considered sight (vision) and hearing (audition) as purer sensual forms, rational and non-sensual, while touch, smell and taste have been deemed less rational. Sight was confirmed as the most important sense with the rise of literacy and science, hearing, although becoming significant in the twentieth century, remained a complementary sense.

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Audionarratology, however, can quickly become a contested term. The expression is intended “to function as an umbrella term for narrative approaches that take into view forms and functions of sound and their relation to narrative structure” (Mildorf & Kinzel 2016, 8). Audionarratology is broad, vaguely defined field that encompasses various disciplinary approaches. Museum exhibitions as such have not yet become an object of study for researchers in audionarratology, who have mainly focused on the function of museum audio guides (Mildorf 2021). This most likely due to the complexity of the sounds used in historical exhibitions. Therefore, researchers have only slowly begun to catch up with the growing interest of curators in including sound and other senses in historical museums and exhibitions (Bijsterveld 2015; Everett 2019; Hjortkjær 2019; Mansell et al. 2022). The position of researchers toward sound in museums is not uniform. Some researchers have highlighted the critical role of sound in surmounting the distance between the visitor and the exhibition, arguing that sound is a “functional tool for meaning creation that blends knowledge with experience” (Bubaris 2014, 400). Miles, exploring battlefield tourism on the former Western front, has highlighted the role of multisensory and embodied performance in representations of the past and stressed the importance of felt knowledge (2017). Other scholars, in contrast, have expressed their concerns about the uses of senses and emotions in exhibitions that prioritize visitor experience over historical representation. The suggestion on that part of certain experiential historical museums, that they provide a reproduction of the experiences of the past, can be a “playful trick” that does not improve our understanding of the past (Jaeger 2018, 168). This runs the risk that the visitor, “put under the spell” (Thiemeyer 2019, 40), may be manipulated through scenographic spectacles, and their capacity for reflection may be therefore reduced. In the following section, I will demonstrate how audionarratology can be a useful narrative device to understand sound. To this end, I investigate the meaning of sound in its narrative dimension, not primarily in its emotional or representational qualities. I propose a “thick description” of the interfaces of sound, vision, and narrative in historical exhibitions; including the intention of the exhibition creators, the impact of the exhibition’s narrative on visitors, and an analysis of the exhibition’s narrative content.

A Multimedia Exhibition in the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising In 2019, on the 75th anniversary of the Slovak National Uprising, a new multimedia exhibition was built from scratch in the record-breaking time of three months. The

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Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, housed in a concrete, socialist-style memorial since 1969, hereby gained a second exhibition space. The permanent two-floor exhibition, entitled Slovakia in the Anti-Fascist Resistance Movement in Europe in the years 1939–1945, was opened in 2004. It is a traditional exhibition displaying uniforms, weapons, and other objects of war in glass showcases; outdated computer stations presenting encyclopedic knowledge and plasma screens showing silent documentaries and photographs have long lost visitors’ interest. The exhibition is only accessible with an official guide, who provides a singular interpretation of wartime events, presumably in line with the official position of the state. The exhibition has the clear characteristics attributed to exhibitions-temples (Cameron 1971, cited in Bogumił et al. 2015).4 The scripts for a new exhibition were created from scratch by the private Institute of Technology and Innovation in Bratislava, in cooperation with the museologists of the Uprising Museum. The new multimedia exhibition is a vital expansion of the already obsolete 2004 permanent exhibition. The new two-room exhibition space (plus a small foyer) includes two monumental projection screens, smaller video stands, headphone listening stations, and other digital devices. The exhibition is geared toward the younger generation – those who have no firsthand experience of war (concerning this trend in German museums, see Thiemeyer 2019). The website of the Uprising Museum also highlights the new exhibition format, and its special appeal for young people; it also advertises that only three physical objects, presumably the most attractive, have been chosen to be displayed in the exhibition (a Mercedes car, a weapon situated between two trees, and a mountain gun). Apart from these objects, all historical information is conveyed audio-visually in the new part of the exhibition. Neither human nor audio guides are provided. Experience and emotions appear to function as synonyms for the exhibition’s creators. A publicity video attempts to engage future visitors: “You can experience the atmosphere of a military trench!” “You can take part in a battle for your life!”5 The designers of the exhibition have set aside the documentary, somewhat detached role of traditional history museums: instead, they have chosen to highlight the role of experience in helping visitors understand the past. In accordance with the idea of the museum as a temple, the creators of the exhibition strove to have an emotional impact on visitors. They aimed to increase visitors’ emotional involvement in the events depicted in a prescribed way: “One cannot leave a war  Exhibition temples can be described as museums in which one interpretation of history is provided and the past is kept distant from the visitors. Exhibition forums, in contrast, offer diverse interpretations of the past and encourage reflections about past events.  UTAI PROJECT: Multimediálna výstava 75. výročie SNP – Múzeum SNP, September 10, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DAw1iFm6d0I (August 30, 2022).

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museum happy. They [the visitors] have to leave with the idea that war is bad, they have to leave with tears in their eyes” (Mičev 2022). The exhibition’s main intention is important for our analysis: if audionarratology implies the study of a narrative, the general “war is bad” narrative works as a master narrative. This master narrative is then comprised of particular subnarratives, created by the exhibition’s various digital devices. Several audiovisual pieces of equipment, various headphones, and numerous speakers, produce sound. Audionarratology pushes us to identify the sounds’ specific narrative qualities and potentialities. It also leads us to consider them as an important narrative device that immerses visitors in affective story telling. Which stories are told by these specific narrative devices? Steffi de Jong (2018) has recently noted that museum visitors can easily pass by objects, only to look at them briefly, or fail to read the museum texts at all. They cannot, however, decide to ignore soundscapes or decide to be unaffected by them, as we have no earlids (Schafer 2009, 32). In the new multimedia exhibition, the visitors cannot escape the sounds that fill the entire area. The space on the ground floor is composed of two windowless, dark rooms with low ceilings (previously, a meeting room and the director’s office were situated here). The foyer, through which the visitor enters the two exhibition rooms, is soundless but strongly illuminated. This is due to a mirrored wall dotted with hundreds of bullet casings that face the visitors. The curators’ aim, to arouse visitors’ emotions before they enter the actual exhibition rooms, is apparent. The first room is plunged into darkness and dominated by sounds accompanying an eight-minutelong documentary film, played on loop on a large screen. The attentive visitor will also register soundscapes coming from the second room, namely the soundtrack accompanying film footage from the uprising. This footage is shown using an unusually large panoramic projection with a 12-metre semi-circle screen. The three aforementioned material objects, a military trench, as well as other smaller visual projections, can be found in the first room in addition to the large screen projecting a newly created documentary film. The space is filled with sounds: dissonant sounds and music are interconnected to create a suspense effect like in a horror movie, impacting visitor’s emotions. Scratches, smashes, and squeaks, in combination with wistful and dramatic music, construct an atmosphere of danger, fear, and anxiety. How can we gain insight into the narrative potentialities of such disparate sounds? By employing audionarratology, we can explore how music is applied in various narrative forms. Analyzing the role of soundtracks in digital storytelling, Dolores Requejo identified several narrative functions of music: it can have an abstract function, it can orient a story, or inform us about a story’s resolution or coda (2016). These narrative functions can also be observed in the sounds generated in the first room of the exhibition. They signal the beginning of

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the story, and that it is time for the visitor should focus. They also orient the visitor within the story told on film, instantly contextualizing the mute narrative being projected onto the screen. In the first part of the film, text-based definitions of fascism, Nazism, and authoritarianism appear on the screen, as well as information on such political regimes across Europe in the pre-war and wartime period; this includes details on their leaders such as Hitler, Mussolini, Franco or Horthy. This information is presented in an emotionally neutral fashion, as if it were stated in a textbook. Dissonant sounds and horror-like music, however, characterize the regimes presented in the film’s fact-based narrative in a negative light. If visitors do not have their own views of these political regimes, their judgments will be oriented toward a similar stance. The sounds in the first room depict the Slovak National Uprising as an event full of terror, anxiety, and danger. This strategy is emphasized by the absence of a voice-over commentary in the documentary. The video projection is not only eye-centric, but also word-based (Chion 2009). While lacking a voice-over, the film is not silent; however, its sound is limited to diegetic sound. The absence of a narrative voice invites visitors to become immersed in these other sounds: Hitler’s voice, the march of soldiers, burning flames, gunfire. These sounds do not always match the documentary footage and, in this way, create their own micro-narratives. These sound effects communicate, together with visual images, concrete historical knowledge about Nazi soldiers invading Slovakia, burned houses, and victims of shootings – although they were added to the documentary in the production stage. As Bubaris points out, sound and narrative are blurred, mutually shaping one another (2014). The narrative potential of sound, as demonstrated through audionarratology, can be seen once again in another digital exhibit in the same room – even if this exhibit is predominantly visually oriented. Inspired by the old Trench experience at the Imperial War Museum London (1990–2014), a highlight of the first exhibition room is a military trench (see Figure 1). The trench exhibit in London displayed static mannequins and functioned as a “playful trick to attract visitors via entertainment” (Jaeger 2020, 90). In contrast, the intended purpose of the trench in Banska Bystrica is to bring visitors as close as possible to experiencing the war and empathizing with soldiers who fought in such trenches. Audio-visual digital devices make this trench experience more dynamic and immersive. This is exemplified by the exhibit’s use of motion sensors, which shape the experience into a moment of shock: when the visitor enters the dark corridor of the trench, a film begins at the other end, showing a soldier sitting in a trench and panting heavily; four other soldiers enter the scene, which plays on loop. The illusion of being in the trench with the soldiers is further enforced by the gesture one of the soldiers makes in the direction of the visitor, signifying for the visitor to be silent (see Figure 2). The visual shock of meeting the soldiers at a close distance and being with them in the trench

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Figure 1: Military trench, multimedia exhibition, Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, Banská Bystrica. Photo by Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková, 2022, used with permission of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising.

is accompanied by the loud noises being made by the soldiers in the trench. Only diegetic sounds (Chion 2009) are heard, enforcing the illusion of reality through a complex soundscape: the lighting of a cigarette, the biting of an apple, footsteps in the trench, the loading of a weapon. On screen, a battle scene begins; two soldiers are shot and one of them is groaning. The deafening sound of an exploding grenade causes visitors to feel unease and disgust. The exhibition simulates soldiers’ historical experiences for the visitors, without simply imitating the past, which can be called primary experientiality (Jaeger 2019). They are brought into close contact with a highly mediated version of the horrors of the past. While the video produces an illusion of closeness to fictive historical actors, historians have to insist on the temporal and epistemological gap between the present and the past. Such an experience cannot convey a knowledge of how the soldiers in the past lived as sensory historians have remarked (Bijsterveld 2015; Smith 2021). While the exhibition’s overarching narrative “war is bad” is supported by the story set in the trench, this scene evidently does not invite an understanding of the Slovak National Uprising as a historical event in all its complexity. The visually and

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Figure 2: A soldier making a gesture of silence in the direction of the visitors, military trench, multimedia exhibition. Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, Banská Bystrica. Photo by Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková, 2022, used with permission of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising.

sonically overwhelmed visitor lacks any contextualization of this event – the trench experience is generalized and a-temporal. However, the sounds in this experience provide the visitor with clues on how to interpret the horrors they witness here. The visible soldiers’ voices are clearly speaking Slovak, while the voices of the out of sight enemies are in German. This scene shows fighting between Slovaks and Germans, depicting all the horrors of war and consequently impacting the visitor. However, the narrative agency of the visitors remains limited: the film orients their perspectives to align with the wounded and dead Slovak victims, while the Germans who open fire are clearly marked as the perpetrators. If the auditory elements of the documentary present the Slovak National Uprising in a narrative full

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of danger, evil and distress, the trench experience makes this historical event very concrete and graphic as the fighting between Slovaks and Germans. As Jaeger and other scholars have observed, memorial museums often commemorate mass atrocities by prioritizing the perspectives of victim groups (Jaeger 2020, 24; Williams 2007, 8). The Museum of the Slovak National Uprising combines the perspective of a detached historical documentary center, particularly in its permanent exhibition, with that of a memorial museum. The space intended for contemplation and commemoration is located between two monumental concrete buildings – connected through a skywalk and situated on the hill above the town. It is comprised of a symbolic eternal flame on the grave of the unknown soldier, alongside a memorial for the victims. The museum’s multimedia exhibition, located on the ground floor of one of the block-shaped buildings, closes with the words “We will never forget.” This pays homage to “more than three thousand soldiers and partisans who died in the battles for the freedom of Slovakia.” This predetermined linear black-and-white perspective of victims and invaders, good and evil, heroes and perpetrators, is encapsulated in the exhibition’s “war is bad” narrative. However, this narrative is disrupted in a dark corner of the second exhibition room. When visitors enter this room, they are met by an unexpected sonic element: frightened whispers can be heard in a dark corner. This soundscape’s immersive effect is enhanced by the fact that their source is untraceable within the exhibition space. Whispering is not a sonic component typically used to depict wartime events. Whereas the sounds of battle, thunder of weapons, and screams of the wounded that the visitor hears in the first room are to be expected, whispers can be considered as a disruptive element in the narrative of the exhibition. As Mildorf and Kinzel argue, auditory perception is intricately related to temporal sequences and other cognitive faculties, such as spatial orientation (2016, 6). Audionarratology invites us to study the spatial and temporal aspects of sound as narrative. Both dimensions can be found in the sound of whispers. The whispers in the exhibition are heard in waves, at times they intensify and seem close, only to be muted and become distant shortly after. Their temporal aspect is even more intriguing: the visitor is shocked and struggles to determine if the whispers relate to the events of the uprising, or whether someone in the room is really whispering. Visitors could thus find themselves in a secret meeting of insurgents, full of whispering, or attending a prayer for the fallen. On the other hand, these whispers could also be other visitors communicating their impressions to each other, or perhaps even the banter of someone who wants to frighten others in the very dark space of the second exhibition room. As Cox (2015) has pointed out, even the most traditional, vision-oriented museums are only seemingly soundless: footsteps reverberating, voices whispering, muttering, murmuring, bodies rustling around the space of the museum, all these

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sounds belong to the museum’s sonor dimension. In this way, the exhibition merges the present and the past, the real with the imagined – using sound collapses temporalities. It is only when the visitor listens more closely that they realize that the whispers are actually prayers recited by a child’s voice. The voice has no visual accompaniments. Furthermore, the museum does not offer any hint as to what these whispered prayers might be, apart from the fact that they are played in close proximity to the “confession booths.”6 These whispers inspire questions around their purpose in the exhibition: does the museum convey information in these prayers that cannot be communicated through visual means? Are these whispers there to intensify negative emotions? These whispers may also stir visitor’s imaginations: what was the role of children in the uprising, which has so far been presented as a men’s affair? Why did they pray? How are these prayers connected to the soldiers, partisans, and their battles? These sounds disrupt the visual master narrative of the exhibition by introducing questions and doubts in the visitor. The second room of the exhibition is dominated by a round, twelve-meter wide projection screen of a diameter of 129 degrees. A six-minute fictional film, created for the exhibition, is played on loop. The use of a fictional film is rare in a historical exhibition. In this case, the fictional narrative is not presented as an alternative way of seeing the past, rather as a simulation of the historical past. This newly created fictional world functions as a climax in the exhibition’s narrative. The exhibition enhances and intensifies the visitors’ emotions. For this purpose, the curators selected the story of two brothers, everyday characters, whose peaceful lives were disrupted by the war. This narrative steers visitors toward feeling empathy with the pair and identifying with them. The loud ticks of an unseen clock can be heard, while the numerals of years appear on the screen and count down from 2019, the year when the exhibition opened, to 1944, the year that the uprising began. In the first part of the film, diegetic sounds inform visitors about two narrative settings that constantly intersect: the two brothers’ everyday lives in their village and their fighting in a battle. A change in the sounds of the film signifies visitors to open their mind to a possible change in the story. When extradiegetic melodramatic music is introduced, visitors can expect a shift in narrative motive. After one of the two brothers dies, the sounds of the battle are muted and melodramatic music, instantly intensified, marks the end of the story.

 The confession cabins contain headphones in which the visitor can listen to six two-minute stories of witnesses of the uprising, interpreted by actors. All of them refer to the most dramatic life moments, meaning death.

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Requejo (2016) has underlined that music, combined with text and images – as is the case of this fictional film – functions as a strong persuasive device. In the exhibition, visitors are challenged to consolidate meanings provided to them by three different narrative modes: the film’s visual elements and textual accounts, as well as the sounds and music that go with them. The visitors’ senses are focused on the story’s immersive – tragically presented – images and sounds, which necessarily emphasize the exhibition’s “war is bad” narrative. Many entries in the museum’s visitor book testify to the exhibition’s emotional impact: “The most emotive exhibition I have ever seen.” “I am scared – random whispers everywhere.” “A strong emotional experience”; “I am leaving with tears.”7 Also apparent in the guest book, is that visitors appreciated the entertainment aspect of the exhibition: “It was the first exposure to history that was not annoying.” In further entries, many visitors reflect a generalized and abstract narrative surrounding the horrors of war, in line with that of the exhibition: “No more war”; “We won’t forget.” However, one type of response seemingly absent from the visitor book, is a critical or analytical stance toward the meaning of the Slovak National Uprising. The goal of the exhibition has not been to offer various interpretations of the uprising. However, immediately after the uprising and the end of the war in 1945, many different interpretations surrounding its meaning emerged in Czechoslovakia. These were produced by the actors of the uprising, politicians, and historians, and were politically used and abused in the years following. This was already apparent, for example, on the second anniversary of the uprising (Mannová 2019, 172–203). The narrative of sacrifice and heroism, as presented in the multimedia exhibition, shares many common elements with the heroic narrative spread by the postwar Communist regime. The sounds in the exhibition underscore this narrative, but also have the potential to disrupt it – as is the case with the use of whispers. The exhibition promotes a traditional narrative about the horrors of the uprising through loud war sounds. However, this is undermined by a child’s voice whispering a prayer, which highlights aspects of the war not typically shown in connection with the uprising. The museum’s curators did not originally intend for this subversion. The whispers were included in the exhibition by the director of the private Institute of Technology and Innovation, due to the confession booths located nearby (Krivosudská 2022). Thanks to this unintentional element, the soundscape now holds the potential to disrupt the traditional narrative. It also includes children, further disrupting the traditional perspective of the uprising as a man’s affair. More generally, the use of children’s whispers could advance perspectives on how to in-

 Visitor book 2021–2022, Multimedia Exhibition, Museum of the Slovak National Uprising.

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clude diverse social and cultural dimensions of the uprising into the exhibition; for example, the everyday lives of children during the uprising. None of the entries recorded in the visitor book mention the role that sounds played in their experience. This short reflection, however, has demonstrated the potential that the concept of audionarratology holds for the study of sounds in historical exhibitions, by examining how sounds can be analyzed as narratives. I have shown that sounds carry their own meanings and emotionally orient the story (in this case, that of the film about Nazism and Fascism). Moreover, I have revealed how sounds can communicate concrete historical knowledge not transmitted through visual images (such as the fight between Slovaks and Germans in the trench experience), as well as function as a subversive element in the master narrative of an exhibition (the whispers).

Conclusion Audionarratology, inspired by various interdisciplinary approaches, including radio drama, has turned our attention to the temporal and spatial aspects of sound. It has also allowed us to demonstrate a collapse of temporalities within the museum space. Whether this approach is intentional or not may correspond to different museums’ strategies to bodily immersing their visitors in the past. In order to maximize the visitors’ emotions, historical museums can proceed not only to reference and represent the past, but actively create the effect of past realities for the present. The investigation of sounds in historical museums is fruitful terrain for further research; specifically, their power to bringing new perspectives into museums’ narratives, which have been traditionally conveyed predominantly using visual devices.

Bibliography Bijsterveld, Karin. “Ears-On Exhibitions: Sound in the History Museum.” Public Historian 37.4 (2015): 73–90. Bogumił, Zuzanna, Joanna Wawrzyniak, Tim Buchen, and Christian Ganzer. The Enemy on Display: The Second World War in Eastern European Museums. New York: Berghahn, 2015. Bubaris, Nikos. “Sound in Museums – Museums in Sound.” Museum Management and Curatorship 29.4 (2014): 391–402. Chion, Michel. Film, A Sound Art. New York: Columbia University Press, 2009.

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Classen, Constance, and David Howes. “The Museum as Senscape: Western Sensibilities and Indigenous Artefacts.” Sensible Objects: Colonialism, Museums and Material Culture. Ed. Elizabeth Edwards, Chris Gosden, and Ruth Phillips. New York: Berg, 2006. 199–222. Classen, Constance. “Museum Manners: The Sensory Life of the Early Museum.” Journal of Social History 40.4 (2007): 895–914. Cox, Rupert. “There’s Something in the Air: Sound in the Museum.” The International Handbook of Museum Studies. Ed. Sharon Macdonald and Helen Rees Leahy. Chichester: Wiley/Blackwell, 2015. 215–234. Everett, Tom. “A Curatorial Guide to Museum Sound Design.” Curator: The Museum Journal 62.3 (2019): 313–325. Griffiths, Alison. Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View. New York: Columbia University Press, 2008. Hjortkjær, Kamilla. “The Sound of the Past: Sound in the Exhibition at the Danish Museum Mosede Fort, Denmark 1914–18.” Curator 62 (2019): 453–460. Jaeger, Stephan. “Visualizing War in the Museum: Experiential Spaces, Emotions, and Memory Politics.” Visualizing War: Emotions, Technologies, Communities. Ed. Anders Engberg-Pedersen and Kathrin Maurer. London: Routledge, 2018. 165–181. Jaeger, Stephan. The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Jong, Steffi de. “Sentimental Education: Sound and Silence at History Museums.” Museum & Society 16.1 (2018): 88–106. Krivosudská, Katarína. Interview conducted by Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková with a member of the realization team (Institute of Technology and Innovation, Bratislava) about the new multimedia exhibition in the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising. Online, June 30, 2022. Levent, Nina, and Alvaro Pascual-Leone. The Multisensory Museum: Cross Disciplinary Perspectives on Touch, Sound, Smell, Memory and Space. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014. Mannová, Elena. Minulosť jako supermarket? Spôsoby reprezentácie a aktualizácie dejín Slovenska. Bratislava: Historický ústav SAV, 2019. Mansell, James, Alexander De Little, and Annie Jamieson. “Staging Listening: New Methods for Engaging Audiences with Sound in Museums.” Science Museum Group Journal 17 (2022) online, https://dx.doi.org/10.15180/221704 (March 30, 2023). Mičev, Stanislav. Interview conducted by the author of the chapter with a former director of the Museum of the Slovak National Uprising. Banská Bystrica, June 28, 2022. Mildorf, Jarmila, and Till Kinzel. “Audionarratology: Prolegomena to a Research Paradigm Exploring Sound and Narrative.” Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. 1–26. Mildorf, Jarmila. “Pictures into Sound: Aural World-Making in Art Gallery Audio Guides.” Audionarratology: Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Ed. Jarmila Mildorf and Till Kinzel. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. 1–26. Miles, Stephen, “Sensorial Engagement in Tourism experiences in the Western front.” Modern Conflict and the Senses. Ed. Nicholas J. Saunders and Paul Cornish. London: Routledge, 2017. 76–92. Requejo, Dolores Porto M. “Music in Multimodal Narratives: The Role of Soundtrack in Digital Stories.” Audionarratology. Interfaces of Sound and Narrative. Ed. Jarmila Mildorf and Till Kinzel. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2016. 29–46. Schafer, Murray R. “I Have Never Seen a Sound.” Canadian Acoustics /Acoustique canadienne 37.1 (2009): 32–34. Schafer, Murray R. The Tuning of the World. New York: Knopf, 1977.

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Smith, Mark M. A Sensory History Manifesto. University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 2021. Thiemeyer, Thomas. “Multi-Voiced and Personal: Second World War Remembrance in German Museums.” Views of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials. Ed. Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger. New York: Berghahn, 2019. 27–51. Williams, Paul. Memorial Museums: The Global Rush to Commemmorate Atrocities. Oxford: Berg, 2007. Winter, Jay. “The Memory Boom and the Commemoration of the Second World War.” Views of Violence: Representing the Second World War in German and European Museums and Memorials. Ed. Jörg Echternkamp and Stephan Jaeger. New York: Berghahn, 2019. 252–260.

Part II: Ruptures and Repair

Emma Bond

Acts of Rupture and Repair: Staging PostCritical Re-Readings of Colonial Histories in V&A Dundee through Contemporary Art Introduction Museums are narrative operators which expertly use their collections to generate stories they can share with their visitors. Employing a range of sophisticated curatorial techniques to interpret the objects they have on display, museums work to narrativize threads and segments of history in three-dimensional form. Much of the scholarship in Museum Studies has to date aimed at exploring how museums tell stories; trying to categorize techniques currently used, as well as identifying new methods that might better express and represent the diversity of the communities that museums serve. Less attention has, arguably, been paid to the narrative effects of those stories and to the means and modalities of their reception. What if we were to shift focus and explore how visitors to a museum can be encouraged and better supported to read and re-read the museum narratives on display in radical, generative ways? As a literary scholar, I want to suggest that we can engage practices from scholarship in my own field of study in order to offer new ways of reading and responding to complex histories of colonialism, empire, and slavery in museum displays. Using theories of post-critique pioneered by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (1997) and Rita Felski (2015) among others, I will offer a creative sketch of how local, contemporary artworks can help illuminate ways in which museum objects function as networked agents of repair. The examples that I call upon in this chapter will show how art interventions work in reparative ways through acts of mending (both conceptual and physical), but also through less conventional acts of ripping or tearing through what are seen as inadequate narrativizations of histories of empire, colonialism, and systemic racism – revealing what Patricia Stuelke has called the “ruse of repair” (2021). These examples show how engaging with post-critical methods can gesture toward new ways of reading colonial histories by offering a framework for building trust and restoration through curatorial acts aimed at “investing in love” (Whittle, cited in Dinsdale 2022). My overarching focus in this chapter will be on the Scottish Design Galleries of V&A Dundee, and on artworks produced in Scotland by contemporary artists Alberta Whittle, Sekai Machache, and Swapnaa Tamhane. Designed by Kengo Kuma as a regenerative capital project, this new museum opened on the city wahttps://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-008

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terfront overlooking the river Tay in September 2018. The aim of the Galleries, which constitute the main permanent display in the museum, was to tell the history of Scottish design from 1500 to the present day. The objects on display are mostly on long-term loan from main Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A) collections in South Kensington, although some were borrowed from other museums and heritage institutions around Scotland. The display is thematic rather than chronological and is grouped around three main sections: in the words of curator Meredith More, the first section explores “the local and global aspects of Scottish design, the second focuses on how design can affect change in society, and the third shows how design can be an imaginative force that unlocks creativity” (More & Spooner 2022, 138). Dundee is a post-industrial city, famous now as a hub for pioneering game design, but its wealth was, in the past, based on the transnational production and manufacture of textiles such as jute and linen and on its involvement in Arctic whaling. Yet the initial curatorial design of the Galleries paid little attention to the imperial imbrications of the history of Scottish design, even in their most local iterations. V&A Dundee curators were aware from the outset that due consideration of Scotland’s role in the British Empire, and of the impact that this had had on the success of Scottish design on the global stage, were both lacking in the gallery interpretation. Long histories of dispossession and violence born of colonialism, empire, and slavery lay unspoken at the foundation of the manufacture, circulation, and profitability of many of the objects on display. Only six months after the museum had opened, I was contacted by several of its curators, alongside my colleague, Michael Morris, and asked to organize a workshop that would provide a wide-ranging “critique” of the Galleries and the absence of discourse relating to empire, colonialism, and slavery on display. This exercise, undertaken in collaboration with a broad range of scholars, activists, and practitioners, led to a number of alterations and additions to labels and other modes of interpretation as part of various, ongoing initiatives aimed at decolonizing the Galleries.1 In my drafting of this chapter, I started to think back to the initial request of the curators – that Michael and I come into the Galleries and lead a “critique” of the displays. It is worth reflecting on the dynamic at play here: that we, as academic “experts,” would come in to the Galleries to offer a critical reading aimed at exposing the deficiencies of what was on display. I feel uncomfortable with that dynamic now, and although our critique generated some meaningful insights, I wonder whether  For an in-depth reflection on this work, see More & Bond 2020. The workshop held at V&A Dundee in August 2019 was part of the “Transnational Scotland: Reconnecting Heritage Stories through Museum Object Collections” network. See: https://transnationalscotland.wordpress.com (July 12, 2022).

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it was limited from the outset in its scope for intervention and real change. What if we had been asked to read the objects in the Galleries in a different way, using a more capacious framework for interpretation? This chapter will seek to redress this limitation by offering an alternative series of speculative readings of objects in the Galleries which I intertwine with readings of contemporary artworks produced in Scotland that seek to directly address local histories connected to empire, colonialism, and slavery. I ask what new stories we could tell about several of the objects on display if we practiced more open-ended, connective readings aimed at promoting attitudes of care and restoration rather than critique. My analysis will cluster around three modes of reading that characterize the post-critical approach. The first examines the implications of our positionality in relation to our objects of study, and – following Felski (2015, 53–54) – asks what sort of readings we could produce if we positioned ourselves besides objects rather than seeking to dig for meaning beneath their surfaces or to critique them from a distance. This attention to adjacency also speaks to the importance of looking at groups of objects as “gatherings” (Latour 2004, 245) and privileging their juxtapositions, rather than holding a sole focus on one isolated object.2 The second part will analyze how practices of “surface reading” (Best & Marcus 2009) which privilege modes of “thin” description over “thick” interpretation (Love 2013) might work productively in museum galleries. I suggest that such practices might encourage us, as readers of the museum, to stay close to objects, to slow down in our approach, and adopt practices of love and admiration toward them. The third section will examine the politics of care involved in practices of “curatorial reading” (Hensley 2013), where the focus shifts to “matters of concern” rather than “matters of fact” (Latour 2004). In all three modes of response, I suggest that, when read together, museum objects and art interventions can function as potential agents of repair. Offering new, reparative readings of museum displays that hold histories of empire and colonialism is not an attempt to “redeem” objects through artwashing, nor to separate them from uncomfortable elements in their biographies, but rather to embark on a speculative journey that seeks joy in contemporary, creative rereadings of them.3 As Shannon Mattern writes, this is a form of care work in itself: “to fill in the gaps [. . .], to draw connections [. . .] is an act of repair or, simply, of

 Indeed, as Latour says: “Objects are simply a gathering that has failed – a fact that has not been assembled according to due process” (2004, 246).  Artwashing is a term used to describe ways in which oil companies and other organizations responsible for environmental damage have traditionally used art and art sponsorship to try to “clean up” their corporate image. I suggest here that artwashing can also be used to indicate superficial gestures toward decolonial practice enacted by museums and galleries through engaging with contemporary art.

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taking care – connecting threads, mending holes, amplifying quiet voices” (2018). Building on Mattern’s prompt, I will focus in on properties particular to the textiles featured in each case, emphasizing the way that woven and knitted threads and fibers in objects and artworks can work to attach and re-attach meaning to our readings of histories on display.

Gatherings As you enter the Scottish Design Galleries, you encounter a cluster of displays which narrate parts of the history of Scotland’s cultural and trade relations with the rest of the world. These histories are told through collections of objects related to shipbuilding design, Scottish exports to Asia, and the varied production of the textile industries on the East Coast and in the Renfrewshire town of Paisley. But if you venture a little bit further inside, you come across a remarkable full-length wall which provides a complex backdrop to the first room in the Galleries. Known internally as the “Inspiration Wall” (see Figure 1), it provides a home for an eclectic sequence of objects that represent themes such as material innovation and vernacular traditions. I suggest that many of the objects that are part of the wall offer an additional layer of inspiration to that which was originally intended in its design and that these objects indicate key pathways towards reparative readings in the Scottish Design Galleries. In my analysis, the “Inspiration Wall” functions something like a “cathedral of potential” (Laing 2020, 116), a utopic space that provides “material with which to think: new registers, new spaces” (Laing 2020, 2). My own initial “inspiration” for pursuing the theme of repair in this way was noticing the visible mends on one of the objects on display in the “Inspiration Wall” during a visit to V&A Dundee. The object is an item of fine cream wool knitted underwear, known in the Victorian era as combinations, since they combined a chemise and briefs into a single article. This is a beautiful example; its neckline and armholes are edged with lace and satin ribbon. It was made by Elliot of Hawick in 1906 in their new “unshrinkable” wool design that traded as ELLICO, and it is this design innovation that has secured its inclusion in the “Inspiration Wall.” Bought in the Marshall and Snelgrove department store in London, the combinations were part of the wardrobe of Miss Heather Firbank, which the V&A acquired in its entirety by 1957.4 I am not going to focus on tracing the history of imperial elements present within the textile industries of the Scottish Borders in this chapter, though I find

 For images, see: https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O145741/combinations-elliot-of-hawick/ (July 19, 2022).

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Figure 1: “Inspiration Wall.” The Scottish Design Galleries V&A Dundee. Photo by Ruth Clark. Courtesy of V&A Dundee.

it fascinating that even during the time that Miss Firbank’s combinations were manufactured, wool was being imported to places like Hawick from as far away as Australia, New Zealand, and South America. A recent report on the built heritage of Hawick states that as a direct result of the importation of wool, “exotic plant species can now be found on the tributaries of the (river) Tweed” (Historic Scotland 2016, 11). What interests me more is what the visible mend adds to the object, and how it can help us to alter the way that we “read” objects for their histories within museum settings. Here, I am inspired in great part by the work of the French artist Kader Attia, who sees repair as a way to “challenge conventional ideas about the values of wholeness and injury, authenticity and repair, belonging and otherness” (Rugoff 2019, 4). In his 2012 exhibition, The Repair from Occident to Extra-Occidental Cultures, Attia juxtaposes images of ritual scarification in some traditional African cultures with what were known at the time as the “broken faces” of injured French First World War soldiers, showcasing repair as an act of both artistry and compassion. In this way, Attia enacts a shift in our understanding of the term “repair,” rejecting its Western foundation in the Latin etymology of repair (reparare), which means going back to the original state,

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In Western society, the pinnacle of repair has become to erase all signs of the injury. In traditional societies, it’s the opposite: they have ways to fix an injury that also keeps it visible. I’ve always been fascinated by traces, by the way that objects are used by time – broken, rusted, and so on. [. . .] Every repair is entangled with the injury – you cannot separate the two. (Attia 2019, 19)

In the fetishization of perfect, unblemished specimens in Western museums, Attia locates a sense of neglect and even a colonizing impulse that seeks to elide and conceal histories of violence and oppression. The ideal of invisible repair belongs within tropes of preservation and conservation that make no space for decay or entropy, and that therefore use excessive energy to maintain the status quo and erase the normal passage of time and wear. Attia asks us to look afresh at things that have been cared for and valued so much that they are selected for repair rather than discarded. There is something extremely personal and personalizing about repair and about the material signs of mending when seen in this way. As Emily Cockagne puts it: “repaired objects are not only relics of the past; they each contain the history of their own survival” (2021, 2). The mended combinations on display in the Scottish Design Galleries prompt me to wonder if and how we might enact careful, reparative readings of objects on display in museums as a counterpoint to more usual tropes of critique. I am borrowing the notion of a reparative reading from Sedgwick’s 1997 essay “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading.” Paranoid readings seek to uncover and expose the negative and are averse to surprises, so they often end up being fearful and defensive. Yet exposing a wrong does not solve it, it only makes it visible. Sedgwick instead asks us to consider what the knowledge we seek actually does (rather than what it is) – and what material benefits or pleasures pursuing, having, and exposing knowledge might hold (1997, 4). She suggests that reparative readings search for amelioration, making room for the reader “to realize that the future may be different from the present” (Sedgwick 1997, 4). This operation requires hope, which although a “fracturing, even a traumatic thing to experience, is among the energies by which the reparatively positioned reader tries to organize the fragments and part-objects she encounters or creates” (Sedgwick 1997, 24). Once hope has allowed the reader to imagine a future that is different to the present, it might even encourage her to imagine that the past could have been different to how it turned out too. Scholars usually apply Sedgwick’s theory to the reading of texts, but here I want to link her advocacy of reparative, hopeful readings more robustly to how we might approach objects with imperial or colonial legacies or connections. As she says: “The desire of a reparative impulse is additive and accretive. [. . .] It wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then leave resources to offer to an inchoate self” (1997, 27–28). My own readings will thus take inspiration from the work of contemporary artists who engage in reparative ways

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with such objects and their histories through processes of adding new, contemporary layers of meaning to them. These artists allow us to witness: “the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture, even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them” (Sedgwick 1997, 35).5 But I also want to read objects like Miss Firbank’s combinations as holding links to the other objects placed beside them in cases and displays. As Felski says, “works of art, by default, are linked to other texts, objects, people, and institutions in relations of dependency, involvement, and interaction” (2015, 11). Critically, these links are not concealed within the objects themselves, but derive from the work of the reader or viewer, “from connections and mediations that must be tracked down and described” (Felski 2015, 11). In the paragraphs that follow I showcase my own personal reading, in which I follow threads of inspiration that link up the juxtapositions present in the “Inspiration Wall” with examples of contemporary art on display both within and outside the same gallery. In this connective assemblage that situates V&A Dundee within a wider national context, reading is understood as an act of “coproduction, a form of making” to which both the critic (as reader) and the multiple objects on display can contribute meaning (Felski 2015, 12). The combinations are placed next to other objects which illustrate the idea of innovation through design. In the case next to them in the “Inspiration Wall” are three golf balls: a feather golf ball from 1840, a gutta percha ball from 1850, and a white colonel rubber-core ball from 1910. I want to show how their backstories of production and use can be referenced and re-materialized within contemporary art to offer a joyful act of repair. Thus, in tandem with these three golf balls, I will consider a joint exhibition by the artists Hardeep Pandhal and Alberta Whittle called Transparency, which was held in 2019 at the new premises of the Edinburgh Printmakers.6 Housed in a former silk factory which then became the site of the North British Rubber Company, the architectural heritage of the exhibition site became a primary point of response for the artworks on display. Both artists worked to unpack the multiple meanings of its title Transparency, which include the physical layers of the print-making process, an opening up of material to public scrutiny, and a sense of invoking the building’s history as a present-day testimony to Scotland’s colonial past.7

 Sedgwick is referring here specifically to members of the queer community, but I want to extend her idea of the possibility of extracting sustenance from a culture that excludes to other marginalized and racialized communities.  For images, see: https://www.albertawhittle.com/transparency.html (July 19, 2022).  The majority of this and the following three paragraphs overlap with Emma Bond, “An Introduction to Scotland’s Transnational Heritage: Sites, Things and Time(s),” Scotland’s Transnational

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Goods manufactured in Scotland with raw materials produced in the colonies, goods refined in Scotland, bought and sold in Scotland, and traded back across the globe have all had meaning-making effects on the everyday lives of Scots. These effects persist today, although their complex histories have sometimes been erased. One example of this can be located in the rubber used for the golf balls on display in the “Inspiration Wall.” The rubber here can trace links to an eleventh-century stone stele depicting the Hindu god Shiva and his consort Parvati, which is currently held in the collections of the Museums of the University of St Andrews, over the River Tay from Dundee, in Fife. The stele, made in Bengal, was a gift from Reverend James Paterson to the University’s Literary and Philosophical Society in 1839 – Paterson was educated at St Andrews and spent his life as a missionary in India. But something unexpected comes up in the object listing in the Museum catalogue: a chain of “secondary subjects” that include “gutta percha,” “golf,” and “golf ball”. It turns out that the stele was packed for transport to Scotland in gutta percha – the dried rubbery sap of the Malaysian sapodilla tree, and that its recipient, Dr. Robert Adams Paterson, experimented with heating and re-forming the rubber to make golf balls that were known at the time as gutties. Just as the transnational circuits of empire brought the stele to St. Andrews, so rubber continued its journeys around those same imperial circuits – from Brazil, to Kew, to India, and back to Britain with a range of different uses. Alberta Whittle was, in turn, struck by the mention of gutta percha in her conversations with an archivist at the North British Rubber Company collections in Dumfries. Her own knowledge of the term was based on its colloquial use in Barbados, where it signifies a sling. In the triptych What Sound Does the Black Atlantic Make?, she features a broken sling in each print, alongside a tuning fork. In so doing, Whittle reminds us that the transnational frequencies that resound through both words and objects might be broken but are still able to be re-tuned. Indeed, placed close by the golf balls in the Scottish Design Galleries are a pair of Hunter rubber boots made by the Gates Rubber company, in Dumfries, in 1989. This rubber was processed at Castle Mills, the site of the Edinburgh Printmaker’s, and was also known as India rubber. Yet rubber was not initially grown in India – up to the nineteenth century, the main sources of rubber were the South American countries of Brazil and Peru. In an audacious act of international biotheft, British explorer Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 Amazonian rubber tree seeds from Brazil and delivered them to Kew Gardens in London in 1876. Although only 2,400 germinated,

Heritage: Legacies of Empire and Slavery, ed. Emma Bond and Michael Morris (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022). Thank you to Edinburgh University Press for the permission to duplicate this section.

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this allowed seedlings to be exported to the British colonies of India, Ceylon (Sri Lanka), Singapore, and British Malaya (Jackson 2008). Once cultivated and harvested, raw “India” rubber was brought back to Britain – to factories such as Castle Mills. Built in 1856, at the peak of its activity Castle Mills covered 20 acres of space and employed 8,000 people manufacturing items such as car tires, hot water bottles, golf balls, and wellington boots, later supplying 1.2 million pairs of boots to soldiers in the First World War. In her work for Transparency, Whittle was particularly interested in using the production of boots in Edinburgh to highlight the contribution made by Caribbean servicemen to the British Army during the First World War – a total of 15,600 men fought in the British West Indies Regiment, which was stationed in France and Flanders, as well as in Palestine and Jordan (Smith 2004). As Whittle highlights in an interview, “the trench boots made here connect with who was in the trenches” (MacNicol 2019). Objects such as wellington boots and golf balls thus connect up multiple layers of time, space, and memory, and their creative re-elaboration by Whittle works to repair historical links broken by acts of disavowal and willed amnesia. Placing the golf balls in the “Inspiration Wall” allows the histories and entanglements held in their material rubber form to emerge through their elaboration in Whittle’s art and sheds new light on the other objects in their immediate orbit. The visible mends on Miss Firbank’s combinations provide an entry point which allows us to understand the importance of co-production in generating new meaning through our adjacent readings of these gathered objects. The patient weaving of threads of meaning into juxtapositions such as these is an act of making in itself, to which the visitor, as reader, actively contributes. Positioning ourselves beside these objects, rather than excavating beneath them or surveying them from a distance, allows new surface links and patterns to emerge, as we create an arena of analysis in which constellations of objects, text, and people can gather (see also Latour 2004).

Surfacing Objects The second item I would like to focus on from the “Inspiration Wall” is a length of furnishing fabric woven on to reversible Jacquard cotton, called “Cyprus.”8 The American born artist and textile designer Marion Dorn designed the fabric in

 “Cyprus” was on display in the Scottish Design Galleries for an agreed maximum term of 2.5 years. In Spring 2022 an alternative Donald Brothers design replaced it. For images, see: https:// collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O68555/cyprus-furnishing-fabric-dorn-marion/ (July 19, 2022).

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1936. Dorn had moved to Britain in 1923 and enjoyed considerable success until the outbreak of the Second World War took her back to the United States in 1940. Dorn designed soft furnishings (particularly rugs and carpets) for high-end hotels such as Claridge’s and the Savoy, and for elegant sea liners such as Cunard’s Queen Mary. She was also highly respected as part of the Modern Art Movement, espousing its principles that designs must be “capable of improving the material conditions of everyday life” (Boydell 1996, 31). “Cyprus” is a typical Dorn design of the late 1930s, showing three of her favorite representational motifs: ionic pillars, lines of birds in flight, and ivy trails. The colorway in the samples in the V&A collections is a striking combination of white, blue, and cream. Other colorways are shown in sample books held in the textile archives of the Heriot Watt Borders Campus in Galashiels, just 17 miles north of Hawick, where Miss Firbank’s combinations were made. As the tweed mills in the Borders began to close in the 1950s, the then Principal of the Scottish Woollen Technical College, James Martindale, began to collect records of the local industry as well as centers of production further away, such as Dundee and Paisley. Indeed, Dorn made “Cyprus” for the Donald Brothers company, who were based in Dundee, with premises on the Old Glamis Road. The company grew out of the town’s jute industry, in which it had been active making canvases for sacks and sails. After the decline of the jute industry, Donald and Brothers’ fortunes were revived by one of the siblings, Francis James Donald, who returned to Dundee in 1900 to take over the firm after some successful years running a tea plantation in India. Again, rather than digging further into that particular colonial angle, here I want to focus on the material features of the fabric sample, and the importance of surface color and texture for Dorn’s designs. Color was integral to Dorn’s processes: she began her career using batik technique, and her application of dye has been described as “painterly” (Boydell 1996, 24). Even when she was focusing on more representational, classical motifs such as those featured in “Cyprus,” her design is stylized and her application of color is “a means of suggestion rather than through the more conventional methods of filling in outlines” (Boydell 1996, 116). Here, the blues used evoke the bright colors of the Mediterranean Sea and sky surrounding the eponymous island of Cyprus. In Transparency, Alberta Whittle also uses blue to powerful effect in the installation Exodus – Behind God’s Back, where it is repeated in the presence of washing basins, cable ties, string vests, flotation devices, and cake soap. Specifically, Whittle uses the crumples of the blue parachute silk to represent waterways where African Caribbean peoples have historically crossed oceans – often against their will. The presence of string vests, flotation devices, and rope reinforces the connection with contemporary migration journeys across seas. The featured blocks of Jamaican blue cake soap (see Figure 2) can be used for laundry, but are also used in the Caribbean to

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Figure 2: Alberta Whittle, Exodus – Behind God’s Back, 2019, washing basins, cable ties, string vests, flotation devices, cake soap. © Alberta Whittle.

lighten the skin. These objects are contemporary, yet serve as pathways into colonial and imperial histories through their racializing implications. They hold stories and values that have morphed and changed over time and that change further as they move transnationally across borders. Things also gain meaning through their juxtaposition with other objects in heritage and museum collections, much as they do in installations such as Exodus – Behind God’s Back. Whittle’s arrangement of soap, washing basins, and parachute silk is meant to recall the location of the original site of Edinburgh Printmakers, a former wash house at the top of Leith Walk, on the other side of Edinburgh to Castle Mills. Yet for the artist, the juxtaposition also combines to evoke the story of the constant erasure and whitewashing of Black and Caribbean histories in Britain. In a similar vein, multimedia work by Zimbabwean Scottish artist Sekai Machache has forged a space that re-inscribes the presences of the African diaspora within Scottish landscapes, and her work is also characterized by her engagement with the color blue. Machache’s project The Divine Sky was on display in fall 2021 at the Stills Photographic Gallery in Edinburgh. A series of ink drawings, fabric dyed with indigo pigment, a blue patterned robe (entitled Blue of

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the Horizon) and feathered headdress, and a narrated film all use the color blue as a cultural denominator and as a cosmic void. For this work, Machache was inspired by methods of indigo production in Africa and the ubiquity of the Blue Willow china pattern, “as if blue were a portal to histories of colonial trade, exploitation and cultural appropriation” (Thomas 2021).9 It is the film Profound Divine Sky that offers a route outward from these histories, toward potential, curative reparation. In the film, the artist wears the ceremonial robe (co-created with textile designer Fiona Catherine Powell) and walks through the ancient peat bogs of Frosinard, in the Flow Country of the Northern Highlands. She carries a vessel patterned with Blue Willow and pours water into the already saturated landscape. The figure splits into various spectral shadows on the screen, reminding us of the multiple spaces of belonging occupied by persons of the diaspora. The impetus is to find meaning in the act of making something new; to use combined histories and mythologies as a form of resistance to racism and exclusion; and to perform healing through acts of reclamation. The Flow Country is a space where the potential for ecological healing is folded into a narrative of post-colonial and environmental cosmic repair. Spanning 4,000 square kilometers of blanket bog, the Flow Country is a model for climate change mitigation. Peat locks up large stores of carbon for thousands of years. It also has a long memory, building a slow, granular world which faithfully catalogues social and climatic events across the Holocene. “Among other discoveries, researchers have found fossilized pine stumps dating from 4500 BC, remnants of an ancient forest the Romans later called “the Great Wood of Caledon,” a Celtic War Horn from the 1st Century, and car exhaust particles from the 20th Century” (Howard 2020). Bordering Caithness and Sutherland counties, the Flow Country also holds traumatic memories of the Highland Clearances, expulsions that also led to emigration – often to the British colonies abroad – and thus to the formation of another networked diaspora worldwide. Blue colors the narrative of these suspended histories in Machache’s film, through visual notes and the narrated sequence which enumerates a list of blue: 1 Blue of Nothingness, 2 A Hint of Blue, 3 Milky Blue, 4 Lively Blue, 5 Azure Blue, 6 Blue of the Horizon, 7 Ultramarine, 8 Assertive Blue, 9 The Divine Sky, 10 Light Divine Sky. Machache and Whittle share a vision for art and for the curation of art as a healing gesture, and the two artists frequently collaborate. Building on the work of Saidiya Hartman, Whittle has advocated for a philosophy of “waywardness” in curating, which privileges notions of mutual care and softness, but also advocates for acts of refusal born of

 For images, see: http://sekaimachache.com/portfolio/light-deep-divine-sky/ (July 19, 2022).

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greater self-reflection and self-care (2019). Curatorial care work is here understood by both artists as an urgent decolonial aspiration. The object juxtapositions and multimedia assemblages that both Whittle and Machache use in their artistic practice collage together creative responses that fit with an interconnected and unstable map of methods for wayward curating. They work to illuminate and add meaning to the gatherings of the “Inspiration Wall” that itself houses an eclectic, active assemblage of assorted objects, including Govancraft spice jars, ceramics that shine with Islamic luster, a poster for Rowntree cocoa, an Allegro armchair part-made from mahogany and birch, and more. I relish the fact that the wall feels less tightly curated than other parts of the Galleries. It allows visitors to make new connections that are more creative and less scripted than displays that provide more interpretation. As such, it recalls recent work on archival hermeneutics which privileges encounters and events over an over-determined attention to people, places, and things. Traditional archival research often resembles Sedgwick’s paranoid reading in its sleuthing pursuit of demonstrating mastery over material and of looking for findings that provide evidence for critique. An alternative is found in what Hayden Lorimer calls “make-do methods”: methods that are open to a willingness to repair, reconnect, and redeploy. This is an adaptive mode of inquiry where “peculiar and particular assemblies of stuff jog new memories” and “narrative threads emerge in unexpected ways, by twists and turns” (2010, 10). It is a reparatively minded research method that Lorimer terms “cultural recycling” (2010, 11). Bringing unconnected materials into contact can lead researchers into processes of manipulation through the displacement of meaning. But, as Merle Patchett and Kate Foster have shown, the purposeful assemblage and rehabilitation of diverse and partial historical remnants can also generate significant creative and political potential. These unorthodox gatherings insist upon more imaginative styles of composition and expression and assist in the recovery and re-construction of aspects of the past that may be veiled or suppressed by more dominant, conventional forms of historical record (2008, 107). For repair work does not have to imply restoration or redemption. We can perform reparative readings through our own affective encounters with objects, and we can encounter the reparative readings of others through experiencing and engaging with the accretive work of artists such as Alberta Whittle and Sekai Machache. Make-do methods allow for creativity in reuse and recycling. They are open to gaps and to the possibilities offered by broken links. This creative collage work defines the “Inspiration Wall,” but it also provides a blueprint for an alternative way to approach other objects on display in the Scottish Design Galleries. In the words of Caitlin DeSilvey, this is an invitation to change the way we look at things to enable more diverse readings of their histories here in the present. “Processes of change and creative transformation may actually

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help maintain a connection to the past rather than sever it [. . .] although this may require a willingness to find value in alternative forms” (2017, 5).

The Politics of Care The artworks I have discussed so far have been shown outside the Scottish Design Galleries, and the links they form with objects on display inside are traced through the commonalities in their surface appearances and composite materials. The next work I want to discuss is a new commission by V&A Dundee that was installed within the Galleries in June 2022. The Golden Fibre is a multimedia work by Canadian artist Swapnaa Tamhane, curated by Tiffany Boyle of the Glasgow-based collective Mother Tongue (see Figure 3). The installation re-elaborates the entwined histories of the jute industry in Dundee and Kolkata and seeks to re-place the labor of Indian mill workers within the lived history of Dundee. Tamhane “works to destabilize and untether colonial constructs” in her art, and her creative process “focuses on the presence of her hand in making paper and the treatment of surfaces” (Tamhane 2022). Working with archival materials held at the University of Dundee and at Verdant Works (Dundee Heritage Trust), a former jute mill, Tamhane has produced a collage of photographs and drawings of female workers as well as microscopic images of jute paper that she makes by hand. Her website describes this process as “laborious”: it involves “cutting up jute cloth, soaking it in the caustic chemical lye, then beating it in water for hours to create a pulp that is then shaped and dried into rough sheets of paper” (Tamhane 2022). The role of the hand and of the handmade links Tamhane’s artistic practice with the labor of the jute workers both in Bengal and in Dundee, binding them “arbitrarily” though determinedly through their shared attention to the fibers of jute. This digital collage, with its crisscrossing design of jute fibers and ghostly silhouettes, forms a large-scale backdrop to a standalone case displaying an installation entitled Tum Banglá mat bolo, ham kuchh nahín samajhtá hai (You don’t speak Bengali, I can’t understand anything). For this piece, Tamhane sandblasted excerpts from a Hidustani phrase book distributed to Scottish supervisors working in Bengali mills onto small metallic plates spread out across the case. They reveal the colonial power dynamics at play between the Scottish employers and Bengali workers through phrases such as “I tell him every day but he does not listen / Do not bring 26 men tomorrow / Bring some fruits from the market / Go to a big shop and buy my cigarettes / Do you say this is first class work?” Yet Tamhane also wanted to gesture toward parallel power dynamics often active in museum displays by using regular oblong plates that recall the size and shape of

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Figure 3: Swapnaa Tamhane, The Golden Fibre, 2021–22. Commissioned by V&A Dundee. Photo by Neil Hanna. Courtesy of V&A Dundee.

object labels. In so doing, The Golden Fibre responds to Nathan K. Hensley’s call to “remain ‘paranoid’ or critical about extrinsic matters of historical violence while adopting a ‘reparative’ or positive dispensation toward the individual objects of its intrinsic acts of reading” (2013, 64). For Tamhane’s work, which combines an attention to the material and metaphorical properties of jute whilst resurfacing the colonial inequalities embedded in its production, also returns agency to objects themselves by placing original tools borrowed from the Verdant Works collections on display alongside her art. The politics of care expressed in Hensley’s concept of “curatorial reading,” which holds both paranoid and reparative modes of reading in productive tension, shifts subjecthood from the reader to the object

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at hand. As such, illuminated by the artistic elaborations they flank, objects become “emancipated,” “active agents of theoretical activity” in and of themselves (2013, 65). The Golden Fibre also adds nuance and potentiality to the existing object displays in the Galleries, layering memories and lived experiences through the inclusion of visual and speech imagery in an artwork that connects Scotland and Bengal in a shared yet differentiated history. Colonial imbrications here become a matter of “concern” rather than of “fact,” which no longer impel us, as readers, to “debunk” objects on display but rather to “protect and care” (Latour 2004, 232) for the thoughts and ideas they set in motion through an “imaginative ability to frame utopias and then move purposefully towards them” (Laing 2020, 115). In drawing toward a conclusion, I want to turn back to the “Inspiration Wall” which faces Tamhane’s installation on the opposite side of the first section of the Galleries and highlight one final object. Angus Ross’s Unstable Stool (2017) showcases the Perthshire craftsman’s ability to fashion sleek, curved furniture from steam-bent wood. It is this process of steam-bending that fascinates me and seems to offer an additional blueprint methodology for reparative reading techniques. Steam-bending loosens wood fibers, enabling them to be shaped into unusually flexible forms – forms that can surprise and delight. As a designer, Ross is principally concerned with embedding functionality in the pure flowing lines of his pieces, but also in creating everyday joy through his designs. The reparative readings I have highlighted throughout this piece seek to offer similar, positive responses of nourishment and pleasure. But is repair sufficient? Does it enact an honest “appreciation of the real limits and fragility of the worlds we inhabit, and a recognition that many of the stories and orders of modernity are in the process of coming apart” (Jackson 2014, 221)? Does it nourish enough and nourish sufficient numbers of people to hold what Graham and Thrift term “emancipatory potential” (2007, 2)? Does it respond robustly enough to the ongoing structural inequalities caused by imperial and colonial histories? What space does it make available for modes of active resistance to institutional violence? And what relation (if any) does it have to increasingly urgent calls for reparation and repatriation, especially within museum and heritage spaces? Patricia Stuelke’s rejection of the turn away from critique within the academy raises questions that must nuance any uncomplicated assessment of the positive potential of reparative readings. Stuelke “understands political (as well as interpretative and aesthetic) investments in repair and reconciliation as deeply implicated in colonial, settler, and imperialist histories” (2021, 11). How can we rethink repair from this critical perspective, as only one facet in what Jackson calls “broken world thinking” (2014, 221)?

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One possible response comes from re-centering the “world-disclosing properties of breakdown” and how “breakdown disturbs and sets in motion worlds of possibility that disappear under the stable or accomplished form of the artefact” (Jackson 2014, 230). During the fall of 2021, I had the opportunity to engage with Milan’s new Museo delle Culture (MUDEC) through a series of visits and conversations with the curators there. MUDEC occupies the former Ansaldo industrial plant in the Porta Genova area of the city and was acquired by the municipal authorities in 1990. It not only houses and displays the municipal collections of ethnographic material, but it also offers a space for community dialogue and intercultural exchange. The topic of breakdown came up as part of my conversations with the principal curator of the permanent exhibitions, Carolina Orsini, in ways which offered an illuminating counterpoint to my engagement with repair as a mode of reading the Scottish Design Galleries at V&A Dundee. On the occasion of the opening of MUDEC’s new permanent exhibition “Global Milan: The World Seen From Here” in September 2021, one of the African Italian artists selected to exhibit their work in the final room, Jarmay Michael Gabriel Cappellin, took a cutter to one of his own canvases and slashed through the artwork, leaving a gaping space. He left a message behind which read, “No more tokenism.” The curators have retained the ripped canvas and preserved the paper message under plexiglass, leaving the issues around representation, remuneration, and racism raised by Cappellin’s act unresolved. My chapter thus concludes by proposing the curatorial response to this act of rupture as an alternative form of repair: a repair that resists easy resolution, but instead opens a gap in interpretation, allowing for otherwise silenced, dissonant voices to be heard. As Olivia Laing puts it: “We’re so often told that art can’t really change anything. But I think it can. It shapes our ethical landscapes; it opens us to the interior lives of others. It is a training ground for possibility. It makes plain inequities, and it offers other ways of living” (2020, 8).

Bibliography Attia, Kader. “Kader Attia and Ralph Rudoff in Conversation.” Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2019. Best, Stephen, and Sharon Marcus. “Surface Reading: An Introduction.” Representations 108.1 (2009): 1–21. Bond, Emma. “An Introduction to Scotland’s Transnational Heritage: Sites, Things and Time(s).” Scotland’s Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Empire and Slavery. Ed. Emma Bond and Michael Morris. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022: 1–22. Boydell, Christine. The Architect of Floors: Modernism, Art and Marion Dorn Designs. London: Schoeser, 1996.

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Cockagne, Emily. Rummage: A History of the Things We Have Reused, Recycled and Refused to Let Go. London: Profile Books, 2021. DeSilvey, Caitlin. Curated Decay: Heritage Beyond Saving. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2017. Dinsdale, Emily. “Why artist Alberta Whittle is imploring us to ‘invest in love’.” Dazed. 2022. https://www.dazeddigital.com/art-photography/article/55947/1/why-artist-alberta-whittle-isimploring-us-to-invest-in-love (July 13, 2022). Felski, Rita. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015. Graham, Stephen, and Nigel Thrift. “Out of Order: Understanding Repair and Maintenance.” Theory, Culture and Society 24.3 (2007): 1–25. Hensley, Nathan K. “Curatorial Reading and Endless War.” Victorian Studies 56.1 (2013): 59–83. Historic Scotland. Hawick and its Place among the Borders Mill Towns. 2016. https://www.historicenvir onment.scot/archives-and-research/publications/publication/?publicationId=585a9c1f-d934 -46da-a9be-a58400e5838b (July 12, 2022). Howard, Ellie. “Scotland’s 10,000-year-old wild heartland.” BBC Travel, 2020. https://www.bbc.com/ travel/article/20200802-scotlands-10000-year-old-wild-heartland (July 13, 2022). Jackson, Joe. The Thief at the End of the World: Rubber, Power and the Seeds of Empire. London: Viking, 2008. Jackson, Steven J. “Rethinking Repair.” Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society. Ed. Tarleton Gillespie, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2014. 221–239. Laing, Olivia. Funny Weather: Art in an Emergency. London: Picador, 2020. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30.2 (2004): 225–248. Lorimer, Hayden. “Caught in the Nick of Time: Archives and Fieldwork.” The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Geography. Ed. Dydia DeLyser, Steve Herbert, Stuart Aitken, Mike Crang, and Linda McDowell. London: SAGE Publications, 2010. Web Version. 1–23. Love, Heather. “Close Reading and Thin Description.” Public Culture 25.3 (2013): 401–434. MacNicol, David. “Artist explores the ‘dirty secrets’ of Scotland’s colonial past.” BBC Scotland, 2019. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-50154835 (July 13, 2022). Mattern, Sharon. “Maintenance and Care.” Places Journal 2018. https://placesjournal.org/article/main tenance-and-care/ (July 12, 2022). More, Meredith, and Emma Bond. “Decolonising our Galleries: An Introduction.” V&A Dundee, 2020. https://www.vam.ac.uk/dundee/articles/decolonising-our-galleries-an-introduction (July, 12 2022). More, Meredith, and Rosie Spooner. “Telling a Fuller Story: Scottish Design, Empire and Transnational Heritage at V&A Dundee.” Scotland’s Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Empire and Slavery. Ed. Emma Bond and Michael Morris. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2022. 136–154. Patchett, Merle, and Kate Foster. “Repair Work: Surfacing the Geographies of Dead Animals.” Museum and Society 6.2 (2008): 98–122. Rugoff, Ralph. “Foreword.” Kader Attia: The Museum of Emotion. London: Hayward Gallery Publishing, 2019. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading; or, You’re So Paranoid You Probably Think This Introduction Is About You.” Novel Gazing: Queer Readings in Fiction. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997. 1–37.

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Smith, Richard. Jamaican Volunteers in the First World War: Race, Masculinity and the Development of a National Consciousness. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004. Stuelke, Patricia. The Ruse of Repair: US Neoliberal Empire and the Turn from Critique. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2021. Tamhane, Swapnaa. Personal website. 2022. https://www.tamhane.net/ (July 13, 2022). Thomas, Greg. “Cosmic Reflections.” Aesthetica. August 2021. https://aestheticamagazine.com/cos mic-reflections/ (July 12, 2022). Whittle, Alberta. “Biting the Hand that Feeds You: A Strategy of Wayward Curating.” Critical Arts 33.6 (2019): 110–123.

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Beyond the De-Colonial: Rethinking the Future of Museums in Africa Introduction Rodney Harrison et al. argue that museum and “heritage futures” concern the role of heritage in managing the relations between present and future societies (2020, 3). Yet, national museums in Africa have been burdened with dealing with a violent past, characterized, among other things, by minority domination, exclusion, marginalization, and even total dispossession. This colonial past and its vestiges continue to affect everyday realities of people and institutions on the African continent. Fausto Fiorin describes this process as the emancipation of memory and the challenge of overcoming the trauma of oppression (2019, 15). Museums are the most conspicuous institutions that have not only borne the brunt of colonialism, but also continue to carry it in their structural and functional DNA – particularly those established during the colonial period. Museum scholars and practitioners from Africa have highlighted the challenges faced by museums stemming from their colonial past; they have also underscored how coloniality, as vestige of colonialism, is partly reproduced and persists in contemporary museum practices, structures, and relationships (Abungu 2019; Silverman et al. 2022; Vawda 2019). Notwithstanding the fact that museums in Africa have produced an “epistemology of injustice” (Vawda 2019, 72), a potential for new practices has been acknowledged, as reflected in the calls by both scholars and museum practitioners for new relationships, repatriation, decolonization, and re-humanization (Hicks 2020; Rassool 2015a, 2015b; 2018). It is interesting to note, however, that even some of the museums that were established in post-colonial Africa have been products of museological practices and processes rooted in the colonial past. Museums in Africa are still confronted with matters of relevance and the need to carve out their space in the public sphere, amid the volatile dynamics of a post-colonial Africa. This is perhaps primarily because colonialism is an expression of power that relies upon oppression and the extraction of resources, including natural, cultural, and heritage resources. It also relies on silencing alternative ways of knowing and being. Such legacies of exclusion and marginalization have not been uncommon in post-colonial Africa both within and beyond museums. We argue that the future of museums in Africa lies in moving beyond the decolonial, as well as in avoiding the temptation to using decoloniality to avoid critical introspection. Without taking away its value and agency, one of the dangers https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-009

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of decoloniality is developing an obsession and consequently becoming stuck with it, and essentializing it (Mbembe 2021; Moosavi 2020). Could it be that this approach, with all its usefulness, also reproduces the pathologies of skewed power that were embedded in colonial institutions and knowledge practices? Could society, the academia or museums end up having the propensity to stifle the desire to take simple, practical steps toward the emergence and/or creation of “post-decolonial” museums, which truly serve communities. Museums in Africa need to position themselves in a way that reacts to colonialism and its atrocities, while simultaneously avoiding turning themselves into new centers for decolonial stagnation. Beyond the decolonial frenzy, museums need not be fixated just on the past, but should embrace community expectations in the present. They should do so while imagining such communities’ futures. Notions of the past encapsulated in victimhood are not adequate to shape or influence the future of African museums. In making this recommendation, we agree with scholars who, while acknowledging the lopsided nature of colonial knowledge, institutions, and practices, caution against the populist and uncritical use of decolonial approaches in museums. This is important in order to avoid the inadvertent reproduction of what these institutions seek to unravel (Mbembe 2021; Moosavi 2020; Taiwo 2022).

African Museums or Just Museums in Africa? The characterization of museums in Africa is by no means an easy process. To what extent are they African? What constitutes an African museum? Would it be more convenient to refer to museums in Africa? In post-decolonial times – which in our view is when the ultimate expression of a truly African museology for African museums has been realized – museums ought to be places for the unusual. They should also be platforms for the expression of African ideas, knowledge, and practices, without apologizing for how they fit into orthodox notions of modernity or postmodernity. Walter Mignolo has suggested turning to “epistemic disobedience” (Mignolo & Walsh 2018, 114) in the context of decoloniality, which he describes as the exercise of power within the colonial matrix to undermine the mechanism that keeps it in place. Such a mechanism is epistemic and, thus, decolonial liberation implies epistemic disobedience. Similarly, and given their colonial framing, African museums may need to consider “museological disobedience,” to eventually assert their freedom from their constraints and framing by colonialism and coloniality. This entails going beyond curatorial preferences in museum programming; it requires setting up a museological practice in which museum professionals co-curate exhibitions and plan all museum programming in cooperation with communities,

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as creators and custodians of culture and heritage. The resilience of coloniality in museums seems to derive its fodder from museums’ unwillingness to relinquish power over communities, bestowed upon them by colonialism. During the colonial period in Zimbabwe, the Witchcraft Suppression Act of 1899 was passed ostensibly to ban witch-hunting and sorcery. However, in practice, the legal difference between sorcery and African culture was deliberately blurred. Therefore, the Witchcraft Suppression Act became, in effect and essence, a weapon for the annihilation of African cultural practices through, among other things, the forcible and nefarious dispossession of cultural objects. As a result, museums became convenient modern sepulchers for African objects of spiritual significance (Mataga et al. 2022). Yet, museum artifacts need not always be exhibited in the same way; the ways in which they are interpreted also do not remain unchanged. Instead, their associated meanings are linked to context, time, place, and culture, as well as to the physical exhibition space (Turpeinen 2006, 86). Voices against this unforgettable, colonial prejudice have been very loud for some time now, and rightly so. Yet, Africans cannot be crying victims forever. It is simply not enough. Therefore, post-decolonial thinking regarding the future of African museums ought to focus directly on confronting the legacies of imperialism in museums. Such thinking should also inspire us to question our own motives in keeping objects detached from their cultural contexts. How do we redress the damage inflicted on cultures and cultural objects by colonial policies and legislations, including missionary activities? Practices of museum collecting during the colonial period in Africa (Mataga & Chabata 2012, 87) yielded some very tragic results; they also resulted in some African countries inheriting undesirable legacies at independence, in the form of human collections. Museums in Africa ought to reflect on how they have perpetuated colonial practices, such as the collecting of human bodies as fungible commodities to be classified and exploited (Modest 2012, 86). Perhaps, human collections in museums need to be reburied in accordance with applicable cultural practices, affording them the decency and reverence that reflects human dignity. The continued shelving of human remains in museums is both colonial and bitterly un-African. Letting go of these collections involves questioning not only the power relations and prejudice between former colonizers and colonies, but in this instance, also between museums and communities.

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Conquering the Past: The Quest for the Next Moment for Museums in Africa The idea or suggestion of conquering the past may, perhaps, sound weird to a not so curious reader of this reflection. Seithy Chacage (2010, 19), cites Hill (1978, 15) and provides illuminating insight into this proposition: “although the past does not change, the present does; each generation asks questions of the past and finds new areas of sympathy as it relives different aspects of the past.” Colonialism remains the very reason why Africa still faces the task of conquering its past rather than being held back by it. Achille Mbembe (2021) characterizes the post-colonial political and cultural power dynamics, whose roots can be traced back to the colonial experiences of the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth century. He posits that the identities of the colonized and the colonizer were shaped by the intersection between willed or assisted forgetting, disengagement, and renewal. It would be an oversimplification of reality to assume that colonialism was either static or monolithic. On the contrary, colonialism was very dynamic, with exploitation and marginalization as the major constants. In many parts of Africa, the post-colonial attempts to tackle the divide and rule tactics of the colonial masters and create unitary nation-states led, in many cases, to ethnic and cultural differences being perceived as conflictual diversity – even unpatriotic. Cultural differences have yet to be adequately celebrated as progressive diversity and not as a regressive problem that needs to be solved. Writing on the Copenhagen Museum, Sandahl (2012) argues that differences between Copenhageners should be seen as an asset and be actively utilized. Similarly, the diversity of people and their cultures and views need to be harnessed and reflected in post-decolonial museum exhibitions and programming in Africa. As colonialism has continued to shape and influence both the theory and practice of museums in Africa, there are some structural issues that stem from how and for what purpose these museums were established in a colonial setting. One gets the impression that museums in Africa stand in stark contrast to the colonial past, which must still be confronted and conquered. There needs to be deliberate examination into what the next big moment for museums could be after colonialism and beyond decoloniality. Colonialism has affected many areas of thought and knowledge in various, if not all, fields in Africa. However, turning decolonization merely into a catchy word – or as Taiwo (2022) posits, using it to perform contemporary ”morality” or ”authenticity” – would limit the appeal of imagining alternative museum futures in Africa. We argue for an agenda of decolonization that helps Africa move beyond the pains and limitations of the past.

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UNESCO’s 2003 Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage recognized the importance of language as a vehicle of culture. Yet many, if not most museums in Africa, remain monolingual. To recognize each country’s multilingualism, museums in Africa do not necessarily need a new discourse, paradigm shift, or donors with fat pockets, in order to translate museum exhibitions into local languages; languages that embody the very culture and heritage they seek to (re)present in their exhibitions. Taiwo (2022, 18), referencing Pentecostal churches in Nigeria, makes an interesting point that the domestication of Christianity has led, in Pentecostal circles, to colonial languages being the primary means of worship – this has resulted in gaudy translations into our mother tongues being provided almost for comic relief. The limited and often absent museum captions in local languages inadvertently seem to reinforce the impression that “anything that requires deep thought is the domain of our borrowed languages; our mother tongues are good only for the everyday, for habits or for ritual purposes” (Taiwo 2022, 18). The language barrier (or limitations) could be described as a low-hanging fruit in imagining and realizing an alternative future for museums in Africa beyond the decolonial.

Beyond Curatorial Preferences: Enter Communities and Living Museums Museum spaces and programming remain largely dominated by state actors and curators, who tend to proscribe what the community wants or needs to see. Such approaches are overly didactic and prescriptive. Unsal (2019), cited by Field (2021, 2), raises a fundamental problem in post-colonial museums in Africa: namely, that these institutions assume the role of purveyors of truth and guardians of history. This consequently results in reverence concerning their expertise, as well as their curators assuming the role of an “authority.” Inevitably, museums function as self-portraits of a nation, a region, or a city; in doing so, they invent, define, delineate, build, and disseminate identities (Sandahl 2012, 467). Museums have enjoyed the spoils of independence by creating authoritative spaces, as opposed to inclusive spaces in which diverse and even conflicting narratives and multi-layered histories are exhibited; in which truths can be relative, as opposed to absolute and authoritative. This position of power clouds museums’ introspection, resulting in their failure to realize the role they continue to play in perpetuating imperial legacies. Community participation has remained largely a cosmetic and fashionable policy gimmick in post-colonial museum practice. The posturing of museum practice in Africa has tended to be overly didactic as op-

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posed to being open to uncomfortable and unsafe ideas, such as conversations around social justice. Community engagement has been a catchy concept in museums in Africa attempting to confront, and possibly redress, colonial injustices and prejudices; with attention being turned toward community participation or involvement. The question remains: What kinds of museums do we have on the African continent? Museums in Africa are stuck with legacies of the colonial past. Such legacies designed and framed them as exclusive collections of treasure and spaces for patronage by settler elites – a common trajectory. Reactions in Africa to the colonial past endeavoring to seek redress of past injustices have tended to largely shape museum practices. In doing so, however, they have merely paid attention to institutional capacities and structures on a cosmetic level, in confronting such vestiges of colonialism which has expressed itself in various pedagogical, epistemic, and museological forms. In essence, museums in Africa are continually conscripting cultures into post-colonial modernity, whose foundations are built on colonial framing reinforced by babysitting rather than unseating colonial legacies and their inherent limitations. Across the continent, many have argued in favor of developing community museums, hosted by local communities as an alternative to colonial legacy museums. This ideal of grassroots, community-based initiatives are sprouting up across Africa, such as the living museums in Namibia or the private museums in South Africa (Mataga 2021). These represent active and emergent social and cultural transformations by indigenous people in the remaking, adapting, and revising of western museological frameworks that are still embedded in national museums in Zimbabwe.1 A few cases exemplify the movement toward the model “museum outside of museums.” This model refers to museum spaces that exist parallel to the normative, formal structures of museum making. In Zimbabwe, there has been a partially successful movement toward empowering communities in the curation of their own histories and culture. This clearly demonstrates the potential that communities can define new alternatives in museum practice, which is manifest in the construction of many community-based museums and other culture initiatives, parallel to state supported museums (Chipangura & Chipangura 2019; Thondhlana et al. 2022). The BaTonga Community Museum in Binga is an example of a museum that has experimented with the principles of museum practice advocated by de-colonial activists.2 Situated in Binga on the shores of Lake Kariba in the Zambezi Valley,

 For reflections upon indigenous agency and storytelling, see also the chapters by Rowan Light, by Anne Schäfer, and by Jimena Perry, and the Introduction by Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger in this volume.  The museum was one of the first community museums in Zimbabwe. It originated in collaborative efforts between local communities, and NGO and the NMMZ. Located in the far North

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North-Western Zimbabwe, this museum was opened in September 2004. It seeks to promote and empower local communities and the vaTonga culture (Mawere 2016). It showcases the traditions, science, beliefs, and ingenuity of the Tonga people, whose environment has been generally dynamic and hostile in many ways due to both natural phenomena, such as flooding, and human activities like the construction of the Kariba Dam in the 1950s. This museum has gone beyond what colonial museums attempted to do: examine the subject (the African), while at the same time not being meant for use by the Africans. The BaTonga Museum was created largely by the repatriation of objects to the community for their own use. Both the former and current curators of the BaTonga Museum have confirmed that storerooms at the museum are open to the makers and owners of the objects – the community. For instance, Tonga stools that are part of the museum’s collection are put to practical use during meetings between community and museum professionals. What has been crucial, however, is that the source community, as owners of the returned objects, started giving objects meanings; therefore, many have received new lease on life following many years of confinement in museum storerooms in other parts of Zimbabwe, particularly in the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences in Harare. The meanings of the objects in Binga have, in some cases, differ from those they had been assigned elsewhere. For instance, the Ndombonda have widely been regarded as calabash containers used for smoking cannabis. In Binga, however, the pipe is used exclusively by women smoking for pleasure, and the smoke is purified by the water that is loaded in the pipe to avoid direct smoking. The traditional focus of museums has tended to be research-based, especially regarding collection management and exhibition design. During this process, museums have turned their exhibition programming into a presentation of research results. In contrast, BaTonga museum work and programming is communitycentered. This preference for self-curation and self-representation within communities, and specifically within previously marginalized ethnic groups in Zimbabwe, recently, has been documented. The work by Thondhlana, Mataga, and Munjeri (2022) documents the resurgence of such museums, which are not usually obliged to endorse official narratives of the state. Thus, they point to the desire to decolonize and indigenize museums in the post-colonial landscape. In Binga, and many other emerging community-based projects of self-curation, exhibitions and collections are configured to showcase the competencies and achievements of the community over time. Unlike their representation within bigger museums, such as the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences, the ethnographic gaze is disrupted;

Western parts of the country the museum works with the minority VaTonga group, and has had relative success in working and collaborating with local communities.

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objects, materials, and cultural practices are confounded and presented in a continuum that draws from long held, historical and cultural practices, but also from the continuity, fluidity, and other links to contemporary cultural and socioeconomic or political realities. An example is the 2004 travelling exhibition on Tonga Drums and Drumming, initially displayed in Binga, and then at the National Gallery of Zimbabwe. The drums were subsequently sold for the direct benefit of the makers of the drums. In this way, the collections of the community museum are not sepulchered in a museum storage area (Mataga et al. 2022). The power of BaTonga lies not merely in its objects and collections but its creation of museum space and inclusive contact zones for community dialogue. South Africa has experienced one of the most checkered histories in museum development on the continent, with notable links between colonial museums, and political and epistemic processes; processes based on racial separation, marginalization and objectification of blacks (Dubow 2006; Legassick & Rassool 2000). Despite this, the post-1994 South African museum landscape has been vibrant, with some notable structural and policy shifts (Coombes 2003; Corsane 2004; Davison 2005). Alongside these state-supported formal museums located in metropolitan areas, there clearly exist several innovative, community-based, and some privately-run museums. These institutions aim to center African systems of thought, local experiences/narratives, and living traditions. They attempt to challenge the model of four-walled, expert-based museums through open, community-curated, and independent heritage places free from government or state support and control. Such places include a museum and heritage center off the Atlantic seaboard, in the Western Cape Province in South Africa. The !Khwa ttu Heritage Centre’s origins involved a local community-based organization: the Working Group of Indigenous Minorities in Southern Africa (WIMSA), which is a non-governmental organization for lobbying and advocacy related to the Khoi and San Communities in Southern Africa. The !Khwa ttu heritage center is composed of purposefully environmentally immersive buildings that exhibit San life, highlighting their stories, knowledge, and skills. Its strategies for engaging and working with local San communities entail three interlinking elements: the heritage center, communitybased satellites, and a digital archive. These elements are co-curated by the Khoi and San communities. Unlike a normative museum, !Khwa ttu is not a mere collection-based museum.3 Rather, the heritage center exhibits and tells stories of San histories and experiences, while the community satellite sites are meant to empower the wide San communities far away from the Centre, in telling their

 https://www.khwattu.org (March 23, 2023).

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Figure 1: Entrance to the “Ways of the San Gallery” at !Khwa ttu. Photo by Jesmael Mataga, 2021.

own stories. The envisaged digital archive is meant to preserve local narratives, histories, and experiences (Mataga 2021). Through the invocation of ancestors, language, culture, elements of history, depictions of everyday life are performed and shown. The forms of display and performance, untangle and visualize the interactive demarcations between the physical and the spiritual. For instance, the Way of the San Gallery (see Figure 1), is seamlessly integrated with the natural environment, and being in the gallery one is indeed also out in the natural environment. In the gallery, audiovisual effects derived from the surrounding nature deepen the connection between the inside and outside. With very minimal materials on display, and short texts, the building, the sound, and its visual rendition tells a unique story of nature, spirituality, and the landscape. Thus, the museum gallery space is curated in relation to its outside spiritual landscape. It foregrounds these local connections through its architecture and exhibition design, rather than the material objects in display cases. The museum becomes a space for complex storytelling. Its architectural features are deliberately curated as part of this act; the building was constructed to seamlessly blend into surrounding landscape (see Figure 2).

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Figure 2: Part of !Khwa ttu San Culture & Education Centre, South Africa. Photo by Jesmael Mataga, 2021.

The African Museum We Want? What’s in the We Factor? Mares (2022) points out that to be in touch with your heritage is to be open to changing ideas of history, religion, science, and art. Debate continues to rage on about the very definition and a possible global consensus of what constitutes a museum (Mairesse 2019; Sandahl 2019). Even the recently revised International Council of Museums’ (ICOM 2022) definition is subject to fresh scrutiny, as it still carries the burden of museums’ struggle for identity and relevance in society: “A museum is a not-for-profit, permanent institution in the service of society that researches, collects, conserves, interprets and exhibits tangible and intangible heritage. Open to the public, accessible and inclusive, museums foster diversity and sustainability.”4 For many museums in Africa, museum practice has tended to be largely, if not wholly influenced by the dictates of international bodies, with an emphasis on technical and professional activities related to preservation and curation. In fact, many museums have aspired to become “world class” museums, drawing from the models of museums in Europe or the so-called West. In a way, the hegemony of international practices partly obscured local and indigenous ways of knowing and being, and turned museums into the preserve of the elite,

 https://icom.museum/en/resources/standards-guidelines/museum-definition/ (March 23, 2023).

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and mostly urban communities. Thus, to unravel this historical marginalization, the process of rethinking the decolonial futures of museums in Africa would perhaps benefit from imagining and tapping into the pre-colonial forms of an African museum, as well as how it may have evolved over time either without or in spite of colonial interference. What would have been the purpose of such a “museum or museums”? How were precolonial museums managed or kept and who were the custodians? More importantly, what was the role of cultural objects, and to what end were they used? As long as museums do not allow communities to have the power to voice which forms of museum exhibitions, spaces, and other programs should take, there is no way museums will be sustainable in the future; and there is an urgent need to go beyond the decolonization project. This is because decolonization has tended to gravitate toward creating rigid and authoritative narratives that exclude community diversity and a plurality of voices. We can look at the example of Zimbabwe in the emergence of commemorative discourses around shared memories of the liberation struggle. There is a dichotomy of colonial and anti-colonial villains, heroes, and heroines. Names like Allan Wilson, Baden Powell, Nehanda, Rhodes, Mkwati, and Kaguvi, feature prominently at the expense of other voices and names. The role of spirit mediums5 like Mbuya Nehanda is widely celebrated in museums, even at the expense of military personnel like Mtshane Khumalo. Khumalo led the Ndebele army that repulsed and defeated the Allan Wilson Patrol who pursued the then Ndebele King, Lobengula in an effort to capture him during the Anglo-Ndebele War of 1893. Lobengula was the king of the Ndebele people, based in South-Western Zimbabwe, and was instrumental in the wars against colonization at the end of the nineteenth century in what later became Zimbabwe. However, even the inclusion of biographies like Mtshane Khumalo’s will not constitute a fully collective story of the liberation struggle. In fact, there cannot be a collective story, although it is fashionable to say otherwise. Instead, it is more viable to talk about a collection of stories. When there is talk of African issues, there is always the problem of using “we” to describe the decolonial futures of almost anything – including the future of museums. One of the most famous references in the decolonial African collective is to the term Ubuntu, which literally refers to personhood. At a more nuanced level Ubuntu denotes the normative values of Africans, an ostensibly seamless cliché across diverse African cultures. Calls for the repatriation of looted cultural objects have grown louder in recent years (Hicks 2020). Human remains, migrated archives, and different kinds of mu-

 Spirit mediums are people believed to possess the ability to communicate with the ancestors and other spiritual powers. They mediate between the spiritual world and that of the living – hence the name spirit mediums.

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seum collections have been returned to their countries of origin as part of the drive to decolonize. Although the push for the return of looted African heritage has been driven by Africans, search engines and publishing houses tell a different and ironic story: one of the largely, if not completely, non-African authorship of the repatriation and restitution discourse. Of course, the matter does not necessarily need to be academic; it can also be very practical, including other facets such as advocacy and diplomacy, since the return of looted heritage is broader than an academic endeavor. The repatriation of objects from imperial powers back to former colonies is perhaps part of decolonizing imperial museums. However, what are the implications of such repatriations? Are they adequate in their own right? What does repatriation mean to a state, group of people, or individuals? Most likely, it means different things to different people. The state actors, however, have tended to appropriate the processes of repatriation in a hegemonic way. Post-decolonial museums need to go beyond embracing the diversity of cultures and communities. They need to highlight the plurality of voices and challenge the illusion of total knowledge. The imperative for museums in Africa to reframe is an understatement. Africa needs to imagine alternative forms of museums, including museum associations. Cues could be derived from Sandahl’s (2019) vision for an alternative museum, one that could short-circuit distance and separation, the alienation and estrangement, between people’s needs and the museum as an institution; an institution whose establishment can be traced back to a colonial context. ICOM defines museums as being open to the public, accessible, inclusive, and fostering diversity and sustainability; as one that is not purely didactic, but one that is prepared to do the work of self-critique and introspection. Being open to the public should go beyond just opening the doors to the galleries and offices. It should also mean being open to new ideas and new forms of museums. The sustainability of museums in Africa will hinge significantly on the willingness and ability to adapt to societal change. Society can impact museums and vice versa. For the future, we will need museums inclined to tackle difficult subjects. In Zimbabwe, for instance, there has been an incredible expansion of African-initiated Apostolic churches. These churches are referred to in one of the local languages, Shona, as mapostori. For some, mapostori have become a menace in the way in which they have literally invaded traditional shrines as places of apostolic worship, erecting new symbols at sites ordinarily described as archaeological. The debate that this new phenomenon has generated, has revolved around the manner of their use of archaeological sites. For example, does such usage add value or is it vandalism? How do museums respond to such spiritual phenomena? To date, museums in Zimbabwe have remained rather indifferent. How do museums, through their exhibitions or programming, respond to changing landscapes – cul-

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tural or urban? In such cases, there is no clearly defined policy or approach for museums to reference. This implies revisiting the institutional framing of museums and assessing whether the structures of museums can be adapted at the pace at which society is changing. Are the current structures and operations of museums adequate to respond to or embrace community and societal needs and expectations so they remain relevant? Do they truly serve the community and sustain decolonial framing? The importance of keeping museum doors open goes beyond mere engagement with colonialism and coloniality. It also demands innovation, imagination, and community engagement, in order to transform museums into inclusive, living spaces of lived pasts, a relevant present, and an imagined future. Museums worldwide are engaged in a struggle involving inadequate buildings, lack of staffing, lack of support to preserve collections, and lack of funding to keep themselves in operation (Mores 2022). In these cases, sustaining and keeping museums open and in service of the community goes beyond repairing staircases, ramps, and elevators (Breier 2021).

Conclusion There are rare cases in history, where individuals, groups or institutions have voluntarily relinquished power and privilege for the greater benefit of society. It is, therefore, imperative that museums are incentivized by legal and policy obligations to engage communities proactively and meaningfully in their planning and programming. Unless and until museums in Africa become a window that simultaneously reflects upon past and present, the future is likely going to be a perpetuation of the past. Decolonization should not be regarded as a destination for museums; rather, it should be regarded as a process that occurs as museums seek something new and more suited for their communities in a responsible, sustainable, and accountable way. Beyond the metanarratives, perhaps the future of new models lies in small practical acts of change, where local ideas must be centered in the practice or praxis of museums in Africa.

Bibliography Abungu, George. “Museums: Geopolitics, Decolonisation, Globalisation and Migration.” Museum International 71.281–282 (2019): 62–71. Breier, Dorothea. “Accessibility Means More than Ramps – A Critical Approach to the (In-)Accessibility of Museums, Galleries and Cultural Institutions.” Museum Studies – Bridging Theory and Practice.

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Ed. Robbins Nina, Thomas Suzie, Tuominen Minna, and Anna Wessman. Jyväskylä: ICOFOM, 2021. 346–366. Chachage, Seithy. “Reading History Backwards with Mwalimu.” Africa’s Liberation: The Legacy of Nyerere. Ed. Chambi Chachage and Annar Cassam. Kampala: Pambazuka Press, 2010. 19–27. Chipangura, Njabulo, and Patricia Chipangura. “Community Museums and Rethinking the Colonial Frame of National Museums in Zimbabwe.” Museum Management and Curatorship 35.1 (2019): 36–56. Coombes, Anne. History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa. London: Duke University Press, 2003. Corsane, Gerard. “Transforming Museums and Heritage in Postcolonial and Post-Apartheid South Africa: The Impact of Processes of Policy Formulation and New Legislation.” Social Analysis: The International Journal of Anthropology 48.1 (2004): 5–15. Davison, Patricia. “Museums and the Reshaping of Memory.” Heritage, Museums and Galleries: an Introductory Reader. Ed. Gerard Corsane. London: Routledge. 2005. 184–194. Dubow, Saul. A Commonwealth of Knowledge: Science, Sensibility, and White South Africa, 1820–2000. Oxford: Oxford University Press. 2006. Feld, Liz. Museum Hegemony, Postcolonial Collections and the Scars of the Colonial Process. Academia Letters, article 867 (2021). https://doi.org/10.20935/AL867. Fiorin, Fausto. Decolonising the Museum: New Perspectives for the XXI Century Ethnographic Collections. MA Dissertation. Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Sciences, Università di Siena. 2019. Harrison, Rodney, Caitlin DeSilvey, Cornelius Holtorf and Sharon Macdonald, “‘For ever, for everyone . . . ’” Heritage Futures. Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. Ed. Rodney Harrison, Caitlin DeSilvey, Cornelius Holtorf, et. al. London: UCLPress 2020. 3–19. Hicks, Dan. The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution. London: Pluto Press, 2020. Laely, Thomas, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere (eds.) Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies. Bielefeld/Kampala: transcript & Fountain Publishers, 2018. Legassick, Martin, and Ciraj Rassool. Skeletons in the Cupboard: South African Museums and the Trade in Human Remains 1907–1917. Cape Town: South African Museum, 2000. Mairesse, François. “The Definition of the Museum: History and Issues.” Museum International, 71.1–2 (2019): 152–159. Mares, Michael. Losing the World’s Heritage: Museums Face Global Threats. Academia Letters, article 5004 (2022). https://doi.org/10.20935/AL5004. Mataga, Jesmael. “What Museums for Africa: What Museums for Africa? Reflections on Recent Histories, Emergent Practices and Decolonial Possibilities”.South African Museums Association Bulletin (SAMAB) 43.1 (2021): 18–26. Mataga Jesmael, and Farai M. Chabata. “Power of Objects: Colonial Museum Collections and their Changing Contexts.” The International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 4.12 (2012): 81–94. Mataga, Jesmael, Farai M, Chabata, and Charity Nyathi. “Sepulcherised Objects and their ‘Decolonial’ Futures in African Museums: The ‘Robert Edward Codrington’ Collection at the Zimbabwe Natural History Museum.” Indigenous Collections: Belongings, Decolonization, Contextualization – A Journal for Museums and Archives Professionals 18.1 (2022): 42–58. Mbembe, Achille. Out of the Dark Night: Essays on Decolonisation. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021.

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Mignolo, Walter D., and Catherine E. Walsh. On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. Modest, Wayne. “We Have Always Been Modern: Museums, Collections, and Modernity in the Caribbean.” Museum Anthropology 35.1 (2012): 85–96. Moosavi, Leon. “The Decolonial Bandwagon and the Dangers of Intellectual Decolonisation.” International Review of Sociology 30.2 (2020): 332–354. Petterson, Susanna. “Museum Leadership: New Competencies and the Cycle of Change.” Museum Studies: Bridging Theory and Practice. Ed. Ninna Robbins, Suzie Thomas, Minna Tuominen, and Anna Wessman. Jyväskylä: ICOFOM, 2021. 118–136. Rassool, Ciraj. “Re-storing the Skeletons of Empire: Return, Reburial and Rehumanisation in Southern Africa.” Journal of Southern African Studies 41.3 (2015a): 653–670. Rassool Ciraj. “Human Remains, the Disciplines of the Dead, and the South African Memorial Complex.” The Politics of Heritage in Africa: Economies, Histories, and Infrastructures.” Ed. Derek R. Peterson, Kodzo Gavua, and Ciraj Rassool. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015b. 133–156. Rassool, Ciraj. “Building a Critical Museology in Africa.” Museum Cooperation Between Africa and Europe: A New Field for Museum Studies. Ed. Thomas Laely, Marc Meyer, and Raphael Schwere. Bielefeld/Kampala: transcript & Fountain Publishers, 2018. xi–xii. Robbins, Ninna. “Locating Museology Outside the Box: New Competencies and the Cycle of Change.” Museum Studies: Bridging Theory and Practice. Ed. Ninna Robbins, Suzie Thomas, Minna Tuominen, and Anna Wessman. Jyväskylä: ICOFOM, 2021. 40–62. Sandahl, Jette. “The Museum Definition as the Backbone of ICOM.” Museum International 7.1–2 (2019): vi–9. Sandahl, Jette. “Exhibitions: Disagreement Makes Us Strong?” Curator: The Museum Journal 55.4 (2012): 467–478. Sandahl, Jette. “Waiting for the Public to Change.” Materialities of Passing, Explorations, Transition and Transience: Studies in Death, Materiality, and the Origin of Time. Ed. Peter Bjerregaard, Anders Emil Rasmussen, and Tim Flohr Sørensen. New York: Routledge, 2016. Silverman, Raymond, George Abungu, and Peter Probst (eds.). National Museums in Africa: Identity, History and Politics. London: Routledge, 2022. Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi. Against Decolonisation: Taking African Agency Seriously. London: Hurst, 2022. Thondhlana, Thomas Panganayi, Jesmael Mataga, and Dawson Munjeri. Independent Museums and Culture Centres in Colonial and Post-colonial Zimbabwe: Non-State Players, Local Communities, and Self-Representation. New York: Routledge, 2022. Turpeinen, Outi. “Recombining Ideas from Art and Cultural History Museums in Theory and Practice.” Nordisk Museologie 2 (2006): 83–96. Vawda, Shahid. “Museums and the Epistemology of Injustice: From Colonialism to Decoloniality.” Museum International 71.1–2 (2019): 72–79.

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Baring our Teeth: Narratives of Colonial Conflict at the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira Introduction: ‘Why don’t you remember?’ There is coming a time when a taniwha will come and his teeth are silver and gold. This taniwha will swallow the land. (Ngāpuhi prophet Āperahama Taonui, circa 1834)

Taniwha-Tū-Horo-Whenua was designed and woven by Toi Te Rito Maihi in 2005 (see Figure 1). The title of this raranga (weaving), provided by Ron Te Ripi Wihongi, refers to the whakaporopiti (prophetic words) of Āperahama Taonui, quoted above, which have been interpreted as foretelling the impact of colonization – a taniwha or monstrous force – that swallows the land.1 The powerful diagonal lines of the raranga are, therefore, indicative of teeth, with Maihi’s work evoking the earth collapsing into itself because of the actions of those who have exploited Papatūānuku (Earth Mother) through material colonization. Crucially, it also references the “bared teeth” within any relationship, not least in the shared home of Aotearoa me te Wai Pounamu, New Zealand.2 The remedy lies in the three kete (baskets) of knowledge, with Maihi adding a fourth, described by tikanga expert Timoti Kāretu as “te kete aroiti” – containing that which has been overlooked (2008, 87–99). In this way, “aroiti” is knowledge about what is unspoken, such as mutual respect and the acceptance of difference. It is also the burden of memory. Maihi’s rich spatial imagery is a local remembrance of colonization and its impact. Societies, globally, are facing calls to recognize the legacies of colonial violence. Museums have been implicated in these debates, as institutions that have, historically, been agents of cultural degradation among indigenous communities and which now face what Henrietta Lidchi calls a “material reckoning” (Lidchi 2020).3 Significantly, these shifts are refracted through twentieth-century com The raranga is currently on display at Te Kupenga Catholic Institute, Ponsonby, Auckland.  “Aotearoa me te Wai Pounamu” is used here as the indigenous name for the islands that make up the New Zealand nation-state. Regarding major Māori terms used in this chapter, see also the glossary at the end of the chapter.  See for example, the Macron Government report Restituer le Patrimoine Africain, in 2018, and the second iteration of the Deutscher Museumsbund/German Museums Association’s Guidelines on Dealing for Collections from Colonial Contexts in 2019. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-010

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Figure 1: Taniwha-Tū-Horo-Whenua (2005) by Toi Te Rito Maihi. Te Kupenga Catholic Institute, 2022. Photo by Rowan Light.

memorative practices. Renovations of the National Army Museum (NAM) in the United Kingdom, for example, broke new ground in reinterpreting imperial legacies of the British Army through engagement with communities impacted by colonial violence (Massie 2020, 229–245) – enabled by Heritage UK funding for the centenary of the First World War – while new German museum guidelines draw on precedents set in the tracing and repatriation of objects stolen during the Second World War. Jay Winter’s speculation that the “memory boom” of the late twentieth century would allow the revisiting of older formations of violence seems to be coming true (Winter 2006, 13). Museums are now expected to facilitate new storytelling about colonization and offer – through these shared narratives – public reconciliation and restitution.4 This chapter explores a local example of these issues through the Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira.5 Reinvented as the “War Memorial”  For reflections upon indigenous agency and storytelling, see also the chapters by Farai Mudododzi Chabata and Jesmael Mataga, by Anne Schäfer, by Jimena Perry, and the Introduction by Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger in this volume.  The chapter reflects the view of the author but has been written based on discussion with a range of different experts and stakeholders inside and outside the museum. In June 2021, the

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in 1929 to enshrine the nation’s First World War dead, especially those who served in Auckland regiments, the museum, as an institution, both reflects the global trends of remembrance and commemoration of twentieth-century conflict and presents distinct challenges to this material decolonization. Until the opening of Te Papa Tongarewa National Museum of New Zealand, Auckland operated as a de facto national museum and contains the largest collection relating to the military and social experience of colonial conflict in New Zealand. In 2021, the museum began the first steps toward the redevelopment of an exhibition space relating to the “New Zealand Wars,” the conflicts between British settlers and indigenous Māori from the 1840s to the 1880s, in light of important constitutional and cultural changes in Aotearoa New Zealand society (O’Malley 2021). Although the New Zealand Wars have been commemorated in both official and informal contexts – at battle sites, churches, and marae (traditional meeting places) – since the nineteenth century, it was only in 2016 that the New Zealand government formulated a schedule for an annual public day of remembrance, He Rā Maumahara – National Day of Commemoration, “in honour of those who made sacrifices in wars and conflicts within Aotearoa / New Zealand” (Te Puni Kōkiri 2018). Unlike European institutions, however, that, while recognizing the ongoing entanglements of material collections in imperial histories, can conceive of decolonization as an extra-territorial project, New Zealand state and society is defined by its postcolonial condition as a society in which “Pākehā,” descendants of European settlers, retain political and cultural dominance, even as Indigenous sovereignty is recognized as legitimizing the state’s “biculturalism” (McCarthy 2011, 9–14). Just as indigenization in Canadian museums is conditioned by a local model of “pluralist negotiation aris[ing] from a unique history of interaction among Indigenous peoples, French and English colonizers and settlers, and diasporic immigrant communities” (Phillips 2011, 10), so is New Zealand’s history of museums “characterized not just by its implication in the colonial project and the resulting alienation of indigenous land and culture, but also a paradoxical resistance to and collaboration with this process” (McCarthy 2011, 5). This Aotearoa New Zealand context produces distinct problems. The original New Zealand Wars gallery, which opened in 1996, reflected museum practices and stories that assumed the wars to be distant and removed from the perspective of its visitors, with little relevance to New Zealand’s multicultural society at the turn of the millennium (Light 2022). The renewal beginning in 2021 is, instead, framed by the particular colonial trauma evinced in the question posed by the

Human History group discussed some of the ideas and plans explored in the writing of this chapter. The feedback and conversation from that workshop are also reflected here.

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Taumata-ā-Iwi, the museum’s representative body of iwi (tribal) stakeholders: why does the New Zealand public continue to remain ignorant of these colonial wars despite their profound implications for Māori society; posed colloquially as “why don’t you remember?” That is, why has the experience of colonial conflict not been translated to public languages and communicated across communities and institutions. The “you” here is pointed: Danny Keenan notes that any public forgetting has been squarely a Pākehā phenomenon, in the face of “the transmission of histories [of the wars] through language, carvings, chants and karakia endures, deeply interwoven within the culture and the land, forever the source of identity, mana – and memory” for Māori (Keenan 2022). The redevelopment, therefore, faces the two challenges of decolonization and indigenization: the creation of narratives for non-Māori visitors with little knowledge of the wars or broader imperial contexts and legacies; and a Māori-centered history in which Māori collective memory – language, cosmology, and knowledge – shape the exhibition’s narrative design. The war memorial museum finds itself between these two challenges in a space that may bring these contested discourses of the New Zealand past into a shared arrangement. This chapter outlines the multifaceted narrative strategies being pursued by the curatorial team as part of this fraught undertaking. No major museum has yet presented the stories of the New Zealand Wars in a way that grapples with the implications of remembering colonial violence as an Aotearoa New Zealand public while aspiring to center the worlds of hapū and iwi in telling these stories. Because New Zealanders have only recently begun to create public liturgies, practices, and habits of commemoration around the New Zealand Wars, since the establishment of Rā Maumahara, this work of public remembrance is very much nascent. The chapter, first, scopes out the project’s horizons of possibility, framed by decolonization and indigenization in the museum context. The chapter then explores the role of historical remembrance in shaping the museum’s research practices, and the new ways in which curators are approaching issues of narrative in relation to communities of memory. At the forefront of the New Zealand Wars gallery renewal is an access project that, centered on communities, enriches both the museum’s knowledge and communities’ knowledge of the collection. The exploration of diverse ways of relating to the past, both Māori and non-Māori, demand the war memorial museum to “bare our teeth”: to lay bare experiences of violence in a way that admits traumatic experiences without recourse to swift reconciliation. This language of an active and critical remembrance, as suggested by Maihi’s work, conveys the sense that this process, even if transparent, is an uncertain one: the renewal project needs to recognize communities’ voices, grounded in entangled memories, while eschewing definitive accounts of the past.

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He korahi: Decolonization and Indigenization at the Auckland War Memorial Museum The Auckland War Memorial Museum’s indigenous framework He Korahi Māori lays out the broader context of decolonization at the museum and provides a starting point for the New Zealand Wars renewal project (He Korahi Māori 2016). This “strategic pathway” reflects the institution’s own journey to embed a spirit of partnership between Māori communities and public institutions. The Auckland War Memorial Museum Act 1996 established the Taumata-ā-iwi within the museum’s governance structure – not attached as a “‘Māori bit’ but as the central element in ‘everything we do and in what visitors see, feel, and experience” – hence, “he korahi,” across the scope of museum practice (3). Part of this involves envisioning the museum as a leader in public debates around colonization and its legacies. Crucially, the recognition of mana whenua – spiritual and territorial claims that are the foundation of tribal belonging – shapes a “commitment to address historical grievances and past injustices” (5), expressed, for example, in the Ancestral Human Remains Repatriation program and the return of the Maungapōhatu flag to Ngāi Tuhoe in 2014 (Shanks 2016). These initiatives point to deeper structural shifts: hapū and iwi (tribal descent groups) maintain relationships with collections so that collections are not “owned” by the museum but, more accurately, cared for with permission from hapū and iwi groups; crucially, this allows for distinct relationships, across local and national identities: Māori/hapū/iwi, New Zealander/Aucklander (He Korahi Māori, 8–9). This emphasizes an intention to co-develop future pathways within the context of communities; developing a research and design program that is directly informed by the needs and input of stakeholders. A key aspect of visitor experience, under this framework, is the importance of placing colonization in a global frame. The extent to which “indigenization” is an implicit term of reference in the museum’s He Korahi Māori, intended to enhance decolonial practice, has been debated within and without the museum (Ngā Kākano 2022). In the New Zealand museum context, indigenization has been understood to mean recognizing Māori narratives as living oral tradition and a particular materialization of objects as taonga tūpuna (ancestral treasures). Māori theorist Linda Tuhiwai Smith observes that “intrinsic in [this form of] story telling is a focus on dialogue and conversations amongst ourselves as indigenous peoples, to ourselves, and for our ourselves” (Tuhiwai Smith 1999, 245). Familiar characters can be “invested with the qualities of an individual or can be used to invoke a set of shared understandings and histories” (145). Fundamentally, this means grounding museum practice in te tino rangatiratanga (Māori sovereignty) as anchored by whakapapa in ancient

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landscapes “posited as living beings, enhanced by founding tūpuna, enshrining ongoing cultural expressions of mana” (Keenan 2019).6 Crucial to Māori materializations of collective memory are taonga as “vital threads from the past, acting as here (guides) to interpreting the past” that “assist descendants to understand the often complex whakapapa (genealogical relationships) that remain patterned across whenua (ancestral lands) of modern tribal New Zealand” (Tapsell 2006, 17–19). Taonga are “more than items once used by ancestors – they are ancestors” (19), with their own subjectivity textured by traumatic survival and filtered by collective memory. Taonga make explicit the link between colonial conflict and the loss of land, language, and cultural property. The 2005 iwiled Ko Tawa: Taonga From Our Ancestral Landscapes, Collection of Captain Gilbert Mair exhibitions provide an important precedent for translating this form of indigenous knowledge into “an exhibitionary context” (Tapsell 2015). Crucially, as one of the exhibition’s Māori curators, Jade Tangiahua Baker, suggests “when relational knowledge of an object’s discourse returns ‘home’, it both transforms our knowing of the temporal displacement and causes shifts in our community perspective” (2009, 124). The iwi-led project initiated “different commitments to object-social relations, materializing a process in which objects are not only acted upon but are significant actors in this exchange” (113). “Material things do matter,” Tangiahua Baker concludes, “when they transform and reawaken hapū and iwi dynamics” (125). They also make museums matter – not as hoarders of material culture but as sites enlivening processes of memory and history. This connection between language, knowledge, taonga, and stories offers a matrix of collective memories, a symbolic-linguistic mosaic of cultural, psychological, and cognitive forces which shape personal and social responses. David Herman describes “the project of integrating narrative theory and cognitive sciences [. . .] as an effort to understand how people weave tapestries of story by relying on abilities they possess as simultaneously language-using, thinking, and social beings”; these living patterns “reveal the extent to which intelligence itself is rooted in narrative ways of knowing and interacting, and communicating” (Herman 2008, 329). These narrative patterns raise important questions of representation and interpretation – like whose stories do these belong to and who is telling them – and come to the fore when they are incorporated into more complex polyphonic structures. Crucially, this also means the possibility of an open-ended narrative, rather than one that offers a definitive answer.

 Justice Eddie Durie, as quoted in Danny Kennan, “The problems that remain with our telling of the New Zealand Wars”, July 4, 2019, Stuff: https://www.stuff.co.nz/national/education/113955468/ the-problems-that-remain-with-our-telling-of-the-new-zealand-wars (May 1, 2023).

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Foregrounding Māori memory-cultures in exhibition narratives, centered on relationships of taonga, is a fraught business in a war memorial museum. One of the signal changes in the historiography of the wars between Māori and Pākehā, for example, has been the name attached to these conflicts. Referring to the “New Zealand Wars” says something about the causes of colonial conflict – sovereignty – but it also attaches to them an internal significance: if we are New Zealanders, then these are our wars. It also points to these nineteenth-century conflicts as a central focus of our histories – they are not just some wars, but the wars. If New Zealand is to retain significance as a political community, it also attaches significance in the other direction: in remembering the New Zealand Wars, we assert the ongoing relevance and existence of “New Zealand.” This is the ahistorical inscription of myth and underlines what Jenny Edkins theorizes as the connection between traumatic histories, memory, and “the political” (Edkins 2003). The modern New Zealand state – rooted in colonial violence – benefits from the constructions of colonial conflict as catastrophic, precisely because it makes natural the pretense that only the state can adequately recognize, apologize, and rectify colonial violence; it survives in scripting these events as emergencies and crises – its own political narrative giving order, sequence, and meaning (Edkins 2003, 5). Such concerns are especially pertinent to the indigenization of New Zealand War narratives at an Auckland museum. The history of the New Zealand Wars is tied intimately to the formation of Auckland settlement; as both a cause of the outbreak of conflict, and as a site indelibly shaped by the consequences and commemoration of the wars, due to proximity to key military infrastructure such as the Albert Barracks and Great South Road (sites reflected in the sizeable archaeological collections held in the museum). The museum’s collection is the largest relating to the wars precisely because of the extent of the historic Auckland Province which encompassed the majority of conflict zones from 1845 to 1872. Furthermore, as New Zealand’s largest and most diverse city, Auckland is the most significant audience for any commemorative project. Broader frameworks are needed to critically evaluate these histories and advance indigenization, rather than reinscribing colonial narratives of settlement. Museum researchers and staff engaged in creating new narratives of colonial conflict need to provide opportunities to facilitate audiences’ remembering, rather than focusing narrowly on an assemblage of storylines, messages, and learning objects that typically define the workflow of an exhibition project. Schorch, McCarthy, and Dürr ask “how can indigenous histories, theories, and practices drive their own visual language, representational mode, and thematic and spatial enactment through curatorial interventions in museum collections and exhibitions?” (2019, 3). In response, this memory-centered approach opens up the possibility of different languages of storytelling: written/textual, visual (film, photography), spatial (exhibi-

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tion arrangements and demarcations; architectures), embodied (ritual, performance), and sensory (music). Using local frameworks, historians and curators in museum contexts become co-producers of meaning, through the historians’ perspective on narrative, and audiences as to the meaning of the past.

Pou Maumahara: Remembered History and Spaces of Memory There are clearly enormous complexities here in conceptualizing narratives of colonization and its violence since the nineteenth century. The New Zealand Wars’ representation requires forms of broader narratives grounded in historical research to ensure truthful remembrance and to integrate local and global contexts of these communities’ experiences. There is a persistent danger that narratives of trauma disempower Māori by framing communities in “deficit” language, while, alternatively, offering therapies for white backlash (O’Malley & Kidman 2018). It risks what Nepia Mahuika refers to as a twenty-first century “white man’s burden” that perpetuates Māori as marginalized victims and a “hidden perspective” needing to be brought into equal view (Mahuika 2011, 16) – rather than a structural difference in which Māori history is foundational and centered on local worlds of hapū and iwi and, crucially, mātauranga. Contextualizing different and contested knowledge of New Zealand’s colonial conflicts as remembered history is useful here. “Remembered history,” or historical remembrance, expresses the relationship between differing narratives of the past that create meaning (Winter 2006, 3–13). As Jay Winter observes, “where there is no meaning, there is no commemoration. [. . .] There is also no history. Here is one of the key reasons for the renegotiation of the space occupied by history and memory over the past sixty years: both the producing of history and the act of remembrance are gestures toward finding meaning in the past” (7). Remembered history describes distinct approaches to narrative. It is historical because it reflects the demand and possibility that narratives of the past can function as a “vehicle of reality” which can contest or support remembrance practices (Herman 2008, 3). It is also remembrance: an activity performed, enacted, and experienced not just from the perspective of the narrator (historians and curators) but by the audience itself. Memory lays bare the representational pretensions of history, as the historical narrator is implicated. Instead, “in a complex interplay between the experience that makes for the personal story and the personal story that structures the experience, the narrator discovers the meaning and significance of the experience,” Jerome Bruner writes: “it is through narrative that we learn about ourselves, our commu-

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nity and the social world” (quoted in Lambert 2009, 25). This allows for “non-linear, almost living storytelling that is fragmented, polyphonic, and collectively produced” (Boje 2001, 1). Remembered history, as a space of interaction, forces the visitor to accommodate or choose between multiple viewpoints. In the shadow of the memory boom, only memory gives value to the interpretive structure of a given story; on the other hand, history continues to provide provisional contextual narratives of the past which can structure public knowledge. These myriad issues reflect how the act of commemoration is a communicative and moral one. What we affirm as a public announces what we care about. This internal-external relationship – between commemoration and caring – is suggested by Avishai Margalit who, in his seminal work The Ethics of Memory, observes that “the idea that truth by itself will bring about reconciliation is a doubtful empirical assumption” (2004, 6). Rather, if the goal here is to contribute to the re-establishing of Aotearoa New Zealand as an ethical polity, “the most promising projects of shared memory,” as Margalit writes, “are those that go through natural communities of memory” (2004, 82). The New Zealand Wars gallery renewal project is an opportunity to see how this works in museum narrative spaces. Communities of memory, for our purposes, are those groups, institutions, and networks which reflect the memory – the strategies of meaning-making – generated by the New Zealand Wars. This means particular emphasis on hapū and iwi, as represented in the community trusts connected with sites of conflict. These communities are enmeshed with the knowledge, stories, and patterns of remembrance. Community trusts are already active in New Zealand’s remembrance landscape, pursuing their own growth and development outside of the cultural sector.7 The aspirations of these communities trusts frame their commemorations: “kawea a pūriri mai,” alluding to the carrying of Pūriri tree leaves as part of the practice of tangihanga (funeral rites); “te kīwai o te kete,” “the carrying of the basket” (a poetic also used in Maihi’s raranga); “kia whakatōmuri te haeare whakamua,” “look backwards to head into the future.” These examples evoke the relationality of memory. Historical memory-communities, like regiments, churches, masonic lodges, and other forms of settler association are also important, not least because it is the dialogue between communities which contributes to public commemoration. Telling the stories of the New Zealand Wars in new ways should create reciprocal relationships that reflect the aspirations of these commu-

 The establishment of He Rā Maumahara reflected community efforts to commemorate the wars. October 28 was designated the official commemoration date, to coincide with the anniversary of He Whakaputanga or the Declaration of Independence by Northern Māori leaders in 1835. Rather than being commemorated in a specific place each year, the commemoration tours on a regional basis.

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nities. This means putting the strategies of survival, as well as the “end” of the wars (impact, legacy, commemoration), that normalize Māori stories of the New Zealand Wars front and center for public audiences. Foregrounding communities of memory means centering these groups, listening and understanding their needs, reflecting on their languages of memory, and allowing any gallery development to be shaped by these patterns. The new compulsory Aotearoa New Zealand Histories Curriculum provides a useful example of this approach. In September 2019, the Ardern Labour Government announced its intentions to make New Zealand history compulsory in schools by 2022 and proposed the introduction of history topics, across all schools and kura, that would include the New Zealand Wars. The final curriculum, following a period of public consultation, was released in late 2021. Joanna Kidman argues that “iwi stories [need to] be central to this new drive to remember and to tell the stories of the past,” as vital sources of knowledge (Kidman 2021). The curriculum framework emphasizes the importance of shared collective narrative structures, as a matter of equity, but which empowers local communities to engage with the particularities of people and place (O’Dwyer 2021). Tony Ballantyne describes this paradox of sharedness and particularity as New Zealand history’s “desperate need” “to juxtapose narratives of the nation with histories that are framed around different spatial units (such as local communities or transnational movements of people, commodities, and ideas) and communities (the suburb or the city, the church or club, social circles, etc.)” (Ballantyne 2014, 65). Ballantyne’s insight points to a second important thread: how spatial language frames memory and how object-based storytelling can be presented in a way that is indicative of remembrance. This requires a “geometry of memory” – distinct languages of trauma mediated through texts of sculpture, painting, photography, and film, but also the museum space itself (Winter 2017, 158). Such a visual strategy of remembrance allows for the possibility of an interrogative commemoration: preserving uncertainty, openness, incompleteness, and eschewing a definitive answer Through this dialogue, the curators and researchers were able to configure objects, practices, and exhibitions in a way that supported communities of memory. Importantly, the galleries offer spatial interpretations of war, not just representations. A remembered history, spatialized in the museum, insists upon making commemoration the posing of a question – how is it possible to represent violence – rather than providing an answer. The naming, mapping, and visualizing of the New Zealand Wars similarly embeds spatial languages. The transformation and dislocation of space – landscapes, environment, and social-cultural infrastructures of Māori society – was part and parcel of the experience of colonization, not least the disruption of knowledge systems and the implementation of new ones as part of the legacy of the wars.

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The use of space itself as memory provides the transition between “borders of interpretive significance” (Lambert 2009, 27). If “curation needs to develop its own theories and methods in a range of disciplinary settings and kinds of museum” (Schorch et al. 2018, 10), then the local conditions of the Auckland Museum as an ethnographic and war memorial provide a distinct case study for international discussions around narrating histories of colonial conflict. There are some precedents for bringing together communities and museum into spaces of critical remembrance. In the lead up to the centenary of the First World War, the museum developed a new discovery center, funded by government grant, to encourage families and communities to use the museum as a hub of research on their personal and local war stories. This was part of an international trend of developing spaces that allow for discovery, inquiry, and interrogation of war experiences. The resulting Pou Maumahara Discovery Centre was intended as an indigenous bridge-head into the established layers of remembrance offered through the museum’s halls of memories and paired with Pou Kanohi, New Zealanders at War (‘the face of war’, or its experience in the 1914–1918 period). “Maumahara,” therefore, suggests the memory of the war; “mau,” to put on, enact, activate; “mahara” to bring to mind, recollect, narrate, filter. It denotes a mental state, attitude, perception, and experience. “Pou” is a pillar or post, such as those typically carved with ancestral figures to demarcate whakapapa (lineage) and mana whenua in a wharenui. A pou is also a support, a fixed point, around which change and movement can occur. In this understanding, Pou Maumahara expresses the “contact zone” between activities of remembrance and a historical contribution, through a historian-narrator, which gives appropriate support and direction. Pākehā historians have yet to ground issues of sovereignty in New Zealand’s historical, literal, or figurative organic landscape (Keenan 2019). There is a need to embed this renewal project in the languages of communities of memory, and particularly the content and structure of Māori war memory. Part of this entails recognizing spatial patterns of memory work which are performed or enacted, such as haerenga and hīkoi among Māori communities. Whereas in the past, the museum has focused on the collection and presentation of authoritative accounts of the past, the renewal project develops methods for these stories to be told by communities, enabled through spaces, with guides, appropriate postures, frames of reference, and tools to traverse complex stories, through access to objects. Both the foregrounding of communities and attending to the spatial languages of remembrance reiterate the importance of historical remembrance. Sir Tipene O’Regan (2014) famously reflected on the fraught march of rangatiratanga, and the dangers of sentimentalism and triviality that come with public uses of memory. When policy and history intersect, “we might begin to devalue our past,” O’Regan argues,

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“blown by political winds and fanned by incessant gusts of media opportunism” (27). The only protection is “a rigorous and culturally inclusive scholarship” (27). An analysis of the current New Zealand Wars exhibition helps to develop our conceptual thinking here. The development of the exhibition took place over 1995 as part of a wider program of refurbishments from 1995 to 1999 around New Zealand’s involvement in global conflict – as indicated in the final second-floor gallery plan (see Figure 2). The project team included curator Rose Young and Buddy Mikaere as Māori consultant, supported by Director Rodney Wilson and a group of historians who provided expertise on the thematic structure of the gallery in the early planning stages. The broad contours of the project reflect the immediate curatorial context of the 1980s and early 1990s: 1995 marked the 50th anniversary of the end of the Second World War, at which time the government made available funding for commemorative projects. A decade earlier, over the 1980s, military historians, museum curators, and creative producers engaged in a nationalist project promoting “the New Zealand story” of the First World War, centered on a series of books, exhibitions, and a documentary all under that same title (Light 2020). In a crowded commemorative field, 1990 marked the contested sesquicentennial anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Waitangi. In this way, the placing of the New Zealand Wars gallery in this broader project of twentieth-century military history indelibly shaped its historiographical emphasis: a specifically national lens, with an emphasis on military experiences and technology, toward the formation of a distinct unified national identity at the end of the century. The current New Zealand Wars exhibition, in part, fails because it does not foreground the languages of memory drawn from the communities themselves. The project simply omitted communities of memory. The object-based history did not enable the different spatial languages required in a broader work of remembrance or, at least, not in the way the exhibition was executed. Above all, it is the desire to present, rather than interpret, to answer, rather than question, that underlies the problems of the current gallery. This is an important dimension to what Pākehā historians call the historical amnesia around the New Zealand Wars. Vincent O’Malley, for example, claims that, fundamentally, Pākehā are reluctant to acknowledge the wars because of the discomfort caused by these histories. Like a bad dream, Pākehā would rather forget (Mulholland 2018). Yet, this forgetting flies in the face of sustained historical-critical and even popular engagement with the wars since the 1970s. Artists such as Michael Shepherd, Shane Cotton, Paratene Matchitt, Greg Semu, Laurence Aberhart, and Toi Maihi all have works dealing with themes and consequences of the wars. Neither is the idea that the wars have been forgotten an innovative one: James Cowan complained in 1923 that “in testing the historical knowledge of the average New Zealander the fact is too apparent that the young generation would be the better for a more sys-

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Figure 2: The north-facing layout of the Auckland War Memorial Museum’s second-floor war galleries. The “New Zealand Wars” gallery is located on the east side, chronologically preceding the Boer War and World War I galleries. AWMM.

tematic schooling in the facts of national pioneer life and achievements which are a necessary foundation for the larger patriotism” (Cowan 1923). The potent desire to make of the New Zealand Wars a story of nation-building is not new. Where O’Malley is on surer footing is when he suggests we have not found adequate public narratives that acknowledge the mamae (hurt) of the wars. These narrations are spatial as well as textual. This demands a number of things from researchers developing public narratives of colonial conflict. In contrast to scripts of the Great War of silence and contemplation, few artistic and architectural representations of the New Zealand Wars inform public spatial frameworks of memory. A century after the establishment of Auckland’s war memorial museum, the tensions between these dual roles of memorial and museum remain.

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Baring our Teeth: Communities of Memory and the New Zealand Wars Renewal Project In thinking about remembered history in a decolonial and indigenized museum context, the renewal of the New Zealand Wars gallery begins to receive its “shape” in key ways. First, curators need to interpolate spatial languages as part of community access projects. As a research process, this entails connecting objects, stories, and communities; understanding the language patterns used in these community contexts; and then conceptualizing how these patterns might be indicated in the space of the museum. These conversations would then inform the development of a wider set of conceptual frameworks that allow for a diversity of experience and locality. Rather than finding resolution of key issues, visitors return home with a sense of beginning: “How does this knowledge equip me to explore local stories?”; “What does it mean to begin to remember these wars?” Like any language learning, this work entails translating, articulating, and making speakable that which is unspoken. Framing devices and metaphors for these audiences invite people to “bare their teeth” – to sit in the gaps, tensions, and discomforts of contested memories. As Hanahiva Rose writes of Brett Graham’s recent New Zealand Wars exhibition Tai Moana Tai Tangata, “giving history a physical form is not the same as remembering”; rather, “memory comes, instead, from what that form may do to the gaps in and around it’ – memory is the fissure “between what we know and what the land holds to be true” (Rose 2020). A tentative co-design also requires conceptualizing the space of the gallery early on in dialogue with the current museum space. One approach could be to expand the current exhibition space to encompass what is now the Pou Maumahara space (see Figure 3). Precisely because it was designed with twentieth-century conflict in mind, Pou Maumahara is a space appropriate to re-framing New Zealand Wars history and memory as a critical dialogue – based on rigorous historical and cultural research. This would allow the development of a more chronological narrative of the wars and maintain the coherence of the conflicts theme of the second floor. This scheme develops the gallery in new ways but also maintains coherency across war histories of the museum; by expanding the gallery to encompass multiple spaces, we will indicate to the New Zealand public that the stories of colonization have greater emphasis or “footprint” in the museum. By keeping these in relation to the wider gallery, we allow visitors to see connections between nineteenth and twentiethcentury conflicts as well as a chronological integrity that will build public knowledge. This first stage of the project is centered on community access – having communities talk, learn, and share about relevant collections. An access project might be framed by these questions: What are your aspirations as communities of mem-

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Figure 3: A possible expansion of the current gallery space, discussed as part of the Human History workshop on the New Zealand wars gallery renewal project in 2021. Photo by Rowan Light.

ory? How can we support your work? How can we equip visitors travelling to your community sites? How do you want us to support the telling of this battle/ conflict/atrocity? How can this be enabled spatially in a museum context? How can the museum support the loan or return of objects to these communities? How can we develop the necessary expertise and knowledge in the communities for this to be done? This research entails building relationships with communities, organizing access project visits, enriching our stories and knowledge of objects in the collection, and creating dialogue for community aspirations into the future. In August 2021, the Human History team piloted a community access project with Kawiti Marae, with staff travelling to Kawiti Marae in Te Tai Tokerau (Northland) to participate in kōrero (discussion) about taonga relating to Kawiti, a leading rangatira in the Northern War and the architect of Ruapekapeka pā. Evelyn Kawiti, a museum visitor host and a descendant of Kawiti himself, facilitated the Kawiti access project. Researchers additionally conducted an oral history interview with Kene Te Uira Martin, the Kawiti whānau historian, on different objects and taonga held at the Auckland War Memorial Museum. The Kawiti Marae visit was an opportunity to explore approaches to gallery renewal by going to the communities shaped by the wars, and reconnecting taonga, stories, and people. The hope is that, by exploring these stories together, curators can understand the languages (the

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symbols, words, narratives, and meanings) used by these communities to make sense of the wars and conflicts, and then use these as the basis for designing the new exhibition space. In this way, the new exhibition might “speak” with the languages and voices of communities. “Languages” include the korero of experts like Whaea Kene, as well as the visual and material records found in communities, such as the arrangement of photographs and raranga on marae. The next stage of the Kawiti project was the transcription of the interviews, sent to Whaea Kene for comment and feedback. As part of this collaboration, the Kawiti whānau expressed interest in having museum conservators visit to look at borer damage to a pare (carved door lintel) associated with Kawiti. This collaboration – learning about and protecting taonga – is an example of how access projects can enrich both marae and museum and also meet the aspirations of communities. The museum could similarly pursue discrete community access projects relating to non-Māori communities. For example, objects relating to regimental soldiers and their families who served in Northern War battles against Kawiti and Ngāti Hine, and the communities they established across churches and other associative networks. This is an important story because not only does it point to how regiments and their families (through social networks) remembered the wars but also how these patterns might inform reconciliation heading into the future – the roots of associative ways of life need to be publicly recognized as part of the legacy of the wars. Opening relations with the community and talking through object histories, in a structured conversation informed by collections research, is the first stage of consultation; its key outcomes are oral history interviews which can provide the basis for textured language analyses of community remembrance. The design stage would entail a second round of oral history interviews with expert knowledge-holders in communities, alongside discussion of design elements based on early language analysis – “translating” from the patterns learnt with the communities, through the transcription of the interviews, and identifying the gaps in our conversation and knowledge and identifying possible gallery design elements. A second visit to the community (such as Kawiti marae) would be based on the community needs identified in Stage 1 and a similarly structured conversation focused on particular topics. Curators and community members would then develop an extended plan for presenting particular taonga biographies of the community in the gallery. An extended plan for presenting particular taonga biographies of the community in the gallery would then be developed. In this way, the knowledge of the community access project is collected, interpreted, and then translated (as narrative patterns, stories, and biographies of taonga) into a design plan. The culmination of the community engagement would be a visit to the Auckland Museum to engage directly with the taonga and objects. This third stage of the research program entails an access visit by community stakeholders and ex-

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pert knowledge-holders to the museum collections. Here, communities would engage directly with their taonga and other objects relating to their tupuna and experiences in the museum space. This would be an opportunity to affirm the textual, spatial, and material languages of the gallery through a third set of interviews, emphasizing the stories and knowledge which comes out of these meetings between communities and taonga. This community-centered, remembered history provides a narrative model that does not resolve these contested perspectives but allows them to co-exist through the work of the war memorial museum. The value of the renewal project is the presentation of rich conceptual frameworks of memory which recognize the different uses of the past to make sense of traumatic violence. The role of the historian and curator is supporting these memory patterns, in a way that is truthful and critical. It is by critically working from the patterns of memory embedded in communities that museums will build coherency with public commemoration. Being explicit about this process is also part of our expression of cultural leadership; being open and transparent about the fraught and uncertain process of gallery renewal remains an ongoing task. A framework of remembered history focuses on spatial languages of memory interpreted through communities of memory.

Experiments in Memory – Conclusions The Auckland War Memorial Museum faces a double challenge of decolonizing and indigenizing narratives of colonial conflict in Aotearoa New Zealand: the need to both provide broad frameworks of historical knowledge for the New Zealand public and speak with the distinct voices of Māori communities who have survived colonial violence. The New Zealand Wars renewal project, in turn, is shaped by essential questions: How should museums present historical narratives without an assumption of resolving these histories? How do curators retain coherence across diverse and pluralist and sometimes opposing narratives, at the same time as equipping visitors and communities to engage in their own discussions? Such questions invite myriad issues around subject and object, narrative and audience. Does the museum have a right to pose this question or perspective as an institution implicated in this public forgetting of colonial violence? How can a “national” museum, ethically, foreground local community memories? Chris Healy and Andrea Witcomb define museums as “experiments in culture” (2006, 1), as places in which different and sometimes conflicting views of the world are brought into the same space and held in tension, generating new connections and webs of meaning. The renewal of the New Zealand Wars gallery can be similarly conceived of as an experiment in memory.

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The what of the exhibition, while complex, is perhaps the most straightforward consideration: the presentation of the New Zealand Wars as part of Aotearoa New Zealand histories. The difficulties relate to the how and why of this renewal, as patterns of the past shaped by powerful political and cultural imperatives. Presenting and interpreting these histories at the Auckland War Memorial Museum will generate considerable scrutiny; yet its contribution could be to develop public languages of the New Zealand Wars, to care for taonga on behalf of communities, and provide spaces for considered discussion. Activating both history and memory is part of a critical interrogation of these stories. The work of pou maumahara is not taking remembrance at face value but placing a collective’s use of the past in context and alongside different, even competing memories, while showing the circumstances that shape memory. The community access projects provide the research basis for the gallery renewal while creating dialogue across communities and the museum’s own spaces and collections. The opportunity here is to consolidate the Auckland War Memorial Museum as a hub of interaction across communities and demonstrate to stakeholders and visitors the importance of a “war memorial museum” which provides a public space for contested representations of the past. This requires an ambitious vision that brings many different groups into conversation, necessary to do the renewal well and provide the needed vocabulary, concepts, and frameworks for public engagement with these changes and challenges within our histories. To this end, museum researchers need to be open about embarking on such a journey without the certainty of knowing where they will end up, modelling an approach of ethical citizenship in which historians and curators sit in the difficult gaps between history and memory, rejecting the desire for easy resolution.

Glossary of Māori Terms Aotearoa Māori name for New Zealand, the North Island hapū/iwi extended kinship groups kōrero verbal discussion Mana personal status mana whenua authority of land Maumahara remembrance Pākehā non-Māori, descendants of European settlers Pou territorial marker Rangatiratanga sovereignty Taonga ancestral treasure Whaea older woman

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Bibliography Auckland War Memorial Museum. 2016. He Korahi Māori. https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/yourmuseum/about/he-korahi-maori-a-maori-dimension-auckland-museum (July 29, 2022). Auckland War Memorial Museum. 2020. Ngā Kākano: Decolonising and Indigenising Museums. https://www.aucklandmuseum.com/visit/whats-on/nga-kakano (July 29, 2022). Baker, Jade Tangiāhua. “Te Kupenga: Re-casting Entangled Networks.” The Australian Journal of Anthropology 20.1 (2009): 112–130. Ballantyne, Tony. Webs of Empire: Locating New Zealand’s Colonial Past. Vancouver, BC: University of British Columbia Press, 2014. Boje, David. Narrative Methods for Organizational and Communication Research. London: Sage, 2001. Cowan, James. The New Zealand Wars: A History of the Maori Campaigns and the Pioneering Period – Vol. II. Wellington: R.E. Owen, government printer, 1923. Edkins, Jenny. Trauma and the Memory of Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Healy, Chris, and Andrea Witcomb. South Pacific Museums: Experiments in Culture. Melbourne: Monash University Press, 2006. Herman, David. “Regrounding Narratology: The Study of Narratively Organized Systems for Thinking.” What Is Narratology? Questions and Answers Regarding the Status of a Theory. Ed. Tom Kindt and Hans-Harald Müller. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2008. 303–332. Kāretu, Timoti. “Te Kete Tuawhā, Te Kete Aroiti – The Fourth Basket.” Te Kaharoa 1 (2008): 87–99. Keenan, Danny. 2022. It’s a Surprisingly Persistent View, but Māori Have Not Forgotten the Land Wars. https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/127624884/its-a-surprisingly-persistent-view-but-mori-havenot-forgotten-the-land-wars (July 29, 2022). Keenan, Danny. 2019. The Problems that Remain with Our Telling of the New Zealand Wars. https://www. stuff.co.nz/national/education/113955468/the-problems-that-remain-with-our-telling-of-thenew-zealand-wars (July 29, 2022) Kidman, Joanna. 2021. I Follow the Trail of Blood. https://e-tangata.co.nz/reflections/i-follow-the-trailof-blood/ (July 29, 2022). Lambert, Stephanie, and Jane McKinnon. “Engaging Practices: Re-thinking Narrative Exhibition Development in Light of Narrative Scholarship.” M.A. thesis Museum Studies, Massey University, 2009. Lidchi, Henrietta. “Material Reckonings with Military Histories.” Dividing the Spoils: Perspectives on Military Collections and the British Empire. Ed. Henrietta Lidchi and Stuart Allan. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. Light, Rowan. “‘Fields of our Blood’: The Development of the New Zealand Wars Exhibition at Auckland War Memorial Museum, 1994–1996.” New Zealand Journal of History 56.2 (2022): 47–68. Light, Rowan. “‘Our War’: National Memory, New Zealand, and Te Papa’s Gallipoli.” Reflections on the Commemoration of the First World War. Ed. David Monger and Sarah Murray. London: Routledge, 2020. Mahuika, Nepia. “‘Closing the gaps’: From Postcolonialism to Kaupapa Māori and Beyond.” New Zealand Journal of History 45.1 (2011): 15–32. Margalit, Avishai. The Ethics of Memory. Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 2004. Massie, Alastair. “Community Consultation and the Shaping of the National Army Museum’s Insight Gallery.” Dividing the Spoils: Perspectives on Military Collections and the British Empire. Ed. Henrietta Lidchi and Stuart Allan. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020. 229–245.

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McCarthy, Conal. Museums and Māori: Heritage Professionals, Indigenous Collections, Current Practice. Wellington: Te Papa Press, 2011. Mulholland, Malcolm. Te pūtake o te riri: Wars and Conflicts in New Zealand. Palmerston North: Te Whare Wānanga o Awanuiārangi Press, 2018. O’Dwyer, Ellen. 2021. The New Zealand Wars Affect Everyone’: Speakers at Hamilton High School Stress Importance of Learning History. https://www.stuff.co.nz/pou-tiaki/124709414/the-new-zealandwars-affect-everyone-speakers-at-hamilton-high-school-stress-importance-of-learninghistory?fbclid=IwAR0Z3mhDJI0rReqXtKCrLFI-ZritCrITSDa3G7bjFsq_Yvc7c6xshBGjRLE (July 29, 2022). O’Malley, Vincent. Ngā Pakanga o Aotearoa / The New Zealand Wars. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2021. O’Malley, Vincent, and Joanna Kidman. “Settler Colonial History, Commemoration and White Backlash: Remembering the New Zealand Wars.” Settler Colonial Studies 8.3 (2018): 298–313. O’Regan, Tipene. New Myths and Old Politics: The Waitangi Tribunal and the Challenge of Tradition. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books, 2014. Phillips, Ruth B. Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s Press, 2011. Rose, Hanahiva. 2020. Memories Carved in Relief. https://govettbrewster.com/news/2020/3/ memories-carved-in-relief (July 29, 2022). Schorch, Philipp, Conal McCarthy, and Eveline Dürr. “Introduction: Conceptualizing Curatopia.” Curatopia: Museums and the Future of Curatorship. Ed. Philipp Schorch and Conal McCarthy. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2018. 1–16. Shanks, Katee. 2016. Treasures Returned to Tuhoe in Settlement Ceremony. https://www.nzherald.co.nz/ rotorua-daily-post/news/treasures-returned-to-tuhoe-in-settlement-ceremony/2G3RRK7YEYGG KHU3GIDFEUPWHM/ (July 29, 2022). Tapsell, Paul, Krzysztof Pfeiffer, and R. D Crosby. Ko Tawa: Māori Treasures of New Zealand. David Bateman in association with Auckland War Memorial Museum Tamaki Paenga Hira, 2006. Tapsell, Paul. “Ko tawa: Where are the Glass Cabinets?” Museums as Process: Translating Local and Global Knowledge. Ed. Raymond Silverman. London: Routledge, 2015. 262–278. Te Puni Kōkiri. 2018. Rā Maumahara – the Journey to a National Commemoration. https://www.tpk.govt. nz/en/whakamahia/te-putake-o-te-riri-wars-and-conflicts-in-new-zeal/ra-maumahara-thejourney-to-a-national-commemorati (July 29, 2022). Tuhiwai Smith, Linda. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. New York: Zed Books; Dunedin: University of Otago Press, 1999. Winter, Jay. Remembering War: The Great War between Memory and History in the Twentieth Century. London: Yale University Press, 2006. Winter, Jay. War Beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.

Anne Schäfer

The Art of Decolonizing the Museum: Implementing Sámi Ontology and Storytelling at the Sámi Museum in Karasjok through Sámi Artwork Introduction In recent years, the discourse on cultural rights has evolved immensely, especially in regard to Indigenous cultural heritage and cultural self-determination.1 This also applies to the Sámi, the only recognized Indigenous group within the European Union. Their homeland, called Sápmi, stretches from the Northern parts of Norway, Finland, and Sweden all the way to the Kola peninsula in Russia. Even though the Sámi identify as one ethnic community, there are significant cultural, linguistic, and historical differences between individual groups. The local variations of traditional clothing and livelihoods are very distinct and different Sámi languages are not always mutually intelligible. Other than most Indigenous peoples, the Sámi have a centuries-long, often peaceful, and at times mutually beneficial history of contact with non-Indigenous societies – especially prior to the ever-increasing taxation of and settlement expansions into the Sámi territories during the Middle Ages (Hansen & Olsen 2013; Holberg & Dørum 2021). While they also have experienced various forms of colonization – cultural suppression, land dispossession, forced assimilation policies – there is a strong notion of multiculturalism within the contemporary Sámi community; national and Indigenous cultural identity are often closely intertwined and multicultural encounters are part of everyday life. Similar to Indigenous communities worldwide, much of the material and immaterial Sámi culture has been lost, especially in relation to the emergence of the modern national states. Cultural objects that were not lost or destroyed during extensive assimilation processes often travelled far away from Sápmi and made their way to Western cultural epicenters. Ethnographic and national museums as well as private collectors have been driving forces behind the dispossession and displacement of countless Sámi objects and artifacts. For many years, these objects and, at times, even Sámi people themselves have been exhibited by Western

 For reflections upon indigenous agency and storytelling, see also the chapters by Farai Mudododzi Chabata and Jesmael Mataga, by Rowan Light, by Jimena Perry, and the Introduction by Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger in this volume. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-011

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museums to strengthen their respective national identities by contrasting them with the “primitive” people from the Arctic. In these instances, Western institutions represented Sámi culture as “other” and, more importantly, inferior. In light of ongoing debates on decolonization strategies and the implementation of truth and reconciliation commissions worldwide, new, more inclusive practices within museum exhibitions have emerged. The same is true for Indigenous museums, which provide communities that were predominantly represented by a more powerful majority with the opportunity to reclaim their Indigenous identities, implement Indigenous perspectives, and promote their modes of storytelling. Although they have to work within given, and arguably colonial, institutional structures, they make their own decisions on content and representation.

Institutional Context and History To this day museums are broadly considered institutions of cultural authority and although more critical approaches to museum practices have been on the rise as marginalized groups gain political influence, many visitors still ascribe high levels of authenticity and reliability to their exhibitions. At the same time, museums arguably do not merely reflect discourses on culture but shape them, a stance brought forth prominently by Stuart Hall. According to him, Culture [. . .] is not so much a set of things – novels and paintings or TV programs and comics – as a process, a set of practices. Primarily, culture is concerned with the production and the exchange of meanings – the “giving and taking of meaning” – between the members of a society or group. To say that two people belong to the same culture is to say that they interpret the world in roughly the same ways and can express themselves, their thoughts and feelings about the world, in ways which will be understood by each other. Thus, culture depends on its participants interpreting meaningfully what is happening around them, and “making sense” of the world, in broadly similar ways. (Hall 1997, 2)

As a result, culture is not something fixed or definite, but rather constantly produced, modified, and reproduced. Furthermore, this production and modification of meanings takes place as a dialogue, as an exchange of positions. Comprehending culture as a set of socially constructed practices and conventions goes hand in hand with the realization that culture is not a tangible entity that a museum can collect and display; the objects on display are selective – and selected – fragments of a culture. Displaying these cultural representatives is not to be equated with creating a mere reflection but rather to be seen as engaging in the (re)construction of culture. Hall likens this process to an act of ideological (re)creation that

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serves specific interests, usually of those responsible for the production of the representation (Hall 1997, 5–6). When confronted with a foreign culture, a knowledgeable cultural broker is needed to make up for the lack of cultural codes necessary to decode the situation and enable a meaningful interpretation. In a museum, explanatory texts or labels accompanying the displays often assist the decoding. But there are many more ways to convey messages and tell stories, among them architecture, location and setting, space and layout, design, color, and light as well as subject, message, text, and display.2 Generally speaking, exhibitions consist of several units that create meaning and can be read as language-like. Therefore, the exhibition is a cultural product that is consciously and deliberately positioned and should be treated as such: multimodal discourse analysis allows us to take several modes of meaning making into account and examine their reciprocal effects, for example, how an accompanying display text relates to the artifact at hand and how the background of the display influences the object’s impact. Given their role as vehicle for colonialism, it is essential to look at how museums run by Indigenous peoples represent them(selves) and their cultures. Museums then become an arena where Indigenous people can practice self-determination and present a positive image of themselves. As pointed out above, museums are places of knowledge creation, discussion, and communication: they provide a scene for cultural encounters. It is therefore both crucial and useful to apprehend museums as contact zones, a concept coined by Mary Louise Pratt (1991) and adapted by James Clifford (1997). Clifford applies this term specifically to museums, ascertaining that “their organizing structure as a collection becomes an ongoing historical, political, moral relationship – a power-charged set of exchanges, of push and pull” (Clifford 1997, 192). As a consequence, museums transcend their existence as spaces of conservation and evolve into a space of encounters, exchange, and interactions: they become “sites of identity-making and transculturation” (Clifford 1997, 219). This becomes particularly apparent in situations where a normative point of view is challenged, as is increasingly the case in museums that partake in decolonization processes by putting Indigenous perspectives center stage. By doing so, museums participate in meaning-creating processes that go beyond the reproduction of culturally dominant discourses.3 What is referred to as “contact” actually covers compli-

 For a comprehensive overview see Moser (2010, 24–28).  Robin Boast points out that despite their potential for mutually beneficial collaboration, the contact zones that museums facilitate are also “asymmetric spaces of appropriation” with unbalanced power relations that ultimately reflect and reinforce (neo)colonial dynamics. Ultimately, it is the museum that holds the decision-making power and dictates the terms of the collaboration and reciprocity (Boast 2011, 63). While Boast raises important shortcomings and pitfalls inherent

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cated and continuous processes of self-situating and positioning of others, both on the side of the museum as well as on the side of the visitors. In a museum curated entirely by the Indigenous community themselves, the main challenge lies not in negotiating the terms of collaboration between a relatively powerless minority that is being exhibited and a culturally dominant majority steering the exhibition. Instead, the museum’s Indigenous curators have to navigate the expectations of a diverse set of stakeholders4 while also finding their own way around the Western concept of the museum. In this essay, I analyze two permanent exhibitions at the Sámi Museum in Karasjok, short SVD,5 on the basis of material I collected there in the summer of 2021. SVD is not only the biggest Sámi museum in Norway, it also harbors the most extensive collection of Sámi cultural historical objects in all of Sápmi (Eriksson & Bergflødt 2019, 17). Established in 1972, it is the first self-administered Sámi museum in Norway and was for many years the only one of its kind. As such, it acted as a pathfinder for cultural self-representation within the Sámi community and has brought forward intriguing practices to make the museum a decidedly Sámi space. In order to convey Sámi knowledge production, which is clearly stated as the museum’s mission in its strategy paper (RiddoDuottarMuseat 2017, 4), the museum integrates Sámi ontology and knowledge tradition into the exhibition space itself, most importantly in form of artistic contributions by renowned Sámi artist Iver Jåks and by Sámi artisan Jon Ole Andersen. These contributions form an integral part of the initial conception of the exhibitions in question and include many of the wooden cases used for the individual displays as well as several pieces of art created by Jåks that frame and accompany the entire exhibition; they greatly impact SVD’s positioning with respect to conventional Western museums as they establish an ever present “connection between the Sámi museum and Sámi cosmological worlds” (Lien & Nielssen 2012, 607). Early reviewers of the exhibition have either ignored or dismissed Jåks’s and Andersen’s artistic contributions as romanticizing and eternalizing (Olsen 1970; 1986; Webb 2006). More recently, Sigrid Lien and Hilde Wallem Nielssen have brought forward the stance that these previous readings are somewhat problematic,

in the concept of the contact zone, his criticism only applies partially to the situation at hand: SVD was not only established by the Sámi community, it is also led and curated by members of the Sámi community.  Among those stakeholders are first and foremost the members of the respective Indigenous community, both in the role of visitors as well as in the role of source community. Other stakeholders include the local community, which in turn might be very diverse, as well as national and international visitors.  This is the abbreviation of the North Sámi name of the museum, Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat.

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because “they neglect to discuss the fundamental question of how meanings are produced in the museum space” (2012, 601). They argue that the exhibition must be interpreted as a whole, including its permanent exhibition on contemporary art as well as the interplay between the aesthetics and the politics of the displays. Lien and Nielssen further suggest that Jåks’s art creates a mythological landscape within the museum, thereby implementing a Sámi conception of reality: “As a result, an image of Sáminess emerges as something that transgresses the limits of time and space” (2012, 613). In the following, I discuss to what extent these artworks and the overall aesthetics contribute to a meaningful reading of the exhibitions. I further discuss to whom and how these readings are made available.6

Sámi Ontology in Architecture and Design While it does not necessarily blend with its surroundings, the museum building fits well into the landscape: It is quite low – most of the surrounding trees are considerably taller – and the materials used for its outer walls, weathered concrete and dark painted pine wood, underline its unobtrusive character. The naked concrete bears visible structures of wooden molds, which, in combination with the wood paneling, subtly attunes the building to its surroundings (Haugdal 2013, 40–41). Another architectural choice that creates interfaces between the building and its surrounding landscape, between nature and culture so to speak, is the use of several large window displays that serve to open up the concrete cubes that define the overall shape of the building. These transparent glass interfaces work in two directions: Viewed from the outside they act as showcases for the objects displayed in them. Seen from the inside, they not only let in a lot of daylight, but they also draw in the landscape. In her study on the architecture of several Sámi buildings, Elin Haugdal states with regard to the Sámi Museum: “Glass is presented here as place-anchoring material: the transparent surfaces link outside and inside, architecture and land-

 While including more new technology could prove beneficial to the museum to further disrupt the traditional museum space – and as far as I could gather from the museum’s strategy paper and my conversations with the staff, SVD is not opposed to the idea of modernizing parts of their exhibition – the economic and human resources of SVD are very limited. These structural limitations extent to the building itself, which is in need of major renovations and reparations (RiddoDuottarMuseat 2017, 7). The museum’s precarious situation has been exacerbated by the COVID19 crisis, not least because SVD and the other Sámi museums administered by the Sámi parliament were initially excluded from help packages provided by the Norwegian state (see Ballovara 2020).

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scape”7 (2013, 46). Since the surrounding landscape consists both of forest and building constructions traditionally used by Sámi, these window displays contextualize the exhibited artifacts both geographically and culturally. This is illustrated by a window display housing several traditionally used tools (see Figure 1). The scattered pine trees in the background locate those former everyday tools in a scenery typical for the context they were used in and area they stem from. In addition, the traditional Sámi building, visible just in front of the tree line, links them unequivocally to the culture and the specific place they were used in. While Haugdal points out that the museum’s exterior and the use of materials is more representative of general architectural trends of its time than of Sámi culture per se, even though much of its architectural concept aligns with the Sámi tradition of using available natural resources (2013, 40–41), there are several unambiguous links to Sámi culture and tradition. Before entering the museum building, visitors are greeted by a window display that accommodates a set of wooden sculptures made by Sámi artist Iver Jåks. They portray stylized human figures that appear to be dancing. Jåks also designed the brass door handle of the main entrance, which means that the visitor is literally in contact with contemporary Sámi culture upon entering the museum, whether they are aware of it or not. This door handle is modeled after a shaman symbol that is also depicted on a drum that is central to the Museum’s collection. The symbol represents the sun, the central force in Sámi religion. According to art historian Caroline SerckHanssen, it is usually read as a fertility symbol (2002, 43). The Sámi also describe themselves as ‘Children of the Sun’. Jåks’s use of a shaman symbol in this specific location and context is meaningful in various ways. Shaman drums figure in one of the most prominent examples of the cultural dispossession of the Sámi; missionaries, explorers, and other colonialist agents historically collected Sámi drums, often destroying them or exhibiting them in ethnographic museums. The collectors often targeted and confiscated these drums because they served as vital instruments, literally and figuratively, to pass on and preserve cultural knowledge. Taking them away from the Sámi community not only interrupted the transfer of cultural knowledge, but it also helped missionaries to eradicate so-called “heathen rites and practices” that were connected to Sámi shamanism (Joy 2018). Employing the symbol in this way is both an act of repossession and transformation of its area of application: Traditionally, the use of Sámi drums and shaman symbols was mostly reserved for the noaidi, the Sámi shaman. Now, every single visitor interacts with it before entering a place dedicated to

 Norwegian original: “Glass presenteres her som et stedsforankrende materiale: de transparente flatene knytter sammen inne og ute, arkitektur og landskap.”

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Figure 1: Window display at RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (SVD), Karasjok, Norway, 2021. © Anne Schäfer, used with permission of SVD.

the transfer of cultural knowledge. In this light, the museum could be seen as emulating the traditional role of a shaman, albeit in a secularizing manner. To the initiated, the door handle at the main entrance marks a passageway into a place that is at the same time mythological as well as this-worldly; it also promises to offer and to mediate cultural knowledge from a Sámi perspective. In addition, shaman symbols occupy a place between oral tradition and written history and thereby represent a specifically Sámi mode to convey and inform on Sámi culture and knowledge production. Stepping inside the building, the artistic exposition in the form of the dancing sculptures and the door handle is followed by a large wall relief in wood and con-

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crete, titled “The Dance of the Gods.” It adorns the entrance area and picks up the dance-like movement of the sculptures. As the title suggests, the stylized dancing figures now represent the Sámi gods, which corresponds with the invocation of the mythological plane initiated by the design of the door handle. The prominent depiction of the drum hammer on the right-hand side and the overall dominance of the sun and its rays reinforce this connection. Lien and Nielssen offer the following interpretation of the sun’s role in the relief: In Sámi cosmology the sun was an ancient cosmic being which carried the other gods on its rays. The artwork represents five cosmological figures: the god of the winds, the father of origin flanked by his wife and son, and the spring goddess. There is as strong erotic element in this: the work of creation obtains its energy and growth-potential from the cosmic lifegiving forces embodied by the gods (Lien & Nielssen 2012, 607).

This trifecta of sacralizing and secularizing artworks not only establishes the presence of the mythological plane, it also intertwines it with the this-worldly plane and stresses their simultaneous existence and overlap: the visitor is greeted by the dancing figures, admitted to the physical and mythological entrance area by the brass representation of the sun symbol, and invited to take up the movement of the sculptures to join the dance of the gods. Taken together, these observations suggest the assumption that the museum space is committed to Sámi, not Western conceptions of reality. Last but not least, Jåks’s contemporary interpretation of traditional spiritual motifs and the continuation of the dancing movements further suggests that Sámi culture and its expressions are present as well as continuously reshaped and moving. Having passed through the entrance area, the visitor enters the exhibition space itself. It is somewhat thematically organized and approximately separated into five individual sections: contemporary art, lifestyle, duodji,8 traditional costumes, and an area reserved for temporary exhibitions. While the temporary and costume exhibitions are clearly and physically separated from each other and the three remaining ones, the boundaries between the art, lifestyle, and duodji galleries are more blurred. They are basically located in the same room with no physical separation between the duodji and lifestyle displays, except for a light corridor spanned by a paneled skylight and the use of a differently colored carpet. While there is a wall between the area housing the displays relating to lifestyle and the contemporary art exhibition, it is retractable and usually opened wide enough to provide a seamless passage between the galleries. The duodji and lifestyle exhibitions’ respective layouts make it unmistakably clear that the two are designed in correspondence with each other: both feature a  Roughly translates to “Sámi handicraft”.

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set of showcases mounted to the wall at the corners of the room, a set of dioramas9 on the opposite wall, as well as several freestanding display cases. Those showcases are crafted from pinewood and hold multiple objects that respectively relate to livelihoods and duodji, including different tools needed to process wood, a collection of knives, a Sámi drum and a sieidi,10 various examples of the individual pieces of clothing that make up the traditional Sámi costume, as well as a pair of mannequins in Sámi costumes.11 Acknowledging the craftmanship of these display cases is important, as they are part of Sámi knowledge that sits in the hands and mind of a gifted duojár, a duodji practitioner who knows how to work the material.12 Designed by Jåks and crafted by Andersen, the display cases not only showcase Sámi artisanry, they also disrupt Western ideas of display cases and display traditions: while some feature protective glass panels, others separate visitor and artifact only by a length of rope, allowing the displayed objects to breath (see Figure 2). Other objects that are integral to duodji as well as everyday life, namely a weaving chair and a fully equipped Sámi tent, are even placed without any artificial framing within the exhibition and invite the visitor to engage more closely with their materiality. The mirrored and intertwining layout of both the room and the displays effectively brings lifestyle and duodji into contact and signposts the interconnectedness of the two. This corresponds directly to the meaning behind the concept of “duodji,” which is often translated as “Sámi handicraft.” This translation, however, does not fully cover what duodji entails, as “Sámi people have traditionally focused on aesthetics in all of life’s activities” (Snarby 2019). Consequently, handicraft and lifestyle are not separable but interdependent. Art historian Irene Snarby summarizes the meaning behind duodji as follows: “In actual fact, it encompasses the Sámi worldview, spirituality, Sámi knowledge, conceptions of nature, and the making of objects in relation to life” (Snarby 2019). Translating

 I follow the broad definition of “diorama” as a multi-purpose label for a variety of simulated environments, either life-size or in miniature applied by Silje Opdahl Mathisen in her research on dioramas in Sámi exhibitions (2017). These dioramas are examined in detail in the next section.  A cultic rock or stone formation.  While the traditional use of mannequins for the portrayal of Indigenous culture in ethnographic displays is potentially problematic (see Lonetree 2012; Mathisen 2017), the Sámi Museum makes a distinction between using featureless mannequins in displays highlighting specific costume traditions and using actual characters in displays which place Sámi costumes in a larger cultural context.  ‘Duojár’ has also been translated as “storyteller and knowledge holder” by Beaska Niillas (Guttorm 2022).

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duodji as “Sámi handicraft” is a make-shift solution in lack of a better option. Duodji is not merely handicraft but a concept that covers deeper layers of meaning, representing also a comprehensive view of life and culture. [. . .] [It] refers to a whole range of practical, social and spiritual activities, whereas the gathering, working and use of materials [. . .] [is] part of the Sámi theory of knowledge and belief systems. In this regard, duodji is both the creation of the object and the object itself (Alta Museum 2021).

The open room design that allows livelihoods, religion, and lifestyle to relate to each other and overlap reflects these conceptions of duodji and the Sámi world-

Figure 2: Anders Poulsson’s drum and a sieidi in an open display case by Jåks and Andersen, Aslak’s riverboat and mural by Jåks in the background at RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (SVD), Karasjok, Norway, 2021. © Anne Schäfer, used with permission of SVD.

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view. Furthermore, the two dioramas, each featuring a mannequin clad in a traditional Sámi costume, one in a sleigh pulled by a taxidermied reindeer and one in a long riverboat, are supplied with large murals by Jåks as their respective backgrounds. These murals depict various symbols found on Sámi drums and motifs from ancient rock carvings associated with hunting magic and invoke yet again the presence of the mythological plane.

Interplay of Art and Display Taking a closer look at the diorama with the riverboat (see Figure 2), it stands out immediately in comparison with most other displays: Contrary to the mannequins in the costume displays, this mannequin has elaborate facial features and hands. The diorama not only shows the individual artifacts – the boat itself, the miscellaneous tools for trapping and fishing, the traditional costume – it puts them in a meaningful context and creates a scene that illustrates their use in a way that makes it easy for the visitor to visualize their use in real life. As the visitor learns from the accompanying exhibition lectern, the boat belonged to a man named Aslak, was traditionally crafted in 1940, and actually remained in use until 1963. The text further describes the traditional way of creating a riverboat, from material collection to craftsmanship, as well as its commercial and personal uses. By not only providing a name, biography, and personal details for both the figure and the object on display, but by also choosing to portray an actual person rather than a type or character and explaining their personal connection to the object, it is made explicitly clear that the Sámi and their cultural traditions have a not-sodistant past, an ongoing cultural heritage, and a historical connection to the area. This argument gains weight when Jåks’s mural used as background is taken into account. It depicts scenes taken from ancient rock carvings found in Alta.13 The chosen motifs include carvings from all time periods represented at the site in Alta, which is to say they cover the last 2,000–7,000 years. This further illustrates that traditional Sámi livelihoods, especially fishing, reindeer trapping, and hunting, have been tied to the area for a very long time. The mural thereby implies a certain degree of cultural and historical continuity, as these livelihoods are still important to Sámi culture. At the same time, the diorama integrates the personal life and presence of a Sámi individual, here Aslak, into a greater historical frame.

 Alta is about 180km northwest from Karasjok. The carvings were found in in the 1960s and 1970s and added to the UNESCO World Heritage List in 1985.

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Last but not least, these carvings present a way in which cultural history has been recorded and cultural knowledge was preserved and shared. Similarly, symbols used on Sámi drums also occupy a space between written and oral knowledge tradition. This leads us to the display that is positioned just a few steps from the diorama: it holds a Sámi drum14 and a sieidi. The placement of the drum in the middle of the room symbolizes its central role and symbolic value for Sámi culture and identity. First, the drum itself is an important carrier of material and immaterial cultural heritage and reconnection. Second, it represents more than just pre-Christian Sámi religion; it also symbolizes colonization, and the persecution practitioners of non-Christian religion were subjected to as well as the resilience of their enduring existence despite that. From the accompanying text, the visitor learns that in this specific case, the noaidi who owned the drum and his fate are known: Anders Poulsson from Varanger was summoned to appear and defend himself in court in 1692. Over the course of his testimony, he provided information on the meaning of the symbols on his drum. Just before the sentencing, an allegedly mentally disturbed person murdered him. Thereby, the anonymous event of persecution becomes a personal and real-life story, and the survival of the drum gains symbolic value on both a personal and a collective level. In contrast, the sieidi placed beneath the drum remains an anonymous object that is merely representative of the old Sámi religion. The only information the accompanying label specifies is that “unusual natural formations like peculiar stones” served as sacrificial sites. Asking the staff on site, I was told that a sieidi also marks a specific site in nature and acts as a contact point where the otherworld is especially close. Its positioning in relation to its specific surroundings is therefore essential. Since there is no further information given about the sieidi, it remains unclear if it is a replica, an imitation, or a real one that has been stripped of its sacred properties by being removed from its original site. Each of these possibilities carries different implications. In any case, the presence of a sieidi as part of a display where individuals cannot interact with it transforms it from a mediator between the earthly and the otherworldly plane, i.e., its active role within religious practice, into a mediator of knowledge about religious practice. The second diorama provides more references to the presence of the mythological planes. It consists of a Sámi equipage in the form of a taxidermied reindeer pulling a mannequin in a sleigh. Similar to the riverboat diorama, the individual objects are staged in a life-like context, showcasing not only Sámi winter clothing, a traditionally crafted sleigh, and an intricate reindeer tack, but also illustrating their

 While the original drum is in SVD’s possession, the drum on display is a replica.

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use. It further reinforces the inseparability of Sámi culture and nature that has been promoted in the other displays and texts by illustrating the close collaboration between the two. While the visitor is not given any information about the diorama, this mannequin is the only mannequin, apart from the one in the riverboat diorama, provided with distinct facial features: He is more than a featureless placeholder for Sámi clothing or vehicle for the presentation of the use of objects related to Sámi culture. He is a real character, even if not a historical one. The diorama positions this “real” character in direct relation to the mythological plane: the large mural constituting the background and context for the display depicts drawings from various Sámi drums, thereby directly invoking a mythological landscape. The placement of another sieidi accentuates the connection between and concurrence of the mythological and the this-worldly planes; this sieidi rests in the corner behind the display, where it is left to stand on its own without being confined to a display case. Theoretically, this allows the visitor to interact with it, to make a sacrifice, and to establish contact with the otherworld.15 At the same time, the placement of a sieidi in relation to reindeer herding underscores a cultural function sieidis still have today. For some Sámi, sieidis are important parts of everyday life because they comprise an integral part of landscape memory: “Nomadic reindeer herders navigate in the landscape by remembering the places, their names, events and stories linked to the places and by identifying the natural formations” (Näkkäläjärvi & Kauppala 2017, 118). The visitors have to make all of these inferences on their own, since there is no text or explanation accompanying the diorama or sieidi. There is, however, a hint to make some connections between the scene at hand and Sámi mythology provided within the larger scope of the exhibition, since just a few meters away visitors encounter the other, labeled sieidi grouped with the Sámi drum. At this point, it can be ascertained that SVD joins the ranks of other Indigenous-led museums that purposefully seek out ways to implement Indigenous perspectives within traditional, modern museum spaces. The disruption of Western museum tradition is first and foremost achieved by centering Indigenous perspectives and voices in museum exhibitions, thereby challenging dominant discourses, and by engaging in collaborative and respectful partnerships with Indigenous communities (Lonetree 2012; Phillips 2003). In the case of SVD, the museum space integrates Sáminess on several levels. On an architectural level, Sámi worldviews are implemented by not clearly separating the individual thematically organized exhibitions from each other but instead letting them overlap. In regard to material and artistic design, the impact of Iver Jåks’s and Jon Ole Andersen’s contributions, en-

 At the time of my visit, the sieidi did not exhibit signs that such interactions actually take place.

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compassing both display design and artistic framing, cannot be overstated, not least because “Sámi art is a natural constituent of Sámi cultural mediation”16 (Eriksson & Bergflødt 2019, 13). Lien and Nielssen even argue that in light of the aesthetic framing of the exhibitions, “the display may be seen as an effort to break also with dominant ways of structuring the past” (2012, 613). They ascribe the exhibition to an altogether non-Western historicity, since in a Sámi context, “memories of the past that are inscribed in practices, places, material objects and bodies, may be just as important as those articulated in verbal narratives” (613). These observations, however, require a fair amount of interpretation and it is questionable if and to what degree the museum makes these narratives of all-encompassing Sáminess accessible or even visible to visitors that are not Sámi or lack knowledge of Sámi cultural codes and do not recognize certain references to Sámi culture and worldview.

Displayed Withholding The various displays employ different modes of meaning making to address different aspects of Sámi history, culture, and identity and link various cultural reference points by positioning the exhibited objects in relation to different contexts, be it geographically, historically, or spiritually. In tune with the museum’s overall concept, the exhibition communicates many of these cultural reference points and contexts not verbally but visually. Consequently, the visitor has to be very attentive to those visual and spatial clues, and depending on their personal background, encounters with Sámi culture may progress in very different ways. To those who are able to identify invocations of the mythological plane, like the use of a Sámi fertility symbol as door handle at the main entrance,17 the permanent exhibition in its entirety is both an expression of Sámi culture as well as an act of decolonizing the museum as a Western institution. They are aware that they are moving in a space where Sámi perceptions of reality prevail; for them the artistic and artisan framing make visible the presence of an intangible cultural heritage: “material, temporal and spatial dimensions of Indigenous craft establish continuity and connection” (Magnani 2022, 510). To those who do not or cannot take the mentioned allusions to Sámi ontology into account, however, the exhibition seems to reproduce and perpetuate ethnographic stereotypes (e.g., Olsen 1970; 1986; Webb 2006). Since the texts that accom-

 Norwegian original: “Samiske kunst er en naturlig del av den samiske kulturformidlingen.”  That Jåks’s door handle can be considered iconic within certain Sámi circles is illustrated by the homage paid to it by Geir Tore Holms, who designed the door handle for the Eastern Sámi Museum (Haugdal 2013, 48).

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pany the displays do not substitute many of the cultural codes necessary for a deeper level of understanding and some of the objects are left to speak completely for themselves, the question arises for whom the exhibitions are actually intended. While the museum generally facilitates cultural encounters for the general public by virtue of being a public cultural institution, it has come to light that these are not accessible to everyone to the same degree. This applies especially to visitors who, for one reason or another, lack knowledge about Sámi culture. Many of the modes the museum employs in its exhibitions to create meaning speak exclusively to cultural insiders or those equipped with enough cultural knowledge to decipher these meanings. When cultural codes are missing, visitors usually turn to the texts that accompany the exhibitions for complementary information, be it in the form of informative and detailed wall displays, titles, or labels. Those texts are the main point of contact for visitors without sufficient command of the required cultural codes, and when they are not available, the cultural meaning of the displays remains shrouded. Those culturally encrypted messages are shown to the visitor in form of objects or murals, but they are not explained: the sieidi grouped with the reindeer, for example, is literally within the visitor’s reach, but its meaning remains ultimately unattainable for those who do not already know what it signifies. This behavior has been termed “displayed withholding” by Mary Lawlor (2006), a concept that Bryony Onciul further identifies as a decolonizing strategy within Indigenous museum practices. In her view, it reminds non-Indigenous visitors of their “place” within the exhibit. The community, despite being in an unequal power relationship with dominant society, publicly asserts their power to define themselves and their “Others,” using the displays to mark the boundaries between “Us” and “Them,” reversing the colonial lens. (2015, 190)

Potential consequences, intended and unintended, of displayed withholding are effectively illustrated when we once again consider the sieidis on display in the exhibitions. Even though sieidis are not sites of worship anymore, they still signify sacred places and are often thought as “a presiding spirit or actor in its particular landscape. [. . .] Even if sacrifices are not made anymore, it is still considered good manners if one behaves respectfully and even thinks good thoughts when passing near them” (Magga 2022, 145). In addition, knowledge about the location of still existing sieidi sites is often kept secret within the Sámi community. On the assumption that due to their continuing use knowledge about sieidis is widespread within the Sámi community, it appears to be a deliberate choice to not provide further information to the uninitiated: this knowledge is not meant for everybody. From this perspective, detailed labeling of the sieidi is unnecessary for Sámi visitors and beside the point for non-Sámi visitors.

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In light of current debates on Sámi identity and affiliation, especially in regard to Sámi who do not live in Sápmi and do not have access to an active Sámi cultural scene, the suitedness of displayed withholding is brought into question. Not all Sámi can be expected to command sufficient cultural knowledge to access implied cultural codes. How can they build a positive Sámi identity if they do not understand and therefore cannot connect to the heritage on display? Because cultural affiliations are often not straight forward, the museum might end up excluding some of the visitors they want to include. At the same time, the mere inclusion of a sieidi can also be seen as the perpetuation of Western display practices in regard to Sámi representation (e.g., Silvén 2012). The lack of information provided enhances this notion: By keeping sacred cultural knowledge within the group, the museum also partakes in an anonymous exhibition practice that was common for Western museums in regard to Indigenous heritage. Earlier ethnographic exhibitions usually displayed Indigenous objects without reference to their origin, effectively denying their respective cultures the capability to evolve (Olsen 1986, 15–17). For the sake of completeness, I want to stress that many of the other artifacts are carefully labeled, especially in the costume and duodji exhibitions, where objects have very personal connections to their makers and owners. Having pointed out potential pitfalls of displayed withholding, I also want to call attention to the fact that falling victim to them is not inevitable. When there is no information supplying the display, rather than undertaking an interpretation based on insufficient cultural knowledge, the visitor could also enter into a dialogue with an available knowledge broker, for example museum staff or even another visitor. This entails leaving the relative security of the rather one-sided engagement with the exhibition, where the visitor simply absorbs the information on offer. Instead, they need to actively seek out another person and ask them questions, running the risk of receiving only partial answers or even being denied the information they seek. In this case, even though they might not have received the hoped-for reply, the visitor will still have learned something they did not know before. This shift from written to oral storytelling further links the visitor to Sámi knowledge traditions: “Although there is by now a rich written Sámi literature, the tradition has chiefly been oral, knowledge transmission (and modification) from person to person” (Eriksen 2022, 589). In the case of the sieidis for example, I asked the museum staff about them when I was visiting and was told some interesting stories. When I, at a later date, contacted SVD with more specific follow-up questions, I was very politely told that what I was asking for was very sensitive information that they, at this point at least, did not feel comfortable

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sharing with me. As it turns out, in its practical application displayed withholding is a strategy very well suited to both disseminate and protect cultural knowledge.

Conclusion As a public cultural institution, the Sámi Museum in Karasjok actively and continuously determines how insiders and outsiders perceive Sámi culture and how they understand Sámi identity. I discussed in this essay how the holistic implementation of Sámi ontology imbues the museum space with Sáminess. This imbuement is first and foremost achieved through the aesthetic framing that Jåks’s and Andersen’s artistic and artisan contributions provide. Jåks’s artwork, in particular, establishes an ever-present mythological plane, which lends the exhibition the sense of a decidedly Sámi conception of reality and historicity. The museum team’s deliberate architectural and exhibition design choices further foreground Sámi approaches to knowledge dissemination. Upon closer inspection of the individual displays and their relation to each other, it is noticeable that many narratives, even though present and reflected in the exhibition, are seldom explicitly addressed. If we read the displays in dialogue with each other and pay attention to cultural reference points, however, we can discern allusions to contemporary issues, like for example debates on land use. Putting the mounted displays on traditional Sámi livelihoods in relation to the Alta rock carvings invokes the unspoken argument that those very livelihoods have been tied to the area for at least 6,000 years and that there is proof of it carved into the surface of the earth. It is politically meaningful to imply that the Sámi’s claim to use the territory predates the national states and their borders and legal systems. “Moreover, land rights are now demanded not merely as a legal provision but also on ontological grounds” (Eriksen 2022, 582). Another strategy employed by SVD to both reveal and protect cultural knowledge, is displayed withholding. While I raised questions about potential shortcomings of this strategy regarding accessibility as well as intended and unintended consequences, I argued that whether or to what degree displayed withholding reproduces ethnographical stereotypes ultimately hinges on the visitor and their willingness to engage in a direct dialogue with human knowledge brokers. SVD limits one-sided knowledge transfer through the relative sparseness of information provided in the form of labels and texts. This choice ties in with an Indigenous way of creating and sharing knowledge in an institution shaped by Western norms, and that is through literal story telling: “For the Sámi, dialogue and narrative are not only ways of seeking knowledge but also ways of producing and shar-

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ing knowledge, hence building a theory of the world” (Valkonen et al. 2022, 5). If visitors do not understand a display or have further questions, they can always reach out to the museum staff. The staff then can decide on an individual basis if and how they are willing to share that specific information. In addition, the centering of dialogue puts the power and authority to reveal or protect cultural knowledge entirely in the hands of the Sámi institution. It is also a way of reminding visitors that, especially in an Indigenous museum space, just because they want to know something does not mean that they are entitled to that knowledge.

Bibliography Alta Museum. Time for Sculpture #1. 2021. Muoras Ardnan. Temporary Exhibition June 3 – October 10, 2021. Andresen, Astri, Bjørg Evjen, and Teemu Ryymin. Samenes Historie Fra 1751 Til 2010. Oslo: Cappelen Damm Akademisk, 2021. Ballovara, Mette. “Regjeringen glemte Anne May og museene – nå får de penger.” NRK Sápmi (November 26, 2020). https://www.nrk.no/sapmi/regjeringen-glemte-samiske-museer-_-na-farde-koronapenger-1.15258481 (May 30, 2023). Boast, Robin. “Neocolonial Collaboration: Museum as Contact Zone Revisited.” Museum Anthropology 34 (2011): 56–70. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997. Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. ”Epilogue: Ways of Being in the World.” The Sámi World. Ed. Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, and Sigga-Marja Magga. London: Routledge, 2022. 579–590. Eriksson Hege, Maria, and Lise Bergflødt. Mulighetsstudie for RidduDouttarMuseat (RDM). October 2019, https://sametinget.no/_f/p1/i607dd1a0-9ff0-4170-a103-3a6907e5a20b/mulighets studie-for-riddudouttarmuseat-rdm.pdf (March 1, 2023). Guttorm, Gunvor. “Iver Jåks’ thoughts as a duojár.” Iver Jåks – Materialfølelse og virkekraft. 28.10 – 22.12.2022. Ed. Hanne Hammer Stien. Oslo: Tegnerforbundet, 2022. Hall, Stuart. ”Introduction.” Representation: Cultural Representations and Signifying Practices. Ed. Stuart Hall. London: SAGE Publications, 1997. Hansen, Lars Ivar, and Bjørnar Olsen. Hunters in Transition: An Outline of Early Sámi History. Boston: Brill, 2013. Haugdal, Elin. “‘Det skal råtne’: Materialbruk i nyere samisk arkitektur.” Kunst og kultur 96.1 (2013): 36–51. Holberg, Eirin, and Knut Dørum. “Norrøn ekspansjon og samisk motmakt i Sør-Salten ca. 600–1350.” Historisk tidsskrift 100.3 (2021): 204–221. Joy, Francis. “The Disappearance of the Sacred Swedish Sámi Drum and the Protection of Sámi Cultural Heritage.” The Polar Record 54.4 (2018): 255–266. Lawlor, Mary. Public Native America: Tribal Self-Representation in Museums, Powwows, and Casinos. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2006. Lien, Siegrid, and Hilde Wallem Nielssen. “Conventional Ethnographic Display or Subversive Aesthetics? Historical Narratives of the Sami Museum, RiddoDuottarMuseat- Sámiid Vuorká-

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Dávvirat (RDM-SVD) in Karasjok, Norway.” Great Narratives of the Past: Traditions and Revisions in National Museums. Conference proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Paris, June 29 – July 1 & November 25–26, 2011. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, 2012. 599–615. Lonetree, Amy. Decolonizing Museums. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Magga, Päivi. ”Frustrated Caretakers: Sámi Egg Gatherers and Cloudberry Pickers.” The Sámi World. Ed. Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, and Sigga-Marja. London: Routledge, 2022. 134–149. Magnani, Natalia. “Commememorating Continuity: Reconciling Material Representations in Sää’m land.” The Sámi World. Ed. Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, and Sigga-Marja Magga. London: Routledge, 2022. 507–519. Mathisen, Silje Opdahl. “Still Standing: On the Use of Dioramas and Mannequins in Sámi Exhibitions.” Nordisk Museologi 1 (2017): 58–72. Moser, Stephanie. “The Devil Is in the Detail: Museum Displays and the Creation of Knowledge.” Museum Anthropology 33.1 (2010): 22–32. Näkkäläjärvi, Klemetti, and Pekka Kauppala. “Sacred Sites of the Sámi: Linking Past, Present and Future.” In Experiencing and Protecting Sacred Natural Sites of Sámi and other Indigenous Peoples: The Sacred Arctic. Ed. Leena Heinämäki and Thora Martina Herrmann. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2017: 117–128. Olsen, Bjørnar. “Bilder Fra Fortida? Representasjoner Av Samisk Kultur i Samiske Museer.” Nordisk Museologi 2 (1970): 13–30. Olsen, Bjørnar. “Norwegian Archaeology and the People without (Pre-)History: Or How to Create a Myth of a Uniform Past.” Archaeological Review from Cambridge 5.1 (1986): 25–42. Onciul, Bryony. Museums, Heritage and Indigenous Voice: Decolonizing Engagement. London: Routledge, 2015. Phillips, Ruth. “Museum Pieces: Toward the Indigenization of Canadian Museums.” Museums and Source Communities: A Routledge Reader. Ed. Laura Peers and Alison K. Brown. London: Routledge, 2003. 45–62. Pratt, Mary Louise. “Arts of the Contact Zone.” Profession (1991): 33–40. RiddoDuottarMuseat. Strategiplan 2017–2022. June 26, 2017, https://rdm.no/wp-content/uploads/ 2020/01/Strategiplan-2017-2022.pdf (February 10, 2023). Serck-Hanssen, Caroline. “Iver Jåks’ kunstnerskap – et riss.” Ofelaš: Iver Jåks veiviseren. Tromsø: Universitetsbibliotek, 2002. 39–56. Silvén, Eva. “Contested Sami Heritage: Drums and Sieidis on the Move.” National Museums and the Negotiation of Difficult Pasts. Conference proceedings from EuNaMus, European National Museums: Identity Politics, the Uses of the Past and the European Citizen, Brussels, January 26–27, 2012. Ed. Dominique Poulot, José María Lanzarote Guiral, and Felicity Bodenstein. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, 2012. 173–186. Snarby, Irene. “Duodji as Indigenous Contemporary Art Practice.” Norwegian Crafts. April 23, 2019. https://www.norwegiancrafts.no/articles/duodji-as-indigenous-contemporary-art-practice (February 10, 2023). Valkonen, Sanna, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, and Sigga-Marja Magga: “Introduction to the Sámi World.” The Sámi World. Ed. Sanna Valkonen, Áile Aikio, Saara Alakorva, and Sigga-Marja Magga. London: Routledge, 2022. 1–18. Webb, Sharon. “Making Museums, Making People: The Representation of the Sámi through Material Culture.” Public Archaeology 5.3 (2006): 167–183

Jimena Perry

Revisiting Grand Narratives at the National Museum of Colombia: Striving for Inclusion and Diversity Introduction To commemorate 198 years since the foundation of the National Museum of Colombia, its director and curators decided to celebrate the country’s cultural diversity and some historical attempts to represent it. With this in mind, they contacted me to be the guest curator of the temporary exhibition Glasshouses: Human Diversity and Paul Rivet, which was on display from December 2021 to March 2022. The original idea of the exhibition was to highlight Paul Rivet’s influence in the creation of the Colombian Institute of Anthropology and History in 1941, its relationship with the National Museum, and the ways in which he understood cultural diversity. We began our task but soon realized we were going down the outdated road of giving voice to a grand white man, in this case a French intellectual, to depict our own history of cultural diversity. After this insight, we stopped, regrouped, and found an alternative way to tell our story. Although we acknowledged Rivet’s scholarly contribution to our understanding of cultural diversity, he was no longer the main character of the display. In this reflection, I discuss how, in a historically polarized and violent country like Colombia, the National Museum attempts to give visibility to groups and voices traditionally underrepresented. Focusing on three sections of Glasshouses as an example of how the team in charge of the exhibition engaged the audience, I explore the strategies used by curators and educators to go beyond a single story and create a collective account of the meanings of cultural diversity in Colombia. Drawing on interviews, oral histories, the archive of the National Museum of Colombia, material culture, and the exhibition’s script, I examine the interactions and conceptual exchanges that made it possible for Glasshouses to become an interactive and comprehensive exhibition with multiple protagonists. Narratives about single stories served their purpose, but this approach needs revision. The exhibition’s shift in perspective was also related to the National Museum’s renovation plan – which started in the late 1990s – that includes the opening of several exhibition halls addressing contemporary issues such as migration, the representation of the LGBTQ+ community, and violence in the country’s recent history, among other topics. The museum’s innovation program also highlights the need to turn the institution into a space that welcomes everyone, with https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-012

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no exception, and a place that encourages different kinds of analysis and critical thinking. Thus, the Glasshouses team worked toward promoting ideas of representation, inclusion, and strived to open new channels of communication with the public. In this context, Paul Rivet became just one example of the ways in which explorers, academics, politicians, researchers, and the public have understood cultural diversity since the nineteenth century and before. His concern about salvaging, documenting, and preserving what seemed destined to disappear, indigenous peoples’ cultures, for example, opened the path for preservation efforts and understanding of how to recognize, accept, and respect cultural diversity.1 Thus, we closed the display with a 2001 quotation of the Office in Colombia of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights. It read: All the men and women of Colombia, including indigenous peoples, raizal,2 afro Colombian, and ROM communities; illiterate, unemployed, displaced, with scarcity of resources, with different sexual orientation, disabled, homeless, and elderly deserve the right of acknowledgement and enjoyment of their fundamental rights and liberties, to be respected, and to be subjects of others solidarity. Foreigners, seasonal workers, and refugees are entitled, as well, to enjoy these human rights (Ohchr-Colombia 2001).3

Our hope was that these words encouraged personal and collective reflections about diversity and the ways in which we approach, relate, and are part of it. The quotation was found before visitors exited the exhibition hall and after seeing a wall showcasing samples of ethnic, religious, sexual, ecological, and political diversity. Our aim was for people to connect Rivet’s approaches to diversity – presented in the first sections of the exhibit – with how it is lived and represented nowadays in Colombia. Rivet, in this sense, was the conversation starter. In interviews I held with Mayali Tafur, Head of the Education Department of the National Museum, and Alejandro Suárez, coordinator of the museum’s Accessibility and Inclusion Program, they told me that almost every person who attended Glasshouses stopped to read the quotation. Also, sometimes when Tafur and Suárez asked visitors about the passage, they answered that it made them feel included in the display.

 For reflections upon indigenous agency and storytelling, see also the chapters by Farai Mudododzi Chabata and Jesmael Mataga, by Rowan Light, by Anne Schäfer, and the Introduction by Kerstin Barndt and Stephan Jaeger in this volume.  Raizal is an Afro-Caribbean ethnic group from the archipelago of San Andrés, Providencia and Santa Catalina off the Colombian Caribbean Coast.  All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise indicated.

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Museums for Whom? Founded in 1823 as a natural history venue and mining school, the National Museum of Colombia is the oldest museum in Colombia and Latin America. Its creation aligned with the European ideals of civilization and promotion of what Europe defined as development during the nineteenth century, thus there was a great emphasis on teaching ways of advancing scientific knowledge to students (Rodríguez Pardo 2008). These premises, however, have changed throughout the years. For instance, during the late nineteenth century, the museum directors focused on collecting objects to glorify the country’s ancestors and showcase its environmental diversity. These were materialized in archaeological remains, animals, indigenous people’s tools, and herbaria (Botero Cuervo 2006). During the first half of the twentieth century the institution’s administrators devoted more attention to social research which allowed for the inclusion of women’s voices but also critical and political stances about Colombia’s progress in the museum’s narrative. For example, the institution acquired archives from liberal figures, such as President Eduardo Santos (1938–1942) (Ortega 2018). These initiatives preceded the comprehensive renovation plan that began in 1992 and is still ongoing. This plan devotes special attention to educational processes, harking back to the original idea of the museum as a place for learning. During the interview with Suárez, I also learned that the directors’ emphasis on education “is helping visitors to understand the value of nonconventional education”4 (Suárez 2022). Suárez insists that despite the historically colonial nature of the institution, the efforts of the museum’s education department to open alternative interactive museum spaces and exhibitions were already initiated before the 2000s. The critical revision of the National Museum’s role in Colombian society, spearheaded by the educational team, has implemented far-reaching new practices that have helped the museum to become a more welcoming and inclusive space. Suárez further notes that since 2014: “Museum professionals are devoting more attention to the meanings people attach to the institution instead of focusing only on objects and knowledge authority. What I mean is that creating alternative education processes is a constant effort” (Suárez 2022). In addition, Mayali Tafur underscores the efforts done by her team related to the renovation plan. For instance, in aiming for the museum to stay relevant for visitors, language had to change, as mentioned to me in the interview. “For example, to call ourselves mediators instead of monitors or guides has encouraged horizontal conversations and communication. Now we know that curators, museographers, de-

 Juliana Restrepo was the Director of the National Museum of Colombia when Glasshouses was active. However, since November 2022, the Director has been William Alfonso López.

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signers, and content producers and not the only ones who impart knowledge” (Tafur 2022). She also notes that the museum is becoming much more community centered. Exhibitions on topics such as immigration, the country’s recent armed conflict, sexual, political, and religious diversity, and non-mainstream artistic expressions reflect this new engagement with various communities and audiences. Both Tafur and Suárez concur that 2014 was an important turning-point for the museum due to the opening of the first of the 17 halls that the renovation plan calls “Memory and Nation.” One of the new gallery’s innovative aspects consists of the representation of a non-chronological, non-linear history, which includes the country’s recent political upheaval and history of violence. In addition, Tafur highlights how curators, museographers, and educators slowly but surely have come together to create displays and contents that speak to diverse publics. Different and nontraditional educational approaches and formats such as performances, dances, hands-on workshops, as well as guided visits in and outside the museum have also advanced debates surrounding the so-called decolonization of museums and knowledge systems. In Latin America, these debates reach back to 1972, when the Roundtable of Santiago de Chile took place (Ibermuseos 1972). During this event, following museologist and anthropologist Bruno Brulon, museum professionals discussed the term decolonizing for the first time. Therefore, the Chilean roundtable has become a landmark for Latin American museums. In the meeting, researchers from the region promoted thinking about community-driven and self-sufficient museums with some level of state mediation with experts’ support (Brulon 2021, 444). The summit initiated necessary conversations about immaterial heritage, object-centered museums, and more inclusive and participatory institutions. Moreover, it paved the way for continuing debates about approaches to the decolonization of museums. This trend is very popular in Brazil, Mexico, and Cuba, and recently also in countries such as Colombia, which did not participate in the Chilean Roundtable. Drawing from premises from “new museology” (Vergo 1989), and its pledge to break the European universal narrative of progress and civilization (Brulon 2021), decolonization narratives went beyond the old/new binary and questioned methods of assigning meaning to objects and stories, which generally overlooked why exhibitions were produced and in what context. As posed by Brulon and reiterated by Tafur and Suárez, it is nowadays impossible to overlook the museum’s political role and its long history of promoting inequalities and tensions created between objects and people. This awareness is precisely what has encouraged the National Museum of Colombia’s education team to reach out and think about what Tafur calls “a museum that looks outside its walls” (2022). I argue that the debate about the decolonization of museums has become so wide in scope that it resembles the variability and dynamics of culture itself. What

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is understood by the term decolonization requires specific and unique approaches in every case (Ariese & Wróblewska 2021, 13). At the National Museum of Colombia, educators, curators, and museographers pursue these efforts and translate them into strategies that purposely involve diverse communities in the process of creating, mounting, and displaying underrepresented and invisible stories. In this sense, practicing decoloniality at the Colombian museum is also an effort to involve shared authority and community knowledge appropriation (Green 2017). From this perspective, the institution has been practicing decolonization initiatives since the 1990s and has strengthened alternative education strategies designed to actively include the communities they serve. It was in this context that we could conceive and realize an exhibition such as Glasshouses: Paul Rivet and Human Diversity.

Which Diversity Are We Talking About? Only anthropologists and archaeologists take into consideration that Rivet’s figure has fallen into oblivion, therefore, the curators wanted to highlight his contributions to the mentioned fields but realized this represented specialized knowledge only interesting for very few people. The challenge, therefore, became how to broaden the exhibition and decenter the French intellectual, which was a powerful exercise that implied revisiting traditional ways of producing content and displays. Searching for a thread that connected Rivet with the past, present, and future of ethnology in Colombia and Latin America, the curatorial team which I led, decided that since anthropologists and archaeologists study human diversity, it could be worthwhile to showcase this diversity from Rivet’s perspective, go beyond this, and show how diversity is lived and understood in today’s Colombia. Glasshouses had four main sections. The first part, “The Meaning of Being Different,” welcomed visitors with several questions. It presented a historical context from the nineteenth century onward, demonstrating how explorers, academics, travelers, and researchers have conceived of human diversity. Here we introduced Paul Rivet’s figure, as part of a group of men and women explorers who were curious enough to look beyond their own culture and take the leap of getting to know how other social groups lived. Including women travelers into this male dominated context set the tone of the exhibition, which attempted to dispense with narratives of “great men.” The second section, called “Races and Racism,” delved into Rivet’s political thought, his approach to understanding cultural diversity, and his committed and long-life fights against discrimination, Nazism, and prejudices. This part consisted of a red cubicle in the exhibition hall’s center. It had only one entrance and in the middle there was a round table and some

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seats. It was completely painted in red because the aim was to surprise the audience with bright colors, text, and images. Here visitors could find a large picture of the Museum of Mankind and a copy of the poem “If” by Rudyard Kipling, that Rivet had pinned to his museum office’s door in the 1930s. The curators, designers, and I choose the color red to allude to the German Nazi Swastika Flag. There were no objects displayed in this cubicle because the intention was for the public to focus on the image and the poem. This section of Glasshouses became a key space for Suárez and his educational activities and a focal point of the exhibition because it provided a reflective and critical space to think about the sensitive topics pointed out above and will be mentioned further in the text. Glasshouses’ third section, “Museum, Resistance, and Academia,” displayed all the different ways in which Rivet defied biological determinism and Eurocentrism (Laurière 2008). Focusing on the Museum of Mankind, Rivet’s life-long project and headquarters for his political struggles, we highlighted the significance and role of museums as public agents that promote reflection and social criticism, and that institutions are far from being neutral. This section presented a history of museums starting with cabinets of curiosities, collecting practices, and human zoos. Lastly, the fourth part of the exhibition, “Diversity Recognized,” called to reflect on Rivet’s legacy in the present. The exhibition closed with contemporary conceptions of human diversity, as noted at the beginning of this reflection. Our purpose was to demonstrate how the concept of diversity and approaches to it have adapted, changed, are dynamic, and never-ending. Here, we had the opportunity to bring in historically marginalized groups such as the transgender community. In this part of Glasshouses, the public also found references to contemporary atrocities in the country, namely the genocide of the leftist Patriotic Union Party between 1984 and 2002, and violence against peasants and indigenous peoples. We arranged this section as a collage of sexual, religious, environmental, political, ethnic, and social diversity pictures to convey the idea that heterogeneity is everywhere and includes us. Thus, we strategically positioned mirrors to allow the viewers to feel like part of what they were observing. Created as a meeting point between Rivet, human diversity, and the public, the exhibition’s final choreography conveyed the message that diversity is boundless but requires care, attention, and the willingness to recognize and accept those who are different.

Glasshouses’ Key Moments Three parts of the exhibition deserve special attention since they speak about the National Museum of Colombia’s efforts to decolonize the institution: the first sec-

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Figure 1: Flora Tristán (1803–1844). © United States Public Domain.

tion in which we included women who explored Latin America during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, who we do not acknowledge enough; the red structure mentioned above, and the collage “Diversity Recognized” I just referred to. These represent turning points because they initiated and allowed more comprehensive conversations with the public, encouraging their active participation. The inclusion of visitors’ voices in the exhibition followed the idea of bringing the audience closer to the display itself. By narrativizing diverse experiences such as the stories of the LGBTQ+ movement, Romani, Indigenous people, Black people, and peasants in Colombia, we aimed to make people feel we are all part of the same country. However, in making this diversity obvious we took the risk of em-

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phasizing differences so much that divisions could be exacerbated. However, this did not happen, as stated by Tafur and Suárez. After entering the exhibition space, to the right, there was a conventional picture display featuring women explorers in Latin America. Since the main goal of Glasshouses was to decenter Rivet’s figure, the curatorial team decided to highlight not only male travelers to the region. Figure 1 portrays Flora Tristán who traveled through her native Peru and critically examined the class differences between elite and poor women in her country. She is just one example of six women we chose based on writings and drawings of what they experienced. This allowed us to contrast the gender approach to Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Women wrote and drew their daily life, parenting, family relationships, and social inequality, whilst men mainly described landscapes, commerce, routes, and scientific discoveries. We also wanted to debunk the myth that only white men had the courage to explore the region. The second space that requires a closer look was in the center of the exhibition hall. It was an extra room painted in red (see Figure 2), as mentioned above. The education team had the idea of including the table and the seats. They argued that this space could allow visitors to rest and to reflect upon Nazism’s horrors, racism, discrimination, and perhaps relate these violent histories to some of their own experiences. The curators thought of this space as a moment to remind visitors about authoritarian and repressive political regimes and what they do to cultural diversity. The idea was not to overwhelm visitors but to surprise them with some negative political connotations which diversity has endured, for example during the Second World War. The National Museum of Colombia’s education team transformed the small room into a more permanent and reflective area, where people could sit, rest, and engage. For example, the first activities in the museum’s history that specifically intended to include transgender women show how a traditionally relegated group felt part of the museum’s narrative, as examined below. Alejandro Suárez, pictured on the left, developed several tasks with different audiences, which gave other meanings to the red structure associated with fascism. The curatorial team used the red color of the Nazi flag to create a different space from the general display for people to stop and think. It was a curatorial decision knowing that in Europe, fascism is associated with brown and black. Using Rivet as inspiration, Suárez and his team developed educational materials for underrepresented communities to share their personal stories of injustice. For example, Suárez took the women to the red room and talked to them about their personal experiences of discrimination and exclusion. Using Rivet as a backdrop, Suárez told these women how cultural diversity was understood by Rivet and how the museum’s intention was to go beyond. He used examples of exotic indigenous people and their representations to illustrate how different groups have suffered from discrimination just for

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Figure 2: Activities by transgender women proud of having their stories at the museum. Red space of section “Races and Racism.” Temporary exhibition Glasshouses: Human Diversity and Paul Rivet. National Museum of Colombia. © Alejandro Suárez Caro, 2022.

being different. Then he related this story to the transgender group he was working with. Suárez also found inspiration in Kipling’s poem and read it with the women, who were touched by its resonance to their own lives. After spending time in the red room, Suárez took the group to the section “Recognized Diversity” to show them some images of the Colombian transgender community. This also allowed the educator to draw associations and relations to other displays in the museum that touch on diversity. Thus, Glasshouses became a starting point for visitors to get to know the National Museum in different ways and to reach historically underrepresented audiences. This gave Glasshouses a transversal scope that went beyond its temporary nature (Suárez 2022). If the idea of the museum’s renovation plan is to make the institution more inclusive and diverse, Glasshouses attempted to make this point. Seeking a “museum that looks outside its walls” as Tafur noted, including visitors’ stories enriches the overall narrative approach of the institution which does not want to perpetuate stories of battles, grand heroes, and winners and losers. In addition, to make the museum an accessible and friendly space, involving visitors’ stories can lead to a fun, interactive place where everyone has something to say. The third arrangement of Glasshouses I want to highlight is its last section: “Diversity Recognized.” With artifacts belonging to Colombian indigenous people, objects representing sexual, religious, and political diversity, including direct references to political and systemic violence in the country, the exhibition team consciously created the display as a collage to allow for multiple readings and as-

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sociations. The format worked particularly well in demonstrating the thinking behind the production of the exhibition. Due to Rivet’s overall prominence in the exhibition concept, the ending of Glasshouses suffered a dramatic revision. Because the last gallery of Glasshouses clearly did not center Rivet, curators and educators thought that they needed to bring the past back to the present. Thus, they related Rivet’s intellectual, political, and academic contributions to bear onto contemporary meanings and notions and expressions of diversity. In this process, the curators realized the need to surpass customary depictions of Colombian indigenous people’s minorities, supported by the 1886 Constitution and its confessional, unilateral, and Catholic nature (Ariza 2004). Relying on the country’s 1991 Constitution recognizing all social groups as citizens, which promotes the idea of a multicultural and multiethnic nation, the Glasshouses’ team highlighted how this new legislation conceived diversity as cultural richness, essential to the project of nation building, and necessary for achieving the country’s elusive peace.5 “Diversity Recognized” did not follow a chronological order but a thematic one. It intended to display many, and sometimes messy, varied expressions from the past and present looking into the future. The artifacts displayed in this section consisted of pictures, clothing, posters, drawings, and videos of cultural diversity in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The intention was to show that despite Rivet’s concerns about diversity becoming extinct, it remains, transforms, and persists. Another aim of this section was to show visitors that despite Rivet’s belief that human diversity was bound to end due to the ongoing extermination of native populations, which is very unlikely to happen. In Colombia, for instance, and many years after Rivet’s death in 1958, it is obvious that diversity prevails. While it is true that Colombians have endured an internal war marked by massacres, disappearances, bombings, kidnappings, targeted killings, and forced displacement since the first half of the twentieth century, one of the ways they have found solace and healing is in their specific cultures. 4.4% of Colombians are indigenous peoples who belong to 115 different cultures, and 22 of them are recognized as natives living in border areas. Afro-Colombians comprise 9.34% of the country’s inhabitants, and less than one percent identifies as Romani communities (DANE 2018). The team that conceptualized Glasshouses not only realized that

 For more than 100 years, Colombia was ruled by its 1886 Constitution which did not mention cultural diversity at all and stated that indigenous peoples were incapable of self-governing. It was only in 1991 that the constitution changed and awarded rights to indigenous people, black communities, and other underrepresented groups. The 1991 Constitution legally changed the conventional approach to these communities and the National Museum wanted to highlight this shift.

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Rivet’s journey contributed to our understanding as Latin American societies but also allowed us to see how our values and beliefs have changed over time.

Now What? As much as Glasshouses can be seen as a key exhibition for the National Museum of Colombia’s endeavors to fulfill its renovation plan and be a critical, welcoming space for all visitors, there have been some issues that need revision. Educators such as Suárez and Tafur believe that this display is only a starting point. I agree. Some public reactions made it evident that much work still needs to be done. For instance, Lillian Contreras Fajardo, journalist of the El Espectador newspaper writes in an article published on January 5, 2022, about diversity perceptions and after describing Glasshouses, she mentions a very telling personal experience. Before leaving the exhibition, a mediator asked what she would like to display on the wall of “Recognized Diversity” that represented her identity, given the opportunity. “I had no answer and still do not. I have always thought about diversity from the other’s point of view, not my own” (Contreras Fajardo 2022). The journalist’s words have several implications. First, it reminds us of anthropologist Johannes Fabian’s book Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object when he refers to the ways in which the observers distance themselves from the observed to represent it, describe it, and objectify it (Fabian 2014). This separation divides people and reinforces colonial stereotypes of the other as exotic. Fajardo’s realization that she is also part of a diverse society and her experiences matter, is a step in the right direction. However, some museum visitors did not agree with the way in which Glasshouses addressed Rivet’s figure and diversity. These criticisms were posted mainly on social media and consisted of opinions that, for example, expressed concern with the decision to not emphasize enough of Rivet’s intellectual contributions and not display part of his texts. In a chain of Facebook messages, some people voiced that the curatorial approach to Glasshouses followed a random logic, making the exhibition an inconsistent diversity account. The team of curators and I did this deliberately. We did not strive for linear academic readings but for letting the visitors have their own interpretations. In a society used to thinking of the National Museum as an authoritative space where people go to learn in a conventional way, changing narratives and frameworks causes resistance. Suárez and Tafur also mention that even their attempts to develop alternative educational strategies have suffered pushbacks (2022). Thus, they have realized that this process should start within the institution and requires time. To transform non-conventional exhibition narratives of “great man, battles, and one-sided history,” as its 2001 director Elvira

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Cuervo de Jaramillo expressed (2001), into more horizontal accounts, the educators of the museum must fight to follow Gyan Prakash’s directive for museums to tell “inappropriate things,” which challenge traditional concepts of authority, power, and knowledge production (2004, 317–324).

Bibliography Ariese, Csilla E., and Magdalena Wróblewska. Practicing Decoloniality in Museums: A Guide with Global Examples. Amsterdam University Press, 2021. Ariza, Libardo José. Identidad indígena y derecho estatal en Colombia. Bilbao: Cuadernos Deusto de Derechos Humanos, 2004. Botero Cuervo, Clara Isabel. El redescubrimiento del pasado prehispánico de Colombia: viajeros, arqueólogos y coleccionistas, 1820–1945. Bogotá: Instituto Colombiano de Antropología e Historia, Universidad de Los Andes, 2006. Brulon, Bruno. “Decolonising the Museum? Community Experiences in the Periphery of the ICOM Museum Definition.” Curator: The Museum Journal 64.3 (2021): 439–455. Contreras Fajardo, Lilian. “Una exposición sobre la diversidad: ¿Qué es eso que me representa? El Espectador.” https://blogs.elespectador.com/cultura/liarte-dialogo-sobre-arte/una-exposicion-ladiversidad-me-representa (May 23, 2022). Cuervo de Jaramillo, Elvira. “Qué mostramos, qué escondemos.” El Espectador, March 1, 2001, Newspaper clip found at the National Museum of Colombia Archive. DANE (Departamento Administrativo Nacional de Estadística). Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda, 2018. https://www.dane.gov.co/index.php/estadisticas-por-tema/demografia-y-poblacion /censo-nacional-de-poblacion-y-vivenda-2018 (May 23, 2022). Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press, 2014. Flor Ortega, Naila Katherine. “Eduardo Santos y el mecenazgo cultural: la donación al Museo Nacional de Colombia.” Cuadernos de curaduría: Aproximaciones a la historia del Museo Nacional 14 (2019): 114–144. Green, Jack. “General Treatment: Museums as Intermediaries in Repatriation.” Journal of Eastern Mediterranean Archaeology and Heritage Studies 5.1 (2017): 6–18. Ibermuseos. Roundtable of Santiago de Chile, 1972, vol. 1. http://www.ibermuseos.org/en/resources/ publications/mesa-redonda-de-santiago-de-chile-1972-vol-1/ (May 23, 2022). Laurière, Christine. Paul Rivet, Le Savant & Le Politique. Paris: Publications Scientifiques du Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, 2008. Museo Nacional de Colombia. Visión del Museo 2017–2023. https://www.museonacional.gov.co/elmuseo/vision/Paginas/Vision.aspx (May 23, 2022). Ohchr-Colombia. “Igualdad, Dignidad y Tolerancia: Un desafío para El Siglo XXI.” OHCHR Library Catalogue, searchlibrary.ohchr.org/record/3545, 2001 (May 8, 2023). Prakash, Gyan. “Museum Matters.” Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts. Ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell. Malden: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 317–324. Rivet, Paul. “La etnología, ciencia del hombre.” Revista del Instituto Etnológico Nacional I, 1 (1942): 1–6. Rivet, Paul. Los orígenes del hombre americano. México: Cuadernos Americanos, 1943.

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Rodríguez Pardo, María Paola. “Origen de la institución museal en Colombia: entidad científica para el desarrollo y el progreso.” Cuadernos de curaduría. Aproximaciones a la historia del Museo Nacional 14 (2008): 1–21. Suárez Caro, Alejandro. Personal Interview, conducted by Jimena Perry. May 11, 2022. Tafur, Mayali. Personal Interview, conducted by Jimena Perry. May 11, 2022. Vergo. Paul, ed. The New Museology. London: Reaktion Books, 1989.

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Celebrating Bad Times: The Epideictic Work of Museums of Racial Trauma Introduction Throughout the twentieth century, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History (NMAH) had housed the sole narrative of the nation’s history in the national capital. That it is now joined by Smithsonian museums displaying American Indian and African American histories, with museums of American Latino and women’s histories in the works, emphasizes the American history museum’s ambiguous role in telling the national story. In fall of 2021, visitors to the NMAH were confronted by this ambiguity in its central lobby. Filling its large marble back wall was, as always, the oversized golden sculpture of a rippling American flag that marks the entrance to the Star-Spangled Banner gallery. This exhibit was purpose-built in 2008 into a shrine worthy of the mythic flag that materializes American communal identity (Weiser 2017, 78–83). But the side wall of that lobby was now filled by a vitrine explaining why the Wampanoag Indian nation continued to call for a day of mourning to replace Thanksgiving Day – a national holiday devoted to the myth of their ancestors being invited to a feast by grateful Pilgrim settlers in 1621, erasing the ensuing centuries of land wars and genocide with pumpkin pie. And in the very center of the open lobby was a battered purple road sign such as those seen across the U.S. to mark historic sites. This one marked a different history – the site in Mississippi where the mutilated body of 14-year-old Emmett Till was found after white vigilantes kidnapped, tortured, and killed him in 1955, a lynching which galvanized national sentiment for the burgeoning civil rights movement. Multiple bullet holes obscured the metal marker. “Till signs have been stolen, thrown in the river, replaced, shot, replaced again, [and] shot again,” the NMAH’s signage told visitors. “The racism that led to Emmett Till’s murder endures.” The museum display might have stopped there, a piece of history with some disturbing undertones – but instead it used the artifact to highlight present-day violence and counter-violence efforts. Walking around the four sides of the vitrine, visitors could read the NMAH’s depiction of how the Emmett Till Memorial Commission continues to combat systemic racism in the county where Till died, and how continued damage to the memorial sign is “not random vandalism. The calculated violence mimics attacks on Till’s body and is intended

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to terrorize Black people.”1 Visitors could also read that anti-Back violence remains a daily threat today, yet Black activists everywhere expose “the afterlife of slavery and Jim Crow.” Finally, they could see, via the accompanying photo of a young boy using a megaphone to address a crowd of Black Lives Matters protestors, that today’s activists are answering bullets with bullhorns, and their protests are a celebration of life. As the museum signage concludes, “Centering Black life and protest, Black activists are not just fighting for change: they are imagining the world anew — a world where the joy of Black children like Till cannot be stomped out” (Reckoning 2021). Situated directly in front of the Star-Spangled Banner, the Emmett Till display, like the Wampanoag vitrine, was a powerful symbol that the master narrative of American history contains more than the unfettered glory of “Old Glory” the flag.2 As a nearby column informs visitors, “The stories of our past are more complicated than they might seem. Here we celebrate and mourn, explore and question.” This revision of the national historical narrative is in itself remarkable – but it comes at a moment that makes it all the more so, when across the U.S. there are protests at state houses and in courtrooms insisting that this more complicated heritage is itself what leads to the toxic divisions polarizing the nation. By mid-2022, some twothirds of the states’ legislatures had either debated or passed bans on what are called “divisive concepts” in classrooms, bans foreclosing discussions in public educational settings of such issues as gender identity and sexual orientation, Western colonialism, and, most particularly, systemic racism (Pendharker 2022; LePage 2021). For the protestors and their legal/political promoters, it is knowledge of injustice, not injustice itself, that causes polarization. While the debate over what we teach our children has made classrooms a battleground for more than a century, that other arena for public education, the public history museum, is increasingly speaking directly to the traumatic moments of the collective identity. Multiple new “museums of conscience” (see Sevcenko 2010) from Montgomery, Alabama to Delta, Utah are dedicated to highlighting overlooked subaltern voices and bringing to light narratives of troubled times, countering the “knowledge is division” argument. As we have seen, their message of a more complicated history is reaching all the way to the halls of the national story at the

 Rhetorician Dave Tell’s 2019 book Remembering Emmett Till, University of Chicago Press, looks at the debates over memorials to Till throughout the South.  For a discussion of the representation of Emmett Till’s story in the National Museum of African American History and Culture, see the chapter by Amy Sodaro in this volume.

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NMAH, and they are speaking out with little public outcry and a great deal of success.3 How is this possible? I argue in this chapter that these museums are using the rhetoric of epideixis to recalibrate the national narrative. Epideixis, or epideictic rhetoric, promotes the communal values that guide a community toward particular actions by its stylistic celebration (or condemnation) of past actors and their actions. Through public performances, it encourages communities to identify with praiseworthy values, to say “yes, this is who we are,” and thereby choose actions that embody that praiseworthy identity. Highlighting traumatic heritage as obscured pieces of American history while celebrating the resilience of the affected communities and the expectation (or hope) that visitors will want to join them in the continuing struggle, these museums are far from perpetuating division. Instead, they are centering at the heart of the American story subaltern resistance to systemic oppression as the celebration of an expanded national narrative. This is a narrative that they believe their audience will want to hear and therefore one that rhetorically calls into being just such an audience. Condemning injustice but celebrating humanity, they invite their visitor audience to learn and to choose actions that ally with their celebratory vision.

Restorative Rhetoric I call the epideixis that these museums are practicing a form of restorative rhetoric, building on initial work in crisis management by Donyale Griffin-Padgett and Donatrice Allison (2010), in which rhetors respond to public crises with a focus not on image-repair of the perpetrators but on mitigating emotional and material damage to the victims. Its hallmarks are the reconciliation requirements of truthtelling and restitution. In the museum, restorative rhetoric means that curatorial and educational staff combine narrative and artifact to manifest new truths (condemning systemic injustice, celebrating human resilience), with the aim of persuading visitors not only to learn about a hidden past but to identify with a more expansive version of present-day communal identity. The museums of conscience I am studying are largely founded by subaltern communities and staffed by subaltern professionals and thus are part of the

 For instance, in 2022 the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, AL was named Alabama’s “Attraction of the Year”; the Greenwood Rising Center in Tulsa, OK finished seventh in a national newspaper poll of best new attractions of 2021 and brought over 20,000 visitors to Greenwood in its first four months of operation; the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, DC receives about 2,000,000 visitors a year.

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movement to decolonize museums – but their recovery and re-narration of oppressive history goes beyond diversifying staff and repatriating artifacts. They are also delinking ways of thinking from traditionally dominant aesthetics and epistemologies and thus delinking ways of selecting, narrating, and displaying the ideas behind the artifacts (see Brulon Soares 2020; Mignolo 2007). They are, in sum, delinking “American history” from “privileged white American history.” As a board member of the West Virginia Mine Wars Museum in Matewan, West Virginia (opened 2015) puts it, “This is the first time that our people are in charge of our own history” (Steele). These sites are also largely a twenty-first century phenomenon: half of the museums I examine have opened only within the past ten years, and the majority are not in big coastal cities but smaller conservative cities and towns scattered across the American heartland. Their new identity construction fights historical amnesia by promoting contested, or difficult, heritage (see Poulot 2012): contested because of conflicting narratives but difficult because the aim is not simply to drown out the older narrative and its narrators. As Lonnie Bunch, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, writes of the mission of the largest of these new museums, the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) in Washington, DC (opened in 2016), his hope as its founding director was to make the NMAAHC “a site of transformation that would make America better [. . .] by helping to bridge the chasms like race that have divided America since its inception, [. . . crafting] a vision that we hoped would help a country heal” (2019, 31). The NMAAHC motto encapsulates Bunch’s belief that epideictic truth-telling can bring communal reconciliation: “A People’s Journey, A Nation’s Story.”

Re-narrated Memory Scholars of nationalism have noted that the concept of “national identity” is in fact quite recent – no more than three hundred years old now, according to sociologist Benedict Anderson (1983) and not coincidentally about as old as the oldest national museum. Yet each nation often has stories of its identity, preserved in those museums, that go back into the mists of time. This collective identity is forged by the sharing of what sociologist Maurice Halbwachs (1992 [1925]) termed collective memory, the told and retold stories of an asserted shared past. Collective memories, though, can forge more than the dominant memory – subaltern groups also heavily use collective counter-memories and the telling of group narratives to forge their own survivance identities of the resilient community. Communication scholar Bernard Armada notes that “somewhere beneath the surface

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of all presentations of the past lie the potentially defiant voices of marginalized groups awaiting fulfillment in the crucible of public controversy” (1998, 236). In a variety of new museums, marginalized voices are forging these new narratives in that crucible of the debate over history. As the newly repurposed American Civil War Museum in Richmond, Virginia4 puts it, the battle has moved “from a war of blood to a war of memory” – and these new museums are determined to renarrate the received memories. Such sites act as counters to the purposeful forgetting that allows dominant peoples to maintain their illusion of innocence. “On face value,” as memory scholars Matthew Houdek and Kendall Phillips write, “memory and forgetting in such contexts can be viewed in binary opposition to one another, and the call to remember serves as a means to grant both legitimacy and recognition to those who have suffered and as a way to confront past wrongdoings” (2017, 11). Acknowledging a difficult past acknowledges that survivors have a right to tell their story. This is the truthtelling side of these museums of conscience – telling not simply the forensic truth, “getting the story straight,” but the epideictic truth that uses past events to invoke present-day collective values and identities. As Aristotle put it in defining epideixis (1991, 1358b), this branch of rhetoric speaks to its audience’s present-day concerns, but it does so by “reminding [the audience] of the past,” while its focus on the values inherent in those past examples means it is also “projecting the course of the future” by highlighting the kinds of values that should guide any decision-making. Aristotle’s example of the eulogy at a state funeral is still apt: the deceased is held up as a model of certain virtues that the eulogist aims to persuade the audience to carry on in their stead. Today, we have less social space for what would feel to many like propagandistic state funerals, grand parades, etc. – grandiloquent speeches on patriotic holidays are less likely to stir the communal narrative. Today, then, curators, exhibition designers, community partners, etc., materialize a community’s values and beliefs into the carefully designed exhibitions filling its museums. As sites focusing on reconciliation as well as on truth-telling, museums of conscience also confront what Houdek and Phillips call the “productive and even necessary cultural practice of public forgetting” (2017, 12) – forgetting the emotional agonism, that is, though not the act itself. Rhetorician Bradford Vivian argues that forgetting is a necessary part of “beginning again” after social ruptures – incorporat-

 The American Civil War Museum is a merger of the Museum of the Confederacy (opened 1896) and the more inclusive American Civil War Center (opened 2006). In 2019, the two entities opened in their new combined home at the historic Tredegar Ironworks, bringing together the plethora of artifacts from the Confederacy Museum with the Center’s diverse narratives and “goal of serving less as a site of reverence and more as a site of conscience and understanding”, according to its director, Christy Coleman (cited in Oliver 2018).

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ing the event into collective history without “refighting the war” or reliving the trauma. Remembering and forgetting, he says, should therefore be seen not as binaries but instead as reciprocal (2010, 9). In difficult situations, to forget is to allow for repentance without the paralyzing shame that makes repentance less likely, and reciprocal forgiveness allows society to move forward. It is true that shame is a great motivator, a master emotion, and it is always tempting to try to get those we see as perpetrators to feel shame for their actions, to recognize “I am bad.” But as psychologists point out, what shame actually motivates us to do is to avoid situations where we will feel ashamed. Clinical psychologist Joseph Horak writes that highly shamed individuals are some of the most difficult to work with, even for professionals in therapeutic practice, for they respond with a mix of blame and shame toward self and others as negative memories interfere with their ability to empathize, develop a capacity for intimacy, and forge relationships (Weiser et al. 2007, 567). Thus, rhetorically, shame is not a persuasive motivator for reconciliation. Promoting truth and reconciliation, restorative museums construct a narrative aiming to inspire visitors to acknowledge painful truths while embracing those values that repair the historical rupture. Thus, as we see, the lobby of the NMAH constructs a narrative that proclaims a collective body that values this flag that flies “oe’r the land of the free and the home of the brave” – a collective body that, it asserts, is now mature enough to include among its brave freedom-loving Americans the Emmett Till Commission, Black Lives Matter activists, and the Wampanoag Nation, creating with their struggles a new more expansive American identity. Expanding this narrative, the juxtaposed exhibitions assert, we neither mourn the past nor shame the present but instead celebrate the diversity and resilience of a more complete cast of characters in what we acknowledge as a more complex American story. For instance, in the new Legacy Museum, opened in 2021 in Montgomery, Alabama as a fourfold expansion of its original 2018 site, visitors journey through galleries depicting the history of anti-Black violence in the U.S., beginning with kidnapping and slavery, continuing with the long horror of lynchings and other terrorism, and carrying forward into the present with mass incarceration and violence.5 The museum, founded by lawyers from the Equal Justice Initiative (EJI), lays out its argument step by careful step to link past instances of white oppression of Black Americans with racialized incarceration in the present.6 It concludes, however, not with the logics of tragedy but with the poetics of celebration. Amid uplifting music and glowing lights, visitors enter the final Reflection Space,  For an extensive discussion of the narrative techniques of the new Legacy Museum, see the chapter by Amy Sodaro in this volume.  See Sturken 2022, and Hasian & Paliewicz 2020, for discussion of public memory in the original museum and memorial site.

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an oblong gallery filled floor to ceiling with the faces of those who are heroes in the centuries-long fight against racial injustice. These myriad individuals, hundreds of whose images look out at the visitor, are epideictic inspirations, people who upheld values with which, as with the eulogized, visitors are invited to identify. A large quotation on one wall encourages visitors to carry forward these aspirational values into their real-world lives: “If we have the courage and tenacity of our forebears, who stood firmly like a rock against the lash of slavery, we shall find a way to do for our day what they did for theirs” (Reflection Space 2021). This epideictic museum rhetoric re-narrates history, changing it from a simpler story of unhindered progress – injustices progressively overcome – into a more complicated story of Black Americans’ creative resistance to the oppression meted out by white Americans, along with an aspirational call to all to ally in the ongoing struggle. Importantly, it is still a national identity story of praise and progress – only the praise is nuanced and the progress more hard-fought, a more “complex” story, as the NMAH calls it.

Narrating the Complex Story The epideictic truths brought forward in museums of conscience bring to the fore the voices of those who have been wronged while encouraging audience identification with embodied values of resistance and resilience. We see an example of this re-narration of the American story in the newly opened Greenwood Rising Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. On a late spring day in 1921, in an era choked with incidents of anti-Black and anti-immigrant violence across the nation, Tulsa exploded in what became the worst race massacre in U.S. history. When it was over, hundreds of residents of the prosperous Greenwood neighborhood were dead, thousands were homeless, and the area known as “Black Wall Street” was almost completely destroyed, ransacked, and burned to the ground.7 The incident was then largely obliterated from official national (and local) memory – until an effort to change the narrative spearheaded by Black Tulsans resulted in the Greenwood Rising Center, which opened in late 2021. Located on the central intersection of Tulsa’s Greenwood neighborhood, the Center uses impressionistic video and holographic displays alongside personal testimonies, oversized photos, and a small collection of artifacts to make visceral the violence of that day. It explicitly ties the Tulsa massacre to America’s ongoing heritage of systemic anti-Black violence, historic amnesia, and the struggle to act for racial  For scholarly treatments of the massacre and its aftermath, see Ellsworth 2021; Messer 2021.

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justice. At the same time, it is openly restorative, aiming to build bridges toward a truer, more expansive history as a means to heal divisions. As an initial sign tells visitors, the Greenwood Center is not “shying away from our darkest moments,” but staff “understand the discomfort that may come from confronting this difficult history,” and they “value the emotional wellbeing of all visitors.” The reconciliation they aim for, though, is targeted less toward feeling good (the present-day concern of those whites seeking to ban anti-racist discussions) than acting good. Like the Reflection Space at the Legacy Museum, the Greenwood Center holds up individuals and their actions for praise. For Greenwood, this includes not only the ancestors who survived and rebuilt the neighborhood, but also present-day residents, both known and anonymous. The exhibition begins with the overview video Still We Rise, filming contemporary residents alongside Maya Angelou’s famous poem Still I Rise, with its opening stanza “You may write me down in history / With your bitter, twisted lies, / You may tread me in the very dirt / But still, like dust, I’ll rise” (Angelou 1978). The video, as well as an end gallery documenting Greenwood’s “rising” over the intervening decades, makes clear the deep celebration of resilience that is at work here: in a place dedicated to a massacre and a neighborhood later redamaged by urban renewal, the existence of the Center itself, along with the visitors it brings to this neighborhood, is a hopeful symbol for its future reemergence. Greenwood rises, both pragmatically and idealistically, by unflinchingly uncovering the past. After several multimedia galleries set the scene of 1920s Greenwood, both within Oklahoma and Black America, it moves to its Arc of Oppression galleries. In a spare blackbox room with stark white lettering and photos of antiBlack violence, legal and extralegal, the first gallery documents four themes – political disenfranchisement, economic discrimination, social segregation, and terror – that it collectively names the “Systems of Anti-Blackness in America.” These four systems, it makes clear, are the real causes of the domestic terrorism that led to the Tulsa massacre. In the next room, oversized videos on burned-out building hulks re-enact the rampaging of the neighborhood (see Figure 1). Personal testimonies from survivors read aloud add to the emotional impact. However, the gallery leaves unnamed the individuals, even the main perpetrators, who carried out the massacre. As a panel explains, “the fundamental causes of the event included other underlying factors such as institutional racism, jealousy, land lust, media sensationalism, and the presence of the domestic terrorist organization, the Ku Klux Klan” (Arc of Oppression 2021). The decision to focus on systems of violence rather than individual perpetrators is particularly notable for Greenwood because Oklahoma is also home to a particularly famous site commemorating another incident of domestic terrorism, the Oklahoma City National Memorial Museum (OKC), a much larger complex opened in 2001 to remember the 168 victims of the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Fed-

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Figure 1: Images of the Tulsa Race Massacre combine art, photos, and audio testimony screened on surfaces built to resemble the ruins of buildings. Photo by M. Elizabeth Weiser, 2022, used with permission of the Greenwood Rising Center.

eral Building in 1995. In the OKC, blame for the attack rests almost solely on the shoulders of individuals, on Timothy McVeigh and his co-conspirators. At the beginning of its galleries, four small cases make the link between McVeigh and the rise of what the museum terms “hate groups,” which it describes broadly as “exist[ing] throughout the history of the U.S. and the world,” but in the rest of the museum, when the museum discusses blame for the attack, it rests almost exclusively with the three individuals.8 Where the Greenwood Rising Center displays a Ku Klux

 There is one plain sign near the end of the exhibition which points toward more systemic causes. Entitled “Domestic Terrorism: Where are We Today?” it states that it is “making the connections of the past to the present”. It points out that there is no federal law against terrorism, and that “radicalized Americans” changed the nation forever. But it connects to the present only obliquely, asking, “Do you see a relationship from the violence that occurred on this site and events happening in our world today?” Compare this to the signage at the end of the Greenwood Center, which devotes dense paragraphs to topics such as reparations, gentrification, public health, and the “rights and responsibilities” of engaging in dialogue.

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Klan uniform and a sign for Oklahoma’s segregated rail cars, the OKC displays McVeigh’s auto and the t-shirt he was wearing when caught. This difference in where to place blame – individuals or systems – can be read in several ways. On the one hand, a focus on individuals obscures the ongoing problem of domestic terrorism in the U.S. On the other hand, a focus on systems obscures the fact that systemic acts are perpetrated by individuals. Either approach may potentially keep visitors from recognizing their ongoing and individual requirement to resist oppression outside the museum, but I would argue that deemphasizing the systemic causes of a trauma makes it harder to engage visitors in ongoing restitution. For example, like many museums of conscience, both sites include galleries that ask visitors to reflect on how their visit has affected them, but the OKC, with its story ending with the prosecution of the individual perpetrators, only asks whether visitors’ opinions have changed, while the more systemically focused Greenwood Rising Center is able to implicate the individual visitor in restitution by asking how they will change their actions. Both museums focus on the “rising” of their communities after the trauma of the event, and both highlight mutual care and economic recovery as models of their successful recovery. But the two present a very different sense of just what they are rising from.

Negotiating Justice These two Oklahoma sites demonstrate the difference between two available models of justice: retributive justice and restorative justice. Retributive justice is a cornerstone of modern legal theory, holding that when an individual breaks the law, the law ensures that they suffer an appropriate punishment. Thus, the focus in the OKC museum is on bringing McVeigh and his conspirators to justice under the law. There is of course a necessary focus on the forensic fact-finding evidence of judicial rhetoric and thus the seeming presentation of historical truth. But this forensic evidence is musealized into a narrative exhibition that is itself also a form of epideixis, praising certain values (using the law to establish guilt and mete out punishment, including in this case condemning the guilty to death) and condemning other values (killing the innocent via extralegal means like the bombing). A highlighted sign demonstrates nicely this museum focus on using the forensic evidence to highlight values. It features the image and statement from one of the judges to a co-conspirator: “It is truly ironic that the very government and the Constitution [. . .] you professed to hate is the very government that assured you a fair trial and protected your rights.” Constitutional legality triumphant is the praised virtue of a retributive system.

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Most museums staffed by and focused on marginalized people, however, do not take a retributive approach – in part because they cannot. White middle-class Oklahomans in 1995 (like white middle-class New Yorkers several years later)9 could expect retributive justice from the courts and sympathy from the nation, while Black middle-class Oklahomans in 1921 were offered neither. As the Greenwood gallery on the aftermath of the massacre notes, the official response of white Oklahoma was to “Deny, Deny, Deny: Some victims of the massacre turned to the legal system to hold perpetrators accountable. These efforts were uniformly unsuccessful.” It quotes the mayor at the time as saying, “First – Responsibility: Let the blame for this negro uprising lie right where it belongs – on those armed negroes and their followers who started this trouble and who instigated it and any persons who seek to put half the blame on the white people are wrong and should be told so in no uncertain terms” (Arc of Oppression 2021). Without the history of individual legal justice to put on display, therefore, and with a greater recognition of the power dynamics at play even in individual actions, museums of racial and other subaltern trauma focus instead on restorative justice, which aims at reshaping the communal life by emphasizing the role of truth-telling and restitution. Restorative justice is most closely associated with the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission after the end of apartheid. Archbishop Desmond Tutu, who chaired the Commission, described their approach as “concerned not so much with punishment as with correcting imbalances, restoring broken relationships – with healing, harmony and reconciliation” (1998, sec. 36). This is not an easy line to walk. Amnesty – communal forgiveness without punishment – for individual repentant perpetrators is counter to the model of justice championed by retribution, and, as a recent article by rhetoricians Andre E. Johnson and Earle J. Fisher points out, it is a model demanded most often of marginalized victims. In an examination of the forgiveness offered by members of Mother Emanuel AME Church after white supremacist Dylann Roof killed nine of their members in 2015, they write, The wider public not only expects a rhetoric of forgiveness when racial ghosts of the past (and present) manifest in ways that cause black pain but also [that] those grief-stricken black families must offer the forgiveness in non-threatening and expeditiously [sic] ways that ease public consciences [. . .]. This understanding of forgiveness sets almost inhumane expectations on African Americans and limits them from authentically grieving” (Johnson & Fisher 2019, 5, 10).

Citing Jamilah Lemieux, they worry that a focus on the immediate forgiveness of the victims stifles an examination of “the Dylann Roof who lives in the hearts of far too many white Americans” (2019, 13). As Tutu himself notes, the amnesty pro The National 9/11 Memorial and Museum takes a similar approach to that of Oklahoma City.

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cess of reconciliation “is indeed a very high price to ask the victims to pay” (2009, 55). But attention to restorative justice at a collective level is often marginalized communities’ only alternative to a deliberate national amnesia – an amnesia that suppresses trauma instead of healing it (see Baker 2001; Vivian 2010). This suppression of history is precisely the problem that museums of conscience are established to address, and, as we saw with the Greenwood Center, they focus the restitution efforts that accompany their exhibitions on changing the current actions of present-day visitors. Indeed, Alabama’s Legacy Museum, a project conceived by lawyers, can be seen as an effort to turn their legal efforts at retributive justice into a more public forum for restorative justice — and thereby also turn judicial rhetoric into epideixis. While the lawyers of the EJI provide legal representation to incarcerated individuals, their museum and its linked memorial are attempts to reach beyond the courts “to chang[e] the narrative about race in America.”10 That narrative – the values espoused by the nation – can only change when people are motivated to listen to a new narrative that they are persuaded better fits with the aspirational values they uphold for themselves. As I wrote in a recent article: Why praise communal values? To motivate people toward responsible civic engagement. “To praise a man is in one respect akin to urging a course of action,” as Aristotle noted (1367b). Here rhetoric reminds us that the dispassionate presentation of reason, logos, does not breed a motivation for unity without the affective attachment of emotion, pathos, given weight by the authority, ethos, of the institution. Without some sense of the benefit of common values there is little impetus to find common ground – and the starting point for common values lies more in emotional resonance than factual truth. For this reason, Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca argued in The New Rhetoric in 1969 that epideictic oratory “strengthens the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds” (1969/1991, 50), and therefore persuades people to create a desired future (Weiser 2021, 212).

Restorative justice, then, is in part pragmatic, in part ethical, and in part, I argue, epideictic, with its focus on reconstituting the values that forge collective identity. Its message is nicely summed up at the entrance to the Search for the Killer exhibition at the National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM) in Memphis, Tennessee. In this exhibition focused on the retributive justice directed toward James Earl Ray, assassin of Martin Luther King, Jr., the museum reminds visitors that holding Ray guilty is not enough. Signage cites what King himself said about the earlier assassination of John F. Kennedy: “that determining ‘who’ killed the president was not

 “About Us.” Equal Justice Initiative. 2021. https://eji.org/about/ (June 13, 2022). Even more clearly epideictic is the EJI’s National Memorial for Peace and Justice (2018), an emotionally wrenching, largely wordless site commemorating by name the over 4,000 African Americans lynched prior to 1950.

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as important as understanding ‘what’ killed him” — which, the exhibition clarifies, meant for King “a society that allowed hatred, false accusation, and violence to flourish” and led to the systemic evils of economic and political oppression (Search for the Killer 2002). This is the social analysis that sites focusing their condemnation on individual actors, like the OKC and the 9/11 Museum, fail to adequately explore.

An Epideictic Call to Action If the values condemned by epideixis are systemic, then the values praised are often communal – individuals uniting together with an understanding of their common goals. The NCRM demonstrates aptly this emphasis on the community. While its original (1991) narrative was focused more tightly on Dr. King and his legacy, its 2014 renovation brought to the fore the communal resilience of the entire civil rights movement. Situated on the site of the Lorraine Motel, where King was assassinated in 1968, the visitors’ path through the museum famously culminates in the motel room where King and his colleagues were staying on that final day. Visitors see the room just as it was set up in 1968, with its open door revealing a wreath marking the spot on the balcony where King fell. In the renovated museum, the motel room is still there, but Dr. King’s story is now woven into many stories of many individuals and groups who were part of the civil rights struggle, with galleries devoted to, among others, Ella Baker and SNCC, the Freedom Singers, the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party, and the specifics of the Memphis sanitation workers’ strike. Instead of a sense of an ending in 1968, extensive galleries now discuss the cultural and political changes invoked by Stokely Carmichael, Huey Newton, and the Black Power movement that emerged afterwards, along with the continuing struggle for voting rights that stretches past the election of Barack Obama and into the present day. The NCRM visually presents the call for visitors to join with these individual and communal heroes of the past, known and anonymous, starting with its opening introductory film, which documents the efforts of African Americans fighting for freedom and justice through the centuries. Strategically, it ends with silhouetted figures marching together – and as the screen pulls back the silhouetted marchers continue on, so that visitors enter the main galleries of the museum by joining the march. It is a cinematic but effective push for rhetorical identification with the marchers and their cause. Some might object that there is a risk of over-identifying museum-going with real-world work, but I would argue that by suggesting that the average visitor

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learning about civil rights is allied with the aspirational figures of the marchers, the museum is making a case for the willing open-mindedness necessary to change one’s narrative of the past. While the silhouetted marchers are walking for freedom, the visitor is called upon to walk through the galleries ahead, becoming aware of the gaps and misalignments in their own understanding of the American experience – an awareness that is the first step in restorative rhetorics, as one allows oneself to become more open to persuasion toward the new narrative and to being inspired by the exemplars of past resistance and resilience (see Figure 2). The massive National Museum of African American History and Culture goes even further in its depiction of the multifaceted struggle for racial justice. There the epideictic tropes of praise and blame are often physically juxtaposed within the same gallery in each of its three floors of historical exhibitions. For instance, depictions of the wealth of African kingdoms in the early modern era face, across a corridor, depictions of the growth of European kingdoms competing for the international slave trade. Written narratives of the brave work of abolitionists and freedmen compete with voiced narrations of the horrors of the slave market. The vitality of the sights and sounds of the New Negro movement confront clippings of the riots and lynchings of 1920s society. Brief overviews of the 1970s to 2000s point out that these decades have seen the rise of the Congressional Black Caucus and the impact of a flood of drugs, the global influence of Hip-Hop and efforts to change the negative narrative of Black men, Hurricane Katrina, Barack Obama, and the pain and power of Black Lives Matter. The NMAAHC makes it clear that celebration is in order — but it is a celebration tempered by a complicated history. The museum, therefore, settles on one key argument in its final history film, which is that the most un-American value of the current era is to ignore the reality of race in America. In a classic Ciceronian move, it states aloud what it imagines to be the counterpoint many of its white visitors would be thinking – that they do not see race. “I think post-racial is a word that white people made up so we wouldn’t have to deal with white supremacy and racism,” white educator Tim Wise says to start the final video. Black author Ta-Nehisi Coates tells Bill Moyers in an interview that “this is heritage; it’s with us, it’s with all of us. And it’s not with you because you’re white. It’s with you because you’re an American. Just like it’s with me because I’m an American. I have to live with this, too.” On the wall as one exits the history galleries is a statement from educator Naomi Murakawa: “If the problem of the twentieth century was in W. E. B. Du Bois’s famous words, ‘the problem of the color line,’ then the problem of the twenty-first century is the problem of colorblindness, the refusal to acknowledge the causes and consequences of enduring racial stratification” (A Changing America, 2014). The seemingly easy path (for white Americans) of ignoring race, wishing it away in the name of ending division – the path that protestors around the country today are pushing onto American schools –

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Figure 2: From the NCRM’s Memphis sanitation strike exhibit; this is one of many instances of civil rights supporters “on the march” throughout the museum. Photo by M. Elizabeth Weiser, 2022, used with permission of the National Civil Rights Museum.

is precisely the path that the NMAAHC argues is not the lesson to be taken about American values from its celebration of the creative resilience of Black America.11 Colorblindness is the path that forces the victims of ongoing racial oppression to prematurely forgive an injustice that is never addressed, never redressed, and therefore never eliminated. Meanwhile, on its two upper floors highlighting community and culture exhibitions, the NMAAHC provides a celebration of Black art, music, writing, oration, businesses, churches, social clubs, educational institutions, military service, sports, theater, etc., as an overflowing epideictic argument for both the creative communal enterprise and the central role of African Americans in the history of the nation. As Eric Pritchard points out with his analysis of restorative literacy practices in the Black Queer community, restorative practices go beyond resistance (necessarily centered on Others); they are also practices centering

 For further detailed discussions of the objectives and narrative structure of the NMAAHC’s exhibitions, see the chapter by Amy Sodaro in this volume.

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on the resilience of the community itself, creating lives lived on their own terms (2016, 35). After the resistance narratives of the historical section, this recentering of the national narrative onto the achievements of the Black community through time invites visitors to immerse themselves in a narrative where the Black experience is not peripheral but encompassing.

Restorative Reconciliation When I say, then, that these museums aim for reconciliation, it is not an uncomplicated reconciliation, not a mandate to forgive and forget. As Bryan Stevenson, founder of the EJI, notes on the introductory video of the Legacy Museum, “It is hard to confront these painful truths. But the powerful thing is, when we have the courage to learn the truth we open up doors that permit justice, that permit reckoning, that permit healing” (2022). Eric Doxtader, who has spent a career studying the South African reconciliation process, writes that agonistic disagreement is a key trait of real reconciliation, which requires “deliberative controversy about the form and substance of collective life” (2003, 278). Reconciliation is a negotiation not for a shared vision of the future but simply for a shared future, argues Byron Bland of the Stanford Center on Conflict and Negotiation (2022), meaning that participants in a reconciliation process must have a basic understanding that they need each other in the reconciled nation they hope to build. Museums focusing on traumatic moments and ongoing controversies can point out where that shared nation has ruptured, but museums that seek to persuade visitors to face those ruptures present a community’s tenacity and creativity as American values – common values that make a shared future seem both more natural and more desirable for all. While the recovery effort of silenced voices is critically important, then, it is these museums’ efforts to attract and engage a diversity of public visitors to history that has been ignored or considered divisive, depressing, or shameful that is their greatest contribution. Unlike an academic recovery study or cultural critique, these exhibitions are not speaking to an audience of like-minded scholars. Instead, they are speaking new truths to families on vacation, skeptical teens, or retirees who thought they’d learned “that” story in school long ago. They are contextualizing for foreign visitors a side of American history that is not promoted by the Voice of America or Hollywood. Most of all, they are providing a curated platform for silenced people to speak both to dominant group members and to members of their own formerly silenced community who are now visiting. These museums place new voices not into the mainstream of existing history but into a

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new mainstream of American history, inviting visitors to experience new perspectives from which to think about how the nation deals today with the legacy of racism; how we reconcile land and property takeovers and forced removals; how we recognize and respond to radicalized domestic terrorism. Rhetoricians Jacqueline Jones Royster and Molly Cochran note that “within the shell of ‘nation,’ all of these mythological imperfections have been comparably misaligned with motifs of the United States as the land of the free and the home of the brave. Their realities do not match the master narrative of freedom, truth, and justice” (2011, 215). Yet these are the kinds of difficult concepts that museums of conscience aim to persuade the casual visitor to confront as the history of “us” is expanded. Of course, museum professionals will caution that museums are not really that powerful, and they are right. The presence of a cultural institution does not by itself change the world. I believe, though, that the museum community may be overlooking both the impact of their own educational efforts (particularly with children at a time when their classroom teachers are being forbidden to raise difficult issues) and the significance of the voluntary nature of (adult) museum-going, which requires from museums a focus on persuasion that is unheard of in most other adult discourse spheres to more limited audiences. For people must choose to walk into a museum on a race massacre or the legacy of lynching – and as noted earlier, many more people than simply the already-converted seem to be doing so. In the voluntary public education forum of the museum, visitors enter primed by the site itself to be learners, and in the case of museums of conscience, they are primed to be learners of new truths. What would persuade them to be willing to have their unexamined beliefs challenged, their historical awareness expanded? Communication scholar Michael McGee would suggest that the rhetor “dangles a dramatic vision” before the audience (1975, 239), inviting them into a difficult but reconciling space. Chelsea Milbourne and Sarah Hallenbeck name certain situations “material chronotopes” that orient users in space-time through the particulars of their material-rhetorical arrangements – and entering the crafted space of a museum would certainly be an example of this orienting space (2013). Maurice Charland would add that the audience is addressed in that space “as a particular type of subject, and thus, in a sense, [is brought] into being as such” (1987, 176). Addressing the visitor as someone whom it expects will be moved by walking through its displays of epideictic exemplars, someone who is expected to answer, as at Greenwood, not the question “Will you take action toward racial reconciliation?” but “How will you take action?” the museum opens a door for the visitor to choose to take on the values of a particular kind of community member. Charland notes that in an audience-constituting rhetoric, there is an illusion of freedom, speaking of “the people” as a freely chosen entity even while declaring that they

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are bound to fulfill a certain prescribed destiny (1987, 139). Carolyn Miller argues that it is these space-time orientations themselves that produce the conditions that constrain certain human activities and make others possible (cited in Milbourne & Hallenbeck 2013, 405). In other words, by choosing to walk voluntarily into a museum on civil rights or internment or workers’ rights, we are bound by the spacetime of the museum itself, with its rhetorics of praise and blame, to become the kinds of people who consider fresh ideas with the rest of the people who, by being there doing the same, help orient us toward a new understanding of the communal narrative. In this narrative, previously marginalized or suppressed communities speak openly of their experiences and display their triumphs, and their resistance to the ongoing evil of systemic biases and oppressions is upheld as the work also asked of each person who wishes to participate in this version of the nation’s communal values. Rhetorician Cynthia Sheard’s foundational analysis of the changeproducing effect of epideictic rhetoric notes: Epideictic discourse today operates in contexts [. . .] that invite individuals to evaluate the communities or institutions to which they belong, their own roles within them, and the roles and responsibilities of their fellow constituents, including their leaders [. . .]. The interdependence of [. . .] the individual and the community is thus another recurrent theme of contemporary as well as classical epideictic (1996, 771).

Facing the ruptures of the past requires forms of redress – actions in the real world that go beyond commonality of feeling to the realized interdependence of community members. Under a retributive model of justice, the idea of reparation is individualized: Am I responsible for past wrongs done to you? Am I owed recompense for my ancestors? A restorative approach, in contrast, asks more broadly: What do we need to do to overcome this division? What is an appropriate collective response to this form of injustice? These restorative questions are judicial and policy-driven, but they begin with the materialization of collective values exhibited in the epideictic museum of conscience. What upends the “knowledge is division” argument, then, is the degree to which visitors have been persuaded that subaltern voices are not only praiseworthy in their truth-telling but are also at the center of an American history built on their creative resilience. For both dominant and subaltern visitors, the uncovered traumas of the past and its uplifted heroes serve as both goad and inspiration to “join the march” in the world beyond the museum, as the NCRM invites its visitors at the closing. One can always say no – persuasion is not compulsion – but doing so means rejecting as well the particular vision of the social imaginary upheld in the museum. In that imaginary, the histories recounted in exhibitions are not of outsiders challenging or interrupting “our” national story, either as perpetrators of injustice, as resistance fighters, or even as resilient community mem-

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bers rising from the ashes of trauma to celebrate again. They are all insiders, all a part of the “us” of the nation. If the national story is an everyone-story rather than a privileged-few story, then there are no discordant outsider voices either to disavow or to silence. All stories are part of the nation’s narrative – a complex history, as the NMAH puts it in its lobby with its flag, marker, and protest signs, to “celebrate and mourn, explore and question.”

Bibliography A Changing America. Permanent Exhibition. National Museum of African American History and Culture. Washington, DC, 2014 [ongoing]. Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Angelou, Maya. “Still I Rise.” And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems. New York: Random House, 1978. Arc of Oppression. Permanent Exhibition. Greenwood Rising Center. Tulsa, OK, 2021 [ongoing]. Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by George A. Kennedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Armada, Bernard. “Memorial Agon: An Interpretive Tour of the National Civil Rights Museum.” Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998): 235–243. Baker, Jr., Houston. Critical Memory: Public Spheres, African American Writing, and the Black Fathers and Sons in America. Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001. Bland, Byron. “What Does Sharing a Future Mean and How Do We Get There?” February 22, 2022, A Shared Future: Overcoming Polarization Discussion, Mershon Center for International Security Studies, Columbus, OH (via Zoom). Brulon Soares, Bruno. “Introduction.” Descolonizando a Museologia/Descolonizando a la Museología/ Decolonising Museology. Brulon, Paris: ICOFOM, 2020. 51–70. Bunch III, Lonnie G. A Fool’s Errand: Creating the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the Age of Bush, Obama, and Trump. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institute Press, 2019. Charland, Maurice. “Constitutive Rhetoric: The Case of the Peuple Québécois.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 73.2 (1987): 133–150. Doxtader, Eric. “Reconciliation – A Rhetorical Concept/ion.” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89.4 (2003): 267–292. Ellsworth, Scott. The Ground Breaking: An American City and Its Search for Justice. New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2021. Griffin-Padgett, Donyale, and Allison, Donatrice. “Making a Case for Restorative Rhetoric: Mayor Rudolph Giuliani & Mayor Ray Nagin’s Response to Disaster.” Communication Monographs 77.3 (2010): 376–392. Halbwachs, Maurice. On Collective Memory. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992 [originally published 1925]. Hasian, Marouf, and Nicholas Paliewicz. Memory and Monument Wars in American Cities: New York, Charlottesville and Montgomery. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Houdek, Matthew, and Kendall Phillips. “Public Memory.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. Oxford: Oxford University Press, January 2017.

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Johnson, Andre E., and Earle J. Fisher. “‘But, I Forgive You?’ Mother Emanuel, Black Pain and the Rhetoric of Forgiveness.” Journal of Communication and Religion 42.1 (2019): 5–19. LePage. Brooke. “These are the States that Passed Laws Restricting the Teaching of Racial History.” The 74, September 3, 2021, https://www.the74million.org/article/these-are-the-states-thatpassed-laws-restricting-the-teaching-of-racial-history/ (Jan. 5, 2023). McGee, Michael C. “In Search of ‘The People’: A Rhetorical Alternative.” The Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 235–249. Messer, Chris M. The 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre: Crafting a Legacy. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan, 2021. Mignolo, Walter D. “Delinking: The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality, and the Grammar of De-Coloniality.” Cultural Studies 21.2 (2007): 449–514. Milbourne, Chelsea Redeker, and Sarah Hallenbeck. “Gender, Material Chronotopes, and the Emergence of the Eighteenth-Century Microscope.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 43.5 (2013): 401–424. Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum. Permanent Exhibition. Oklahoma City, OK, 2000 [ongoing]. Oliver, Ned. “In the Former Confederate Capital, There’s No Longer a Museum of the Confederacy.” Virginia Mercury, Oct. 2, 2018. https://www.virginiamercury.com/2018/10/02/in-the-formercapital-of-the-confederacy-theres-no-longer-a-museum-of-the-confederacy/ (January 5, 2023). Pendharkar, Eesha. “Efforts to Ban Critical Race Theory Now Restrict Teaching for a Third of America’s Kids.” Education Week 41.21 (2022): 8. Perelman, Chaïm, and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca. The New Rhetoric: A Treatise on Argumentation. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1991 [1969]. Poulot, Dominique. “Introducing Difficult Pasts and Narratives.” National Museums and the Negotiation of Difficult Pasts. Ed. Dominique Poulot, José María Lanzarote Guiral, and Felicity Bodenstein. Linköping: Linköping University Electronic Press, 2012. Pritchard, Eric Darnell. Fashioning Lives: Black Queers and the Politics of Literacy. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2016. Reckoning with Remembrance: History, Injustice, and the Murder of Emmett Till. Temporary Exhibition. Sept. 3 – Nov. 2, 2021. National Museum of American History, Washington, DC. Reflection Space. Gallery. The Legacy Museum. Montgomery, AL. 2021 [ongoing]. Royster, Jacqueline Jones, and Molly Cochran. “Human Rights and Civil Rights: The Advocacy and Activism of African-American Women Writers.” Rhetoric Society Quarterly 41.3 (2011): 213–230. Search for the Killer. Exhibition. National Civil Rights Museum, Memphis, TN, 2002 [ongoing]. Sevcenko, Liz. “Sites of Conscience: New Approaches to Conflicted Memory.” Museum International 62.1–2 (2010): 20–25. Sheard, Cynthia Miecznikowski. “The Public Value of Epideictic Rhetoric.” College English 58.7 (1996): 765–794. Steele, Wilma. Homepage, West Virginia Mine Wars Museum. https://wvminewars.org (April 11, 2022). Stevenson, Bryan. “Visit the Legacy Museum.” YouTube, uploaded by Equal Justice Initiative, March 3, 2022. https://youtu.be/GEXTR5rOpDI (March 25, 2023). Sturken, Marita. Terrorism in American Memory: Memorials, Museums, and Architecture in the Post-9/11 Era. New York: New York University Press, 2022. Tutu, Desmond. “Foreword by Chairperson.” Truth and Reconciliation Commission of South Report, 1, Oct. 29, 1998, https://www.justice.gov.za/trc/report/finalreport/Volume%201.pdf (April 3, 2023). 1–23. Tutu, Desmond. No Future Without Forgiveness. New York: Random House, 2009.

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Vivian, Bradford. Public Forgetting: The Rhetorics and Politics of Beginning Again. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2010. Weiser, M. Elizabeth. Museum Rhetoric: Building Civic Identity in National Spaces. State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017. Weiser, M. Elizabeth. “Rhetorical Museology.” The Future of Tradition, ICOFOM Study Series 48.1 (2021): 207–221. Weiser, M. Elizabeth, Joseph J. Horak, and Debra Monroe. “Beyond Shame: The Dialogic Narrative and Comic Cognition.” JAC 27.3–4 (2007): 563–590.

Part III: Difficult Memories and Histories

Mark W. Rectanus

Narrative Spaces of Conflict and Social Repair: The Conflictorium and Museum of Conflict (Ahmedabad) Introduction The significance of residential spaces in everyday life, and the narratives that emerge from them, were underscored during the coronavirus pandemic, as houses, apartments, and other living spaces were repurposed as sites for working and learning, but also as places for reflection, sharing, and social repair.1 As sites of cultural work, houses also have extensive histories as artist studios, performance venues, museums and galleries, schools, and communal meeting places. While this chapter does not focus on the pandemic or questions of creative space and workspace, these issues and their conflicting spatial narratives also indicate the ongoing social ruptures and repairs that are registered across the contemporary museum landscape. This chapter will examine the ways in which a former home in Ahmedabad, India, which was repurposed as a museum and cultural center, has created dialogic platforms that engage visitors in multivalent experiences of conflict, rupture, and repair. The Museum of Conflict (MoC), as part of the overarching Conflictorium project, has not only become a site where visitors explore the narratives of historical conflict in India and the ruptures that have shaped the social space of Ahmedabad, India (that are often referenced as riots and protests), but also as a place where they can examine and share their personal narratives of conflict and participate in a process of social repair.2 The MoC and Conflictorium emerged from, and are located in, the former residence of a well-known local businesswoman, Bachuben Nagarwala, who bequeathed her house, Gool Lodge (named for her mother, Gool), to the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) in Ahmedabad. The CSJ subsequently made the building available to the Conflictorium’s founder, the interdisciplinary practitioner and artist Avni Sethi, and the project opened in 2013. While the Conflictorium website uses the designations “Con-

 The uses of lived spaces intersect with notions of “home”, “homeland”, and contested representations of identity in museum narratives (e.g., in heritage museums) and across cultural geographies. See Macdonald (2013) and Harrison et al. (2020).  The Conflictorium includes outreach projects that support artists’ interventions in public spaces and discussions with neighborhood groups. The Conflictorium and MoC also reflect the intersections of social justice and decolonization initiatives in India. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-014

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flictorium” and “Museum of Conflict” interchangeably, the project views the Conflictorium as a conceptual platform and center for social justice that includes, but also extends, the physical site of the MoC, e.g., when artists in residence create participatory projects that are realized in the public spaces of Ahmedabad. I will argue that the MoC productively mobilizes notions of conflict, which have shaped the contested communal relations of Ahmedabad. As one local publication noted, the work of the Conflictorium and MoC unfolds within the highly charged urban space of a “city of conflicts, mainly because of the 2002 riots that scarred our memories. The biggest skirmish between Hindus and Muslims, and the consequent class and racial discrimination that followed, has divided Ahmedabad” (People Place Project 2017, para. 5). In order to engage visitors in an exploration of conflict and social justice in India, the MoC has developed a multi-staged, multidimensional approach, which creates diverse narrative spaces, including galleries for exhibitions, spaces from the original house, art installations, and participatory spaces.3 Four permanent exhibitions provide the epistemological and affective contexts for understanding, (un)learning, or confronting the sources, historical trajectories, and narratives related to social conflict and oppression in Ahmedabad, in the State of Gujarat, and throughout India. These include the “Conflict Timeline” (history of Gujarat), “Gallery of Disputes” (folktales that metaphorically engage conflict), “Empathy Alley” (speeches by political figures, see Figure 1 and book cover), and “Moral Compass” (constitutional issues of social justice). The galleries were installed in the existing rooms in Gool Lodge, most of which comfortably accommodate small groups. As I will discuss below, the gallery spaces also enable visitors to make connections between the original residential space and the museum space.4 The participatory spaces of the MoC enable visitors to reflect upon the knowledge gleaned from the permanent exhibition galleries and share their responses to conflict by creating their own narratives that include memories and personal objects that they contribute to the Memory Lab and personal apologies that are hung on tags of the Sorry Tree (located outdoors). Artists’ installations for the MoC galleries and interventions in the public spaces of Ahmedabad conceptually and physically extend the epistemological foundation presented in the MoC exhibitions, engage visitors in an exploration of conflict, and provide a platform for supporting a heightened engagement in social justice. In addition, I will argue

 The MoC underwent a renovation during 2022–2023. As of this writing, the permanent exhibitions, as well as the Memory Lab and Sorry Tree, remain part of the MoC.  Regarding other spaces in the MoC see: Conflictorium, “The Space” (blog), April 14, 2013, https:// galleryofdisputes.wordpress.com/2013/04/14/the-space/ (January 9, 2023); Shruti Chaturvedi, “Conflictorium,” June 13, 2013, https://shrutichaturvedi.wordpress.com/2013/06/13/conflictorium/ (January 9, 2023).

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that the participatory and performative spaces of the MoC, which have pronounced affective and experiential dimensions, support forms of social repair.5 However, it should also be noted that much of the work of the MoC involves aspirational “first steps” that aim to engage visitors in learning and reflection, rather than a “roadmap” or specific strategies for conflict resolution. In order to conceptually frame and contextualize the analysis of the MoC and Conflictorium, I will begin by briefly discussing notions of narrative space, social repair, and affect as interrelated dimensions of the MoC experience that collectively contribute to the museum’s vision of engaging visitors and communities in a critical dialogue regarding conflict and social justice. These concepts also offer an analytical lens for examining the MoC. Following this overview, I will then turn to an analysis of the MoC, including the galleries, participatory spaces of the Memory Lab and Sorry Tree, and artists’ projects at the MoC. The chapter will conclude with a brief discussion of the Conflictorium project as a contribution to discourses on alternative heritage futures. Research on museums as narrative spaces frequently underscores place, architecture, exhibition design, or the spatial logics of the museum, all of which frame and contextualize visitors’ interpretations and experience of museum narratives. In Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions, Laura Hourston Hanks, Jonathan Hale, and Suzanne MacLeod observe that new museum projects are creating “‘narrative environments’; experiences which integrate objects and spaces – and stories of people and places – as part of a process of storytelling that speaks of the experience of the everyday and our senses of self, as well as the special and the unique” (2012, xix). In this regard, they also refer to the “inherently spatial character of narrative and storytelling and their potential to connect with human perception and imagination” (2012, xxi). While the MoC aims to make such connections between the museum’s narratives and the museum experience, it does not privilege one dimension or model of narrative space, one mode of storytelling, or one way of experiencing a narrative. By not presenting a unitary narrative strand or curatorial approach, the MoC also reflects Boris Groys’ observation that curating involves a process of telling “contradictory stories” (2013, 51). In “The Museum as Narrative Witness,” Jenny Kidd notes that museum visitors consider processes of “individual remembering” as more significant and central to the museum experience, rejecting notions of “a collective memory or a grand narrative” (2012, 81). As an alternative to narratives constructed solely by museums or,

 Participatory and performative dimensions are closely linked in the museum experience and as forms of art (Finkelpearl 2014).

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alternatively, positing the role of visitor narratives, Kidd concludes that museums frame their narrative projects by creating an “interface” between the subjectivity of visitors’ experience and the authority of “the institutional,” i.e., “a collaborative, fluid, responsive narrative space within which new ideas about self-ness, the museum, legitimacy, authority and ‘truth’ can be safely explored and valued” (2012, 81). Charles R. Garoian frames this collaboration between “the museum and its visitors as a dialogic process that enables a play between the public narratives of the museum and the private narratives of the viewers” (2001, 234). I would argue that the dialogic moment of multiple narratives (personal, collective, institutional) also indicates a negotiation between the epistemological aspirations of the museum (i.e., in knowledge transfer, education, and reflection) and the experiential frame(s) of individual visitors and communities. As will be discussed below, the narrative spaces of the MoC encourage visitors to engage in their own (re-)negotiation of the significance of conflict, as a process that occurs at the junctures of personal and communal life. This is a performative space in which visitors also reflect upon and share their own narratives and perceptions of conflict. Thus, in the context of the Conflictorium, I consider the notion of narrative space to be a negotiated space, i.e., an experience of negotiating the multiple narratives of the MoC and the performance of personal memories and narratives. The MoC not only aspires to enable young and adult visitors (aged 15–35) to critically engage and negotiate the narratives of conflict, and their competing claims within the museum but also to carry this awareness to the contexts of everyday life beyond the MoC. The historical narratives of conflict that are presented in the MoC’s galleries and the affective and performative dimensions of the Memory Lab and Sorry Tree are not only closely linked, as part of visitors’ overall experience of the museum, these interconnected spaces are also pivotal to the process of social repair. Omer Aijazi points out that the concept of social repair has been used in artistic, cultural, economic, environmental, and political discourses, including projects that seek socio-political reconciliation after periods of conflict and war, that support peace and justice studies, or address social policies of relief and recovery following natural disasters (2015, 15–16). In general, Aijazi concludes that discourses of social repair frequently address two processes: the “resumption of everyday life and re-humanization/reconstituting the self,” and “the agency of memory, hope and resistance as strategic tools for achieving social repair” (2015, 15). However, it is also important to note that the trauma of oppression and conflict cannot be solely addressed through therapeutic interventions that will lead to the “resumption of everyday life and re-humanization/reconstituting the self.” As used in the context of this chapter, the practices of social repair recognize and acknowledge the (historical) forces of conflict, displacement, violence, and oppression. Here, social repair involves individual and collective engagement with neighborhoods

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and communities that support dialogue, (un)learning, critical (self)reflection, healing, hospitality, activism, and reconciliation through art and culture. Yet, as artist Kader Attia has pointed out in his extensive work on notions of “repair,” social repair is fragmentary, incomplete, and must acknowledge the irreparability of trauma that has become woven into the individual and collective psycho-social fabric – i.e., contesting claims that trauma can be seamlessly “repaired” (2021).6 Moreover, in many respects, forms of social repair can only be effective with the advancement of social justice through systemic and institutional change. Here, it is useful to note the conceptual intersections between social repair and the Conflictorium’s goal of social justice, which is supported through a critical engagement with the histories and legacies of conflict. In part, the participatory projects and art installations in the MoC aim to foster (self-)reflection and (re)humanization, which are realized through “the agency of memory, hope and resistance” (Aijazi 2015), as processes of social repair that reflect an affective dimension of individual and collective interaction. Here, affect is a significant dimension of social repair. While affect is linked to a spectrum of (human) emotions, as Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg observe, affect also occurs within a complex constellation of forces and interactions that extend and complicate emotion: “Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside, or generally other than conscious knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward movement, toward thought and extension [. . .]” (2010, 1). Affect involves the complex dynamics, articulations, and expressions of socio-historical, political, and psychological relations as well as nonhuman forces (e.g., animal, biological, meteorological) that shape and are shaped by human interactions with them. These forces and dynamics underscore the relational and paradoxical aspects of affect, as embodied experience, that can simultaneously drive (re)actions and sublimate them. Social repair, like the notion of affect, as it is used here, recognizes the agonistic forces and ruptures of social trauma as well as the potentialities and fragmentary processes of “repair” and memory that cannot erase the scars of oppression. While the individual negotiation of visitor experience and the reception of museum narratives may involve traumatic memories of personal or communal conflict, the MoC aims to create spaces in which the socio-historical and political narratives presented in the galleries inform personal and collective experience (e.g., of caste, religion, and race). Thus, the interplay of epistemological and affective approaches in the MoC unfolds as a multidimensional process and

 For a more detailed discussion of Kader Attia’s concept of repair, see the chapter by Emma Bond in this volume.

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negotiation, as visitors explore the museum galleries, participate in the performative spaces of the Memory Lab and Sorry Tree, or view interventions by artists in residence in the museum or in public spaces.

The Museum of Conflict: Urban Spaces, Gallery Spaces, and Narrative Environments An understanding of the historical site of the MoC, located in the former home of Bachuben Nagarwala, is crucial to the MoC’s status within, and relations to, the surrounding neighborhood of Mirzapur, the City of Ahmedabad, and the State of Gujarat. During the renovation of Gool Lodge (2012–2013), Sethi and a group of volunteers who lived and worked in the house, became increasingly aware of the conflicts within Mirzapur and Ahmedabad. Sethi references the micro-politics of these urban spaces that reflect the complex challenges, social ruptures, and contexts in which the Conflictorium and the MoC emerged: Within a 500-metre radius of [Gool Lodge] live the Devi Pujak community, the Muslims and the community that does manual scavenging work7 [. . .]. It takes very little for a small brawl in this part of Mirzapur to become a stone-pelting event and then escalate into something that needs the army to come in [. . .]. One way of understanding this was that we were in the middle of conflict. Conflict was a term—an idea rather—that felt like it encompassed the nuances of all that was going on. Not only in Mirzapur but also what underlay Ahmedabad as a city and Gujarat as a state (2019, para. 9).8

These perspectival shifts from the site-specific spaces of Gool Lodge and Mirzapur to the macro-politics of Ahmedabad, Gujarat, and India unfold within the narrative and performative spaces of the MoC. The spaces within each area of the MoC might be conceptualized as clusters that form “narrative environments,” i.e., the interactions between visitors, permanent galleries with historical exhibits, and temporary art installations that emerge in the constellation of more than one narrative space, and which are aligned with the overarching objectives of the Conflictorium. The visit begins with a sound installation, In This House and That World, located in a niche under the main stairwell, which introduces visitors to the Conflictorium project. Here they learn about the life and work of the owner of Gool Lodge, Bachuben Nagarwala. This installation connects the historical space of the  Manual scavenging is defined as “the removal of human excrement from public streets and dry latrines, cleaning septic tanks, gutters and sewers”. This work was often relegated to the Dalit caste (“India’s manual scavenging problem,” 2020).  Also see Hossain 2021.

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house with the contemporary MoC by making the links between personal and public histories, and their spatial relations to outside conflicts, more explicit. A single visitor can sit in front of an old-style hairdressing mirror, which is framed with large bulbs, and listen to a narrative about Nagarwala, who is metaphorically embodied in the space of her house. The installation provides an invitation and context for engaging with the house, not only as Nagarwala’s personal and professional space that has been transformed into a museum, but also as an experiential, public space that has been surrounded by histories of conflict. In an interview, Sethi points out that Nagarwala, who belonged to the minority Parsi community, was a respected figure within her neighborhood, which was marked by frequent conflicts: They would throw acid bombs in soda bottles across this building [Gool Lodge], but never at it. As a young woman, she decided never to marry, she had no children, she died heirless. So, I think she lived a life of courage of a certain kind and maybe exemplified a certain kind of conflict or transformation in the way that she lived. (Mehta 2017, sec. 3, para. 2)

The installation positions Nagarwala as an empathetic figure who was well respected within the community and donated Gool Lodge to the Centre for Social Justice. Nagarwala’s biography and the visitors’ reflections sitting in front of the mirror may not only activate imaginary narratives in the retelling of the story, but it also contextualizes the role of the house and its owner. In this regard, the installation aims to activate both an affective, i.e., empathetic, perspective on Nagarwala’s life and work, as well as to create a space that references the genealogy of the museum as a residential space. The latter is reinforced as visitors encounter numerous architectural features of the original Gool Lodge (e.g., interconnected galleries that were residential spaces, balconies, and passageways). In addition, traces of the original furnishings (e.g., basins in corridors or a dresser drawer repurposed as part of an exhibit) evoke a heightened sense of the stories instantiated in those spaces but also acknowledge and suggest the ongoing presence and legacy of Nagarwala (People Place Project, para. 10–11). While the small space of the sound installation, and some of gallery spaces, may pose challenges as the number of visitors increases, the MoC underscores the value of repurposing and preserving heritage sites that are part of the cultural fabric of local communities, rather than selecting new construction projects or museum additions.9 Following the sound installation, In This House and That World, the museum narrative shifts from the biographical presentation of Nagarwala’s life to socio-

 The MoC could consider digital QR codes in the future, which would allow multiple users to access digitally recorded sound files, using their smart phones. Many heritage sites and art museums with limited space use this strategy successfully.

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political narratives, presented in three distinct narrative environments. Visitors encounter the first narrative environment, comprised of four galleries (floor 1 and 2), which traces the historical forces of conflict and their ongoing impact on contemporary culture and society. The second narrative environment builds on the historical documents, images, and stories that visitors encounter in the exhibitions by creating spaces that allow them to reflect upon their experience and also create and “perform” their own memories and narratives in the spaces of the Memory Lab (floor 1) and at the Sorry Tree (floor 2, balcony). A third narrative environment unfolds in spaces for artists’ installations or exhibitions (floor 1 and 2). The following sections explore the ways in which each of these narrative environments create diverse spaces and “stages” that support the Conflictorium’s vision of social justice while also inviting visitors to engage in a process of negotiating their personal narratives of conflict in the context of a museum experience. In order to establish a knowledge base for visitors, the first gallery begins with a “Conflict Timeline” that traces the histories of violence and oppression beginning with the founding of the State of Gujarat in 1960. This exhibition aims to counter popular perceptions in India that Gujarat was largely “a peace-loving state” and that periods of pronounced violence (e.g., during 2002) were “aberrations” (Mehta 2017, para. 7). In addition to the division of the Bombay State into the states of Gujarat and Maharashtra,10 the “Conflict Timeline” includes student strikes and protests during the 1970s in Gujarat, as well as ongoing documentation of social unrest throughout Ahmedabad well into the twenty-first century. The gallery presents these conflicts as counter-narratives that challenge visitors to engage in a process of unlearning. Nora Landkammer describes unlearning as a process of “returning to the knowledge one has learned in one’s own life – but in a critical fashion. Unlearning is a deconstructive operation.”11 In the context of the MoC, learning and unlearning involve a dialogic process of negotiating public and personal narratives and experience. The “Conflict Timeline” also draws on the MoC’s aspirations to create an archive which will document forms of conflict throughout Mirzapur and Ahmedabad. A local report on this process of archiving underscores some of the repressed memories of the city’s residents by drawing parallels to archival documents stored in locked cabinets within the exhibition space:

 The Mahagujarat Movement demanded a new state of Gujarat for Gujarati-speaking people, which subsequently led to the dissolution of the Bombay State and the formation of Gujarat and Maharashtra along linguistic lines in 1960.  Landkammer bases this observation on Grimaldo Rengifo Vázquez’s work in liberation pedagogy (2018, 15).

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The Conflictorium is an archive of all the clashes that have occurred in Gujarat since its inception [. . .]. The museum painstakingly chronicles every riot, every argument, every skirmish, and every disagreement between parties, binding them into tightly bound scrolls that are locked in cabinets fitted along the wall and stored deep in the memories of those who have lived through the violence (People Place Project 2017, para. 4).

While some of the recent accounts of conflict may appear to be “locked” within this exhibition space, as will be discussed below, the performative spaces of the Memory Lab and Sorry Tree, which follow the historical galleries, encourage visitors to reflect upon difficult memories that might be personal or collective. The “Gallery of Disputes” continues with a similar dialogic strategy of counternarratives by employing the folk tale genre (e.g., through the “voices” of animals), which introduces narrative elements that destabilize visitors’ expectations. Unlike the “Conflict Timeline,” this exhibit more explicitly engages the affective dimensions of visitors’ imagination through the allegorical lens of fables, rather than foregrounding the acquisition of historical knowledge. The stories and images presented in the gallery aim to show how conflict is inextricably linked to everyday life by taking visitors on an imaginary journey, i.e., through the fable of a donkey who encounters various disputes along the path: “Horse heads hang from the walls to represent labour, donkeys represent manual scavengers. On one side a cabinet hides what looks like a television news show with monkeys, bears and lions making up the panelists. Sounds of the animal kingdom rage as the cabinet doors are opened” (Mehta 2017, sec. 2, para. 3). With a young-adult audience in mind and based on comments provided by schoolteachers who visited the museum, the MoC developed the concept of a fable in order to create a safe space for conversations on difficult issues (Sethi 2019, para. 13). This feedback from teachers suggests that (younger) audiences may be more receptive to fictional narratives, which become allegorical touchstones for initiating discussions regarding social conflict.12 Conflicts related to gender, caste, labor, and the media are personified in the images and sounds that augment the story. The gallery aims to make these connections explicit by also posting images and reports from print media, e.g., an article on manual scavengers. Unlike the “Conflict Timeline,” which utilizes archival documents and images, the folk tale genre may be more engaging for younger visitors. However, visitors need to make connections to the social issues and conflicts in the other galleries and reflect on their own experience or path in life – both of which could inform the narratives and conflicts that they encounter in this gallery.

 For a discussion of the use of fiction in museum exhibitions, see particularly the chapters by Sanna-Mari Niemi and by Jana Hawig in this volume.

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Figure 1: “Empathy Alley.” Museum of Conflict. Courtesy of Conflictorium.

The next gallery, “Empathy Alley” (see Figure 1 and book cover), presents life-size silhouettes of pre- and post-independence political leaders (including Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar, Mahatma Gandhi, Mohammed Ali Jinnah, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel, and Indulal Yagnik).13 Recordings of their significant speeches demonstrate a range of political positions during the process of nation-building in India. The speeches can also be seen as political discourses that reflect diverse perspectives on India’s conflicting histories and social movements, and how they informed the construction and imagination of nationhood among influential political figures. However, the title of the gallery seems to conflate notions of “empathy” and “understanding.” In this regard, the excerpts from the speeches may be more effective in eliciting an understanding of the positions and conflicts that emerged in the process of nation-building, rather than creating empathy for the figures or their personal and political struggles. Moreover, the black silhouettes do not present a “human face” to the persona or struggles of the figures – they focus more on the content of the speeches rather than figures themselves. While this gallery aims to increase visitors’ ability to recognize or identify the central figures involved in na-

 See “Indian Politician Biographies.” Biography Online. https://www.biographyonline.net/politi cians/indian.html (February 12, 2023).

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tion-building, it also implicitly challenges them to understand the differences in their political positions. In the gallery space of the “Moral Compass,” visitors are encouraged to read and touch a copy of the pre-1977 version of the Indian Constitution and to consider it within the context of other laws related to human rights and social justice that are posted in the gallery, e.g., regarding gender, untouchability, and the environment. The title, “Moral Compass,” suggests an ethical dimension to the exhibition that aims to respond to perceptions among (younger) visitors that religious conflicts and differences have shaped notions of a collective identity in India rather than shared beliefs in a secular state.14 Here, Sethi points out that for many young visitors a “consciousness that our Indianness lies in a constitutional morality is absolutely absent” (2019, para. 16). Thus, many of the younger visitors perceive this gallery, and the Constitution, as a historical narrative that has been relegated to the past and may only have tenuous connections to their own perceptions of contemporary cultural identity in India (2019, para. 16). The gallery asks visitors to consider their own understanding of moral conflicts, which are often linked to personal experience (e.g., religious beliefs and persecution), in the context of the claims that India is a secular state. Here, the use of the Constitution as a legal document and historical narrative, which supports notions of a secular Indian identity, may also expose a process of telling “contradictory stories” (Groys), which, however, only emerges when visitors consider the narratives and claims of the Constitution in the context of their experience in everyday life. Although the galleries in the MoC present diverse contexts for learning about socio-political and historical conflict in India, the thematic and representational connections or transitions between the galleries could be made more explicit and engaged more productively. For example, in the “Moral Compass,” the MoC might highlight the contradictions between constitutional claims and visitors’ experience in the speeches on nation-building in “Empathy Alley.” The allegorical approach of the fables in the “Gallery of Disputes” could be brought into conversation with the “Moral Compass” by highlighting passages from the Constitution that address ethical issues.15 In doing so, these galleries would foreground conceptual or thematic links, such as constitutional frameworks and the personal or ethical positions, which emerge when visitors reflect upon narratives that connect the galleries.

 See the 42nd Amendment of the Constitution of India (1976).  For example, Article 15: Prohibition of discrimination on grounds of religion, race, caste, sex or place of birth.

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Narrative Environments of Performance: Memory Lab and Sorry Tree The overarching epistemological orientation of the galleries, which occupy the central areas of the MoC, inform the process of reflection and articulation of personal and collective conflict that is subsequently enacted in the museum’s performative spaces. While the MoC, not the visitors, creates the contexts and curatorial strategies within which visitors negotiate their own experience, the museum hopes that visitors will transfer the critical perspectives, which are gleaned in the process of negotiating the narratives of conflict, to the conflicts of everyday life. As the following discussions suggest, the Memory Lab, Sorry Tree, In This House and That World (see above), and art galleries are conceptualized as “community art installations” (Conflictorium, “Memory Lab”) that operate at the intersections of museum space, personal space, collective space (of the surrounding community), residential heritage space, and the aesthetic space of art. The wall label at the entry to the Memory Lab reads: “Even in an ideal society, conflict would persist – pain, hurt, retribution would flare up. Instead of sowing seeds of silence inside our souls, can we find more creative and constructive ways to express and channel such memories?”16 On the shelves of the Lab, visitors find large pickle jars (Memory Jars) containing tags with handwritten texts that have been hung on the inside or outside of the jars. The exhibition invites visitors to contribute their own memory by writing a brief text on a pre-printed tag that indicates “Exhibit Title,” “Date,” and “My Memory” (see Figure 2). The memories range from deep reflections to fleeting thoughts, which are written in English or in the Gujarati language. The exhibition also invites visitors to leave personal objects that become a medium for evoking memories or reflections and add another performative dimension to the Lab as visitors not only create a text but decide what objects they might leave behind in the Lab and how the object and text relate to conflict. In this regard, the Memory Lab creates a psychosemiotic space in which the contributed objects become signs, signifiers, and traces of the personal experiences that are recorded in the fragmentary texts and memories. The process of deciding on a personal item (e.g., cigarette pack, bangles, tickets) to deposit and creating an accompanying text-memory not only engages visitors in recalling, negotiating, and enacting the signification of memory (as an affective process), it also involves them in co-creating an installation, which subsequently contributes to an archival space within the MoC.

 Conflictorium, “Memory Lab,” https://www.conflictorium.org/at-the-museum/ (February 5, 2022).

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Figure 2: Memory Lab and Memory Jars (2019–2020). Museum of Conflict. Courtesy of Conflictorium.

As a “community art installation,” the Memory Lab becomes a performative site in two respects: as a place for visitors to enact their own narratives by creating texts and leaving personal objects and as a place where these stories, memories, and objects “perform” after the visitors have departed, i.e., by inviting new visitors to read the memories and challenging them to make sense of the objects and fragmentary narratives left behind. Thus, the Memory Lab provides a space in which “the narratives perform” and become part of a collected cultural memory in a space that also sensitizes the performer-narrator to the connections between these personal objects and the material culture surrounding their everyday life, i.e., the ways in which their personal histories and narratives can be remembered through objects and texts.17 The experience of the Memory Lab is extended near the end of the tour as visitors enter a balcony (floor 2) and encounter the branches of the Sorry Tree. Here, visitors can select short texts on pre-printed tags or write apologies and

 The MoC is archiving the objects and statements placed in Memory Jars and plans to make the collections available on a web-based platform (Sethi 2019, response to audience member four).

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Figure 3: Sorry Tree (2019–2020). Museum of Conflict. Courtesy of Conflictorium.

hang them on the Sorry Tree (a peepal tree),18 including personal statements of embarrassment, shame, as well as expressions of love (see Figure 3). Sethi comments that “Apology is such a political act in Gujarat specifically and elsewhere generally. But it also stems from our concern about how difficult it had been for a lot of people to occupy spaces alongside survivors of violence” (2019, para. 19). Like the Memory Lab, the Sorry Tree is a space for negotiating personal and collective memories and a performative place for the enactment of an apology that supports a process of social repair. The Sorry Tree represents a logical extension of the Memory Lab by encouraging visitors to reach tentative forms of closure and repair through apologies and expressions of sorrow. The Sorry Tree also extends the process of repair from the (archival) space of the Memory Lab to the green space of a tree outdoors. This ecological shift not only encourages visitors to think about acts of apology outside of the museum, but also consider how apology might be related to, or facilitated through, individual and communal interactions with nature. As a signifier of green space, spirituality, and medicine, the peepal tree suggests a site of healing and an aperture extending from the museum’s balcony to the neighborhood  A fig tree that is associated with religious and medicinal qualities.

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spaces of the community. This constellation of cultural associations (ecological, medicinal, spiritual), interstitial spaces (museum balcony and neighborhood), and significations (the tags on the tree) also suggests a spectrum of affective interactions, i.e., between human and non-human agents, noted at the outset. While the view from the balcony may remind visitors from Mirzapur or Ahmedabad of the conflicts of communal life, the MoC hopes that their museum experience will provide a fuller understanding of conflict and support acts of individual and collective repair when they leave the MoC.

Narrative Spaces of Art and Social Repair Artists and art exhibitions at the MoC have added an aesthetic dimension that creates the third narrative environment of the MoC and extends the experiential scope of the Conflictorium project: The curatorial practices of the museum are a silent response to the historically exclusive nature of the art world [. . .] the museum has involved bringing in works of artists from largely marginalised communities (Dalits, Muslims, Tribals, Women etc), which has offered a richer perspective to the frameworks that the museum is engaged with and brought a unique visual perspective to its audiences (Collier 2020, para. 4).19

For example, the Conflictorium organized an exhibition titled To stories rumoured in branches (2017) by the artist Rollie Mukherjee. The paintings mediated the stories of the forced disappearances of half-widows in Kashmir, which occurred during a period of four and a half years (Mukherjee 2017). Many of the artists’ exhibitions at the MoC explore the everyday contexts of social relations and the potential for social repair through the Conflictorium’s Curator Residency program. As an artist-curator in residence, Chiara Colombi developed an illustrated booklet titled the Manual on Universal Engagement: Challenging Perceptions (2018) as part of six manuals dealing with social actions generated through art. Each of the Manuals presents “a series of actions to be taken on a daily basis according to a different theme for each manual proposed by different artists [. . .] The topics covered so far are: rescue, escape, parrhesia (telling their truth without fear) and the warm-up.”20

 The Conflictorium communicates recent information on its artist residencies, exhibitions, workshops, and films via social media (Facebook and Instagram).  “Chiara Colombi on Exploring Universal Engagement,” June 26, 2018. https://www.conflicto rium.org/exploring-universal-engagement-with-chiara-colombi/ (February 5, 2022).

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The Manuals provide performative situations and suggest narrative prototypes for social practice that groups can interpret and actualize in the MoC or within the public spaces of a community. Columbi’s website presents artwork from the Manuals and images from several of the actualized performances, e.g., a young woman washing the feet of a somewhat older woman in a public space while pedestrians observe (2018). In another image, the performers wear blindfolds in a public space where they are surrounded by a group of children who are standing in a circle watching. The act of wearing a blindfold reflects the Manual’s subtitle, Challenging Perceptions, which questions the politics of “seeing” and identity in everyday life and in public places. The Manuals created an aesthetic point of departure or, in some cases, a storyboard of sketches for social performances. The storyboards require the performers to interpret the drawings and then construct an artwork, sculpture, or plan a performance, in the MoC, in a public place, or somewhere in their daily life, and in doing so create social contexts for communal engagement (Columbi 2018). The series of illustrations and texts suggest interventions and embodied practices, e.g., the power of “seeing” or foot washing, that may contribute to social repair by altering perceptions through collaborative art projects. Much like film storyboards, participants interpret and actualize the Manual’s images and texts through creative performance. However, unlike storyboard narratives intended for performance on a film set or in a studio, these narratives unfold within the unscripted social space of public venues or in everyday places (residences), with an uncertain outcome. Baaraan Ijlal developed another project for the Conflictorium that explores the affective dimensions of conflict in everyday life: the sound installation titled Change Room (2018). This performative space involved audiences in a sonic exploration of their perceptions of fear, apprehension, and emotional catharsis. In preparation for the installation, Ijlal recorded anonymous conversations dealing with everyday encounters that frequently expressed: unresolved childhood memories, abuse, fear of the other, violence, including gender and identity based violence to sharing secrets of unfulfilled relationships. A lot of women have responded to the call and have spoken about abuse. About how they are not heard enough. About the fear of them being the first casualty in any situation of conflict: be it in a situation of a riot or a street fight gone violent. About the ways in which they are “shown their place” every now and then. About desire (Gupta 2018, para. 12).

Museum visitors were invited to enter a space filled with a fog that would cause them to focus on listening to the overlapping conversations on the recordings, rather than the visual environment of the room. The visitors could then “opt to record their own reflections anonymously which are then added to the audio that is being played” (Conflictorium “Baaraan” 2018, para. 3). The installation created

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a narrative space and dialogue between the artist and visitors who could “respond and speak about their fear in total privacy” within a “space that is at once anonymous and cathartic where one could let go of[f] fear – a catharsis essential for a society to progress” (Conflictorium “Baaraan” 2018, para. 3). In the context of this installation, catharsis is the product of a negotiation – between the individual’s willingness to accept the invitation within a safe space created by the museum and the emotional risk of expressing and sharing fears – which embodies the affective dimensions of social repair.

Coda: Creating Alternative Heritage Futures Rather than relegating Gool Lodge to the role of a traditional heritage home that appeals to cultural tourists, the Conflictorium and MoC have challenged visitors (and the city of Ahmedabad) to interrogate the legacies, contemporary disjunctures, and futures of conflict and social justice. The focus on conflict has not detracted visitors – suggesting that in this case a critical approach and the potential for public engagement are not mutually exclusive. In addition to school groups, the MoC has been successful in attracting wider audiences to the museum as a site for (un)learning and reflection regarding the forces of conflict. However, as noted at the outset, these initiatives are aspirational “first steps” in raising consciousness and inviting visitors to develop a critical perspective on social conflict. The extent to which the Conflictorium project has been able to support or demonstrate collective social repair and social justice in local communities is a complex issue. In this regard, the impact of the MoC may emerge more clearly as the Conflictorium documents visitors’ responses and as future research examines connections to the communities in Mirzapur and Ahmedabad. Indeed, the Conflictorium’s informal conversations with local communities and performative projects by artists in residence suggest a potential for more initiatives involving communities in the future. However, developing external funding sources that would support longer term sustainability and enable the Conflictorium to realize and expand its work with local communities remains a critical challenge.21 The constellation of narrative and performative spaces that unfold in the former house and present-day museum also constitute an experiential space and a (meta-)narrative environment that extends into the city. Sethi has remarked that: “at no point do we imagine ourselves as outsiders who are playing a facilitation  For a discussion of the Conflictorium’s funding, organization, and institutional outreach efforts, including data on events and attendance, see Bihani & Thaker (2022).

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role. We are part of that community, we have as much at stake” (2019, response to audience member two). While disputes can also result in productive outcomes, e.g., when a local group cleared a dump near the MoC and opened a food stall in that space, the MoC is also involved in negotiating with very diverse groups in Mirzapur that often have disparate and conflicting interests (2019, response to audience member two). The Conflictorium project advocates for social justice by arguing that individuals and institutions should productively engage with the histories of conflict throughout the city as a part of its present-future rather than relegating these conflicts to the past. This aspect became particularly pronounced in the context of Ahmedabad’s designation as a UNESCO World Heritage City in 2017, in recognition of its historic Walled City and Mahatma Gandhi’s struggle for national freedom. Here, Sethi argued that “this euphoria of being called a ‘World Heritage City’” and Ahmedabad’s attempt to rebrand itself as a UNESCO heritage site could not erase the cultural and social divisions of the city (2019, para. 2). As a center for learning about conflict, the Conflictorium supports a notion of critical heritage that challenges visitors to excavate their personal and collective memories and spaces. This process of metaphorically “digging where you stand” at Gool Lodge aims to contribute to the transformation of personal memory and public space, by making the sites of communal histories and their narratives “visible” within the MoC (Rehberg & Lind 2020).22 This suggests a critical politics of heritage that acknowledges the past without relegating it to musealization or stasis, i.e., one that mobilizes historical narratives and the contested histories of local heritage that are embedded in the house and neighborhood, as sites for simultaneously activating cultural memory and exploring its ongoing conflicts and contestations. Drawing on Anna Tsing’s notion of “zones of awkward engagement,” Rodney Harrison et al. discuss how “heritage futures” often coalesce as “spaces of friction in which the relationship between local actors and global processes are realised, producing conflict or consensus, but always acting back upon the worlds they themselves are engaged in generating” (2020, 15; Tsing 2005). The frictions and ruptures of conflict, including the loss of heritage sites and cultural objects, may problematize claims to collective or “shared” definitions of heritage. Yet, it is precisely through these “spaces of friction” and the negotiation of the narratives of conflict that the Conflictorium engages as a dialogic space in order to imagine alternative heritage futures that commit to social justice as a prerequisite to social repair within and beyond museums.

 The “Dig Where You Stand” movement in Sweden is associated with Sven Lindqvist’s book Gräv där du står (1978), which raised consciousness of public history and labor.

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References Aijazi, Omer. “Theorizing a Social Repair Orientation to Disaster Recovery: Developing Insights for Disaster Recovery Policy and Programming.” Global Social Welfare 2 (2015): 15–28. Attia, Kader. Fragments of Repair/Kader Attia. BAK basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht April 17, 2021. https://www.bakonline.org/program-item/fragments-of-repair/ (February 5, 2022). Bihani, Amrita Harshvardhan, and Nimit Ashwinkumar Thaker. “Designing a Social Enterprise: The Story of Conflictorium.” The Case Journal 18.3 (2022): 484–505. Collier, Lizzy Vartanian. “Conflictorium: India’s Museum of Conflict.” My.Kali, March 11, 2020. https://www.mykalimag.com/en/2020/03/11/conflictorium-indias-museum-of-conflict/ (April 20, 2022). Columbi, Chiara. Manual for Universal Engagement (sixth part): Challenging Perceptions (with Conflictorium museum). Ahmedabad, March 2018. https://chiaracolombi.tumblr.com/MANUELS %20UNIVERSELS (February 7, 2022). Conflictorium. “Baaraan Ijlal on Silence, Space & the Self.” June 26, 2018. www.conflictorium.org/. (February 7, 2022). Conflictorium. “Chiara Colombi on Exploring Universal Engagement.” June 26, 2018. www.conflicto rium.org/ (February 7, 2022). Conflictorium. “Memory Lab.” www.conflictorium.org/at-the-museum/ (February 7, 2022). Finkelpearl, Tom. “Participatory Art.” Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. Ed. Michael Kelly. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Garoian, Charles R. “Performing the Museum.” Studies in Art Education: A Journal of Issues and Research 42.3 (2001): 234–248. Published online in 2015, https://www.jstor.org/stable/1321039 (February 5, 2022). Groys, Boris. Art Power. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. Gupta, Monobina. “Interview: The Art of Listening to Conversations.” The Wire (India), June 9, 2018. https://thewire.in/the-arts/baaraan-ijlal-interview-change-room (February 7, 2022). Hanks, Laura Hourston, Jonathan Hale, and Suzanne MacLeod, “Introduction: Museum Making. The Place of Narrative.” In Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. Ed. Suzanne MacLeod, Laura Hourston Hanks, and Jonathan Hale. London: Routledge, 2012, ix–xxiii. Harrison, Rodney, Caitlin DeSilvey, Cornelius Holtorf, and Sharon Macdonald. “For ever, for everyone . . .’” In Heritage Futures: Comparative Approaches to Natural and Cultural Heritage Practices. Ed. Rodney Harrison, Caitlin DeSilvey, Cornelius Holtorf, Sharon Macdonald, et al. London: UCL Press, 2020. 3–19. Hossain, Adil. “Citizenship and the Amnesia of Violence.” In As for Protocols. New York: Vera List Center for Art and Politics, 2021. https://veralistcenter.org/publications/vera-list-center-forum -2021-as-for-protocols (February 9, 2021). “India’s Manual Scavenging Problem.” The Hindu, February 16, 2020. https://www.thehindu.com/news/ national/indias-manual-scavenging-problem/article30834545.ece#:~:text=Despite%20stringent% 20provisions%20in%20the,caste%2C%20class%20and%20income%20divides (February 5, 2022). Kidd, Jenny. “The Museum as Narrative Witness: Heritage Performance and the Production of Narrative Space.” In Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. Ed. Suzanne MacLeod, Laura Hourston Hanks, and Jonathan Hale. London: Routledge, 2012. 74–82. Landkammer, Nora. “The Museum as a Site of Unlearning? Coloniality and Education in Ethnographic Museums: A Study Focusing on Germany, Austria and Switzerland.” The Museum as a Site of Unlearning: Materials and Reflections on Museum Education at the Weltkulturen Museum. Ed.

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Stephanie Endter, Nora Landkammer, and Karin Schneider. Traces 6 (2018): 1–23. https://dieangewandte.academia.edu/NoraLandkammer (December 2, 2020). Macdonald, Sharon. Memorylands: Heritage and Identity in Europe Today. London: Routledge, 2013. Mehta, Avantika. “When the Gujarati Word for Fun Described Rioting, Looting and Murder.” Scroll.in Magazine, March 24, 2017. https://scroll.in/magazine/831479/when-the-gujarati-word-for-fundescribed-rioting-looting-and-murder (February 5, 2022). Mukherjee, Rollie. “‘To stories rumoured in branches,’ Artwork by Rollie Mukherjee.” AWID (The Association for Women’s Rights in Development). February 22, 2017. https://www.awid.org/ news-and-analysis/stories-rumoured-branches-artwork-rollie-mukherjee (February 5, 2022). The People Place Project. “TBI Blogs: A Unique Museum in Ahmedabad Is Helping Conflict Victims by Highlighting Their Stories.” The Better India, May 5, 2017. https://www.thebetterindia.com/ 98930/conflictorium-ahmedabad-unique-museum/ (February 5, 2022). Rehberg, Vivian Sky, and Maria Lind. “Art’s Critical Force.” Art Agenda, July 17, 2020. https://www.artagenda.com/features/340256/art-s-critical-force (February 7, 2022). Seigworth, Gregory J., and Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” In The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Gregory J. Seigworth and Melissa Gregg. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010, 1–25. Sethi, Avni. “Collecting History beyond Artefacts: Reflections on the Conflictorium.” Fourth Annual History for Peace Conference, Calcutta, India, August 2018. History for Peace (website) November 11, 2019 (updated November 30, 2020). https://www.historyforpeace.pw/post/collect ing-history-beyond-artefacts-reflections-on-the-conflictorium (February 5, 2020). Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.

Florencia Larralde Armas and Julieta Lampasona

Clandestine Captivity, Testimony, and Construction of Truth in a Memory Site: Narrative Strategies and Memory Work at the ESMA Site Museum’s Permanent Exhibition (Buenos Aires) Introduction The ESMA Site Museum is located in the former Officers’ Quarters at the Navy School of Mechanics (ESMA) in Buenos Aires,1 where one of the main Argentinian Clandestine Centers of Detention (CCD) operated during the last military dictatorship (1976–1983).2 The museum was inaugurated on May 19, 2015, after in-depth negotiations between human rights organizations, victims (survivors and relatives of disappeared detainees), and state agencies. Starting in 2007, the government created a new impetus for memory policies.3 In this context, following the navy’s eviction from the property in 2004,4 the “Space for Memory, Promotion and Defense of Human Rights (former ESMA)” was created under the joint man-

 In this critical reflection, we present some of the results from our research into victims’ testimonies incorporated in the ESMA Site Museum. This research was part of the collective project ‘ESMA, from Clandestine Center of Detention to Memory Site: historical and memorial processes between 1976 and 2016ʹ, under Ph.D. Marina Franco’s direction. We are grateful to Nikolina Židek for the translation of this manuscript.  Located in Buenos Aires, the ESMA premises were first put into operation in the 1920s and are composed of 35 buildings. As recorded in survivors’ testimonies, the CCD operated in the Officers’ Quarters, but some detainees were occasionally and briefly transferred to other buildings, such as the “Infirmary” (“Enfermería”). Between 1976 and 1983, it functioned both as a CCD and a school, and from 1983 until its eviction in 2004, it continued operating as the Navy School. For a history of this place, see the Museum’s website: http://www.museositioesma.gob.ar/el-museo/laex-esma/ (May 15, 2023); for an analysis of its repressive functions, see Franco & Feld 2022.  From when Nestor Kirchner’s government (2003–2007) came to power until the last period under his successor, Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner (2007–2015), memory policies had a significant place on the public agenda. In addition to ESMA, other memory sites were created in former CCDs in Buenos Aires and other provinces.  After years of demands by human rights organizations, the Navy was evicted from the property. In March 2004, following a massive public demonstration, the space was officially “opened” to civil society. For further information on this specific event, see Jelin 2017, 206–212; for the “recovery” process, see Feld 2017; Guglielmucci 2013; Larralde Armas 2022. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-015

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agement of human rights organizations and state agencies. Several proposals for the new usage of the buildings were put forward, and the former officers’ quarters (considered the place where ‘horror occurred’) therefore remained empty for years, preserved as evidence for the ongoing judicial investigations (Feld 2012) and fulfilling a “testimonial” function.5 Under the curatorship of Hernán Bisman and Alejandra Naftal, the current exhibition was created in 2015, to coincide with the inauguration of the museum. Since the building continues to function as a piece of judicial evidence (as is the case with other memory sites constructed in former CCDs), easy-to-remove acrylic structures were within and outside the site; no additions, demolitions, or changes to the building’s structure were carried out. The curators have created an exhibition space “embedded” in survivors’ testimonies, utilizing numerous posters, panels, and audiovisual projections to highlight this effect. We start from the premise that exhibitions are not neutral; they have an active role in the reconstruction of history and the transmission of accounts of the past: these accounts, in turn, are never complete, and museums – particularly, trauma sites – become memory framing institutions (Pollak & Heinich 2006). In this critical reflection, we will examine narrative strategies and the memory work developed by the ESMA Site Museum in its permanent exhibition. Against the background of the rise and consolidation of Argentina’s right-wing political movement, the museum appeals to a “humanitarian narrative” (Laqueur 1996), and employs judicially certified cases in its exhibition, as a legitimate basis for the creation of an undeniable story.6 We will reflect on the uses of testimonial voice, the particular meanings that this narrative produces, and the temporalities that emerge from it.7 In order to do so, we have organized our paper into two

 As discussed by Claudia Feld, the first exhibition was opened in 2005. Completely different from the current one, it consisted of small and succinct signs containing fragments of the earliest survivor testimonies, provided under the dictatorship and during the first months of democratic transition.  The production of the museum’s curatorial script depended on two interconnected processes that affected the selection of testimonies, their forms of incorporation, and the construction of meanings about what happened here. The first process was related to the previously mentioned discussions between state and civil actors involved in ESMA’s “recovery”. The second, was informed by the political context in which the museum was inaugurated: specifically, the consolidation of right-wing political movements and the presidential victory of Mauricio Macri (from the political party ‘Cambiemos’) in October 2015. This political context provoked multiple questions and disputes on the issue of human rights, state terrorism and its victims, and modified the discursive limits of what could be said (Besse & Messina 2021).  Following Jaume Peris Blanes, testimonies “are not texts that have a meaning of their own, but they are always intertwined in a network of changing representations, languages, and concep-

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separate sections: first, we analyze the juridical basis of the curatorial script as a way of establishing truth values; we then reflect on the expository strategies in which the testimonies are articulated. The corpus for this study consists of our observations made in December 2018, March 2019, and March 2020, an interview with the Museum’s former Director, Alejandra Naftal – a museologist and survivor of “El Vesubio” CCD – and multiple documentary and audiovisual materials displayed in the permanent exhibition.

On the Judicial Legitimacy of the Museum Narrative The former officers’ quarters building is in the right-hand corner of the premises, at a distance from most of the other buildings. It is made up of a freestanding pavilion, three floors, a basement, and an attic. The exhibition consists of 17 rooms8 and its exhibition tour uses a self-guided format. As the introductory panel in the entrance area indicates, the reconstruction of each room and the CCD’s function as a whole is fundamentally based on the information provided in survivors’ testimonies; as “eyewitnesses,” survivors were able to describe the physical characteristics of the detention center, the people they interacted with, and what happened in each of the spaces where they were held during their captivity. The preeminence of the testimonial voice can be found in all the sectors where detainees passed through.9

tions about what giving testimony means” (2015). In this sense, their multiple uses and appropriations have an impact on the meanings that they contribute to building. At the same time, as discussed by Magrin y Martínez (2012), Da Silva Catela (2014), and Cinto (2023), the forms of incorporation of survivor voices and stories in memory spaces do not respond to a neutral narrative strategy; on the contrary, the decisions about their possible uses stem from in-depth discussions. In any case, the testimonies selected, their content, and the manner in which such voices are addressed in each memorial device will have an impact on the meanings built and transmitted.  See: http://www.museositioesma.gob.ar/exhibicion/exhibicion-permanente/salas/ (May 15, 2023).  The CCD consisted of different rooms with specific uses. While detainees only passed through those areas which were used for torture – the “Sótano” (basement), for solitary confinement – “Capucha” (hood) and “Capuchita” (little hood), and for “forced labor” – “Pecera” (fish tank); other rooms were exclusively used for administrative or intelligence tasks, without the presence of detainees. The permanent exhibition only includes survivor testimonial fragments in the first set of rooms.

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The exhibition exclusively uses the testimonies provided in the framework of judicial proceedings, namely the Trial of the Military Juntas (1985), and the first part of the ESMA Mega-Trial (2010).10 As we will shortly elaborate on, the voices and stories included in the permanent exhibition are specific ones: they stem from neither public complaints made by victims, nor from journalistic or oral archives – rather, they have been taken from judicially certified testimonies. The museum’s narrative strategy, only to include testimonies from completed court trials, differs vastly from those of other sites in Argentina (such as the former Olimpo, Automotores Orletti, and La Perla CCDs, among others). Therefore, the museum’s use of a juridical scene (with its corresponding verdicts and convictions of perpetrators) legitimizes the exhibition’s construction of an undeniable and indisputable truth; every single reference to captivity, torture, and disappearance practices has already been proven and certified in court. As stated by Pollak and Heinich, juridical modes of testimony solicitation are adjusted to official procedures of evidence production and verification (2006). In contrast to the use of other forms of testimony or documents, this provides certified facts and witnesses to the exhibition’s narrative, which consequently produces an undeniable truth (according to a juridical framework). As a symbol of repression, and later turned into a museum (not just a ‘memory site’), the ESMA has since been nominated to be added to the UNESCO World Heritage List.11 As mentioned above, the museum was inaugurated in a tense political climate, in which the veracity and the scope of the dictatorship’s repression was publicly questioned by different right-wing political elements.12 Because of

 In the “Trial of the Military Juntas” (1985), the commanders of the first three military juntas were convicted. However, the subsequent “impunity laws” closed the prosecution processes (Final Point and Due Obedience, 1986 & 1987). The declaration of nullity (National Congress 2003) and unconstitutionality (Supreme Court of Justice 2005) of both laws enabled the reopening of the trials for crimes against humanity. For the crimes committed in ESMA, three trials were held and a fourth one is under way; the first of these (2010), alongside the Trial of the Juntas, provided the largest amount of testimonies for the museum’s permanent exhibition.  The ESMA Museum and Site of Memory will be evaluated for entry in the UNESCO World Heritage List in September 2023.  While the questioning of the scope of the extermination can be traced to a previous point in time, this revisionism became particularly evident during the rule of Mauricio Macri’s government (2015–2019). The public challenges were manifold: they included questioning the figure of “30,000 disappeared” and human rights organizations drew attention to the Supreme Court’s attempt to apply the so-called “2x1” to prisoners convicted of crimes against humanity. In this framework, the idea was a “dekirchnerization of ESMA” and “the opening of an agenda aimed at other human rights problems. [. . .] In that context, the space for memory became a space with a voice of its own for the safeguarding of policies and in defense of democracy” (Larralde Armas 2022, 51).

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this, the juridical certification of narrated facts and witnesses was essential to the creation of the exhibition. In an interview with the museum’s former director, Alejandra Naftal, she particularly emphasizes these certified claims to truth: The testimonial voice given in court could not be disputed by those who could come and ask: “‘Where are the subversives?” For this reason, the events that occurred are narrated here through the voices given in court at different times of our history: CONADEP, the Juntas’ trial and the ongoing trials.13

Several authors consider the work of the National Commission on the Disappearance of Persons (CONADEP 1984), its report “Nunca Más” (Never Again), as well as the Trial of the Military Juntas (1985), as significant milestones for the configuration of social and cultural meanings about the past (Crenzel 2008; Feld 2002; Feld & Franco 2015, among others). During this period, a matrix of representation of the disappeared emerged as social production (Crenzel 2008) and it unified the discursive strategy of human rights organizations criticizing all violence, the appeal to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the idea of an “innocent victim.” As stressed by Crenzel (2008), this “humanitarian narrative” presented those affected by repression not as political subjects, but based on socio-demographic and socio-economic categories – such as age, gender, trade, or profession. Thus, this narrative highlighted the indiscriminate character of state violence and the innocence of its victims, alien to armed politics and militancy. Understood as ineluctable tropes in the construction of the “official memory” of state terrorism (Raggio 2009), these instances have fostered the prevalence of the humanitarian narrative and the “juridical paradigm” (Jelin 2017). They have also had a profound impact on and longstanding social agreements (Besse & Messina 2021) surrounding the characterization of (innocent) victims, the responsibility of perpetrators, and the relevance of judicial process in both human rights and public agendas. This context in which testimonies are produced, conceals or makes invisible not only political and militant actions by victims, but also the subjectivities of the witnesses (Pollak & Heinich 2006) and their own life stories. Additionally, when the museum exclusively uses these voices in its exhibition, it limits the narrative to the time prisoners spent in captivity. This begs the following questions: What are the editing processes that give a voice to the space? What aspects of this experience are highlighted? What stories or dimensions remain untold in the transcribed judicial testimonies presented in the exhibition? Which temporalities does this judicial narrative impose on the museum narrative? Given that these inclusions and narrative devices are reiterated in every space of transit or deten-

 City of Buenos Aires, March 2019. Interviewers: Florencia Larralde Armas, Julieta Lampasona, and Adriana D’Ottavio. Translated into English by the authors, emphasis added.

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tion, we focus on the exhibition room called “Capucha” (hood) as an illustrative example in the next section (see Figures 1 & 2).14

Testimonial Voice and Expository Strategies Testimonial voices were transposed from the courtroom onto the genre of memory through selection, editing, and mediation processes. Thereby, certain elements were attenuated, exaggerated, or omitted. The museum’s curatorial team implemented two strategies for this transposition: anchoring testimonial voices to the physical space and the construction of a “choral” voice. Naftal describes them here: We decided that testimonies should give an account of what happened in each space [. . .] thus we tried to find a choral voice, in which each witness could speak from an subjective, individual position: there are those who speak with an analytical voice, others who speak of sensations, and those who speak specifically about what happened to them. And we tried to put them together as a choir. [. . .] This is their place, and they are the legitimate voices of what happened here. Who else can tell the story of this place? The military and the survivors.15

The exhibition team anchored the testimonial voice to the physical space through the placement of panels and audiovisuals. The panels contain three types of data: informational data, alongside a few fragments of testimony describing something about the place, one or two testimonial fragments about what happened in each space, and often, an image from a documentary or journalistic archive, or a picture of a related object. These elements are integrated into panels with relatively homogeneous aesthetics, but with different fonts; in the case of testimonies, the panels also differ in their use of quotation marks, italics, and way of referring to the witness. The panels are entirely translucent: on the one hand, this causes them to visually overlap with the physical space of the building and its walls; on the other, they create distance between visitors and space. Audiovisual testimonies from the court trials are projected on the walls, conveying the idea that the testimonies make the space speak.

 Located on the top floor of the building, the room was originally named “Capucha” (hood) by the perpetrators. The memorial site maintained the use of this term. It was a huge, unventilated attic where detainees were held with no comforts, and where people spent days, months, or even years in isolation. It was used to detain the majority of prisoners.  Same interview, March 2019. Translation by the authors.

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Figure 1: Entrance of “Capucha” (hood). Panels in this room explain the characteristics of isolation and reclusion. Audiovisual recreation screen showing the layout of the space when it operated as a Clandestine Center of Detention (CCD). © ESMA Memorial Site.

In support of, or complementary to the testimonial material that is being projected on the walls, the exhibition provides information through audiovisuals and panels. This weaves a narrative thread whose function is to give an already certified account of what happened in each space. For construction of a “choral” voice, the curatorial team edited the testimonies, so that every fragment (and witness) communicates with the previous one. As panels contain one or two fragments respectively, this intervention becomes more evident in the audiovisuals projected on the walls, consisting of about a dozen testimonies, each one from 10 to 20 seconds long. Although each witness describes what they experienced, saw, or felt during their captivity, the editing process links every moment or situation narrated by a singular voice to the next one. Therefore, the narrative thread is sustained by the specificity of what happened in each room, but not the individuals’ perspectives on it. Furthermore, all the testimonial fragments overlap by pointing out similar situations and action sequences in the CCD.16 By erasing indi-

 In the case of “Capucha”, testimonies refer to isolation, lack of light or appropriate food, restrictions on free movement, and extremely poor hygienic conditions, among others.

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Figure 2: “Capucha” (hood) Room. Wall Projection of survivor Victor Basterra’s testimony at the ESMA Trial in 2010. ESMA Memorial Site. Photo by Julieta Lampasona, December 2018.

vidualities in the construction of a “common story” (Feld 2012, 363), this synthesis of experiences reinforces the idea of a systematic practice – a practice which consisted of kidnapping and illegal detention, torture, “slave labor,” forced adoption of babies born in captivity, gender-based violence, as well as murder and the disappearance of bodies, among other aberrational practices. As an example, we present the following fragment of one of the videos displayed in the room “Isolation and confinement,” inside “Capucha”: Carlos Alberto García (testimony from the ESMA trial, case no. 1270, May 28, 2010): we reach our destination upstairs. They tell me, ‘from now on, you don’t have a name anymore, your name is 028ʹ. They make me enter, and from the side that we entered, they make me go to the left, in the shape of an ‘L’, and they throw me into a cubicle, where you could guess that there were many people around. I didn’t see anything. Fernando Kron (testimony from the ESMA Trial, case no. 1270, 27 August 2010): I realize that I am in a kind of closed place, I hear planes, I hear cars, in the distance, at some point through the hood I can see that there is a gable roof, it seems to me a very dark place, and I realize that there are more people.

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Norma Cristina Cozzi (testimony from the Trial of the Juntas, case no. 13, July 24, 1985): I hear people talking, asking for water, asking to go to the toilet. I hear footsteps. Then they finally leave me, they allow us to “destabicarse”,17 to lift our hoods a little. Miriam Lewin (testimony from the Trial of the Juntas, case no. 13, July 18, 1985): I could see the basic outline of the place, I see that there are metal beams, I see that there are cabins, I found out that they were called cabins later. They were like wooden compartments, where the detainees slept, I saw metal beds. Capucha was like a large corridor in the shape of an ‘L’. Victor Basterra (testimony from the ESMA trial, case no. 1270, April 30, 2010): in that place, prisoners were handcuffed, shackled and hooded 24 hours a day. The food consisted of a quarter or half a glass of boiled mate tea, some bread in the morning, a sandwich that guards called ‘navy steak’, consisting of a piece of strange meat, and half a glass of water. In the afternoon, the morning menu was repeated and at night the lunch menu was repeated.18

In this example, as also seen in the other videos projected in the museum, the editing process constructs a rhythm that emphasizes the information and evidence that each testimony provides; it highlights different elements or thematic knots where various testimonies overlap: the L-shaped corridor, the sounds heard and the characteristics of the building, the scarcity of food, the conditions in which they carried out their basic human needs, as well as descriptions of the lighting, the smell, and what the mats or mattresses, “cuchas”,19 were like, where the prisoners were held. Finally, the video closes with the reflection of one of the survivors about what it meant to be there. These videos reveal a specific narrative construction: the ESMA curatorial team emphasizes the information provided through the (juridically legitimized) testimonies of victims as eyewitnesses; they provide a reiteration and links between what each witness is saying. Moreover, it excludes those moments in which the witnesses break down, keep quiet, or cry. In doing so, the exhibition presents the torture and harassment in a sober, descriptive, and informative tone; however, almost all the videos end with a reflective testimonial fragment in which the survivors interpret their own experience, or the objectives of torture and repression by the military. In all cases, the curators’ objective is to show and make people see in a physical space that, due attempts to erase the material traces of the CCD, bears few traces or evidence of the clandestine actions committed during the dictatorship.

 “Destabicarse” is the Spanish term referring to how prisoners called the lifting or removal of the blindfold from their eyes.  Translation by the authors. It continues with other testimonies.  “Cucha” means “doghouse” in Spanish, referring to the narrowness of the space where each prisoner was held.

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The curator’s reconstruction of the captivity experience through the creation of a “choral voice” consequently generates an authenticity effect (Violi 2012), in which the subjectivity of those giving testimony becomes obliterated (aside from their nominal identification through their names). Instead, the figure of a collective, homogenous victim, as already shaped by the total and omnipresent power of the dictatorial state, is introduced. Regardless of the witnesses’ biographical singularities or political choices, this lethal power historically imposed itself in a massive, widespread, and indiscriminate manner – this is also how the ESMA exhibition seems to reproduce it. By both transposing juridical testimony, as well as highlighting aspects in the time-space experience of captivity that are nodal and common, the curatorial narrative excludes all other dimensions of the victims’ political and life experiences from the exhibition’s account: their political agencies and ideals, their previous trajectories and (in the case of survivors) their subsequent ones, as well as the context of socio-political confrontation in which those disappearances took place. What is also absent are the experiences of actors from human rights movement who played a key role in the struggle for memory, truth, and justice, among other issues. With the erasures of longstanding temporalities and of political identities, and with the preeminence of a generalized condition of victimhood, the museum’s script reproduces “the myth of innocence” (Novaro & Palermo 2003) and reinforces the constitutive pillars of the humanitarian narrative.

Conclusion In this critical reflection, we carried out an analysis of the uses and meanings that the testimonial voice assumes within the museum narrative of the ESMA Site Museum. As mentioned above, the political climate that converged with the inauguration of this museum led the curatorial team to construct a narrative based on judicial testimonies, in order to guarantee an undeniable story. The encounter between the museum’s objective of “making the space speak” and proving events through juridical testimonies of captivity generates a concentric movement within the narrative; it also leads to two forms of blurring: in relation to the CCD’s context and the detainees’ biographies. The former relates to the CCD’s impact on and articulation with society, such as the extension of ESMA systems of repression into different institutions or dimensions of society (Feld 2019), the threats and coercion against families looking for their disappeared relatives, as well as the dictatorship’s economic and social planning, among other aspects. The latter blurring effect emerges in the scope of the museum’s narrative: since it

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relies on the captivity experience and on the space-time limits imposed by the existence of the CCD, it only covers the period from 1976 to 1983. Thus, visitors cannot inquire about the individual lives of the survivors after captivity; nor can they inform themselves about the memory disputes, demands, and the initiatives they have sustained, in concert with disappeared detainees’ relatives. Due to the predominant testimony of victims as eyewitnesses and, in particular, to the spatial location of these voices, the permanent exhibition’s narrative is heavily restricted – it only provides an account of the extreme CCD experience, alongside judicial certainties, but fails to offer a more critical review of the past (and the present).20

Bibliography Besse, Juan, and Luciana Messina. “Las políticas y los lugares de la memoria en las emergencias de la antipolítica (2009–2019): conjeturas y observaciones acerca de las controversias intelectuales y las retóricas mediáticas sobre el terrorismo de Estado en Argentina.” Primer Seminario Memorias, pasado reciente y ascenso de las derechas. “Argentina, 2008–2019.” Buenos Aires: IDES, 2021. 1–17. Cinto, Agustina. Entre la sacralización y el parentesco: el ex centro clandestino de detención Servicio de Informaciones de la Policía de Santa Fe como objeto de políticas de la memoria en la ciudad de Rosario (2001–2020). Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, 2023. Crenzel, Emilio. La historia política del Nunca Más: La memoria de las desapariciones en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2008. Da Silva Catela, Ludmila. “‘Lo que merece ser recordado . . .’: Conflictos y tensiones en torno a los proyectos públicos sobre los usos del pasado en los sitios de memoria.” Clepsidra: Revista Interdisciplinaria de Estudios sobre Memoria 1.2 (2014): 28–46. Feld, Claudia. Del estrado a la pantalla: las imágenes del juicio a los ex comandantes en Argentina. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 2002. Feld, Claudia. “Las capas memoriales del testimonio: Un análisis sobre los vínculos entre espacio y relatos testimoniales en el Casino de Oficiales de la ESMA.” Topografías conflictivas. Memorias, espacios y ciudades en disputa. Ed. Anne Huffschmid and Valeria Durán. Buenos Aires: Nueva Trilce, 2012. 335–365. Feld, Claudia. “Preservar, recuperar, ocupar: Controversias memoriales en torno a la ex ESMA.” Revista Colombiana de Sociología 40.1 (2017): 101–121. Feld, Claudia. “El “adentro” y el “afuera” durante el cautiverio en la ESMA: Apuntes para repensar la desaparición forzada de personas.” Sociohistórica 44 (2019): 1–18.

 It is worth noting, however, that after the permanent exhibition was inaugurated, the ESMA Site Museum have promoted different activities, lectures, and temporary exhibitions that have incorporated new aspects of the survivors’ testimonies and new voices. These elements have consequently expanded the restricted limits of the curatorial script (Larralde Armas & Lampasona 2022).

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Feld, Claudia, and Marina Franco. Democracia, hora cero: Actores, políticas y debates en los inicios de la posdictadura. Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2015. Guglielmucci, Ana. La consagración de la memoria: Una etnografía acerca de la institucionalización del recuerdo sobre los crímenes del terrorismo de Estado en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Antropofagia, 2013. Jelin, Elizabeth. La lucha por el pasado: Cómo construimos la memoria social. Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI editores, 2017. Laqueur, Thomas. “Bodies, Details, and the Humanitarian Narrative.” The New Cultural History. Ed. Lynn Hunt. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1996. 176–204. Larralde Armas, Florencia. Ex ESMA:. Políticas de Memoria en el ex centro clandestino de detención (2004–2015). Madrid: Ed. La Oveja Roja-Kamchatka, 2022. Larralde Armas, Florencia, and Lampasona, Julieta. “Multiplicar voces, descentrar memorias: Un análisis sobre las estrategias narrativas en el Museo-Sitio ESMA.” Punto Sur 7 (2022): 48–62. Magrin, Natalia, and Roberto Martínez. “Testimonios y sitios de memoria: Acerca de los usos del testimonio en la construcción de narrativas y relatos del Museo de Sitio del Archivo Provincial de la Memoria.” Astrolabio: Nueva Época 9 (2012): 209–220. Novaro, Marcos, and Vicente Palermo. La dictadura militar: Del golpe de Estado a la Restauración Democrática. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2003. Peris Blanes, Jaume. “Usos del testimonio y políticas de la memoria: El caso chileno.” Kamchatka: Revista de análisis cultural 6 (2015): 549–581. Pollak, Michael and Natalie Heinich. “El testimonio.” Memoria, olvido, silencio. La producción social de identidades frente a situaciones límite. Ed. Michael Pollak. La Plata: Ed. Al Margen, 2006. 53–112. Raggio, Sandra. “La noche de los lápices: del testimonio judicial al relato cinematográfico.” El pasado que miramos. Memoria e imagen ante la historia reciente. Ed. Claudia Feld and Jessica Stites Mor. Buenos Aires: Paidós, 2009. 45–76. Violi, Patrizia. “Trauma Site Museums and Politics of Memory: Tuol Sleng, Villa Grimaldi and the Bologna Ustica Museum.” Theory, Culture & Society 29.1 (2012): 36–75.

Rachel Christ-Doane

Finding Meaning in Tragedy: A Critical Reflection of Audience Engagement at the Salem Witch Museum Introduction Today famed as “The Witch City,” Salem, Massachusetts was once the site of the largest and deadliest series of witchcraft trials in colonial North America. From February 1692 to January 1693, between 150 and 200 people were accused of practicing witchcraft, 19 were hanged, one man was tortured to death, and at least five died in prison. The intensity and devastation of these events forged a powerful and lasting connection between Salem and witchcraft trials in public memory (Adams 2008, 10–36). For centuries travelers stopped in Salem, curious to see the site of the infamous witch-hunt. An 1895 Salem Visitor’s Guide went so far as to observe: “the Witchcraft Delusion, which caused many to flee from Salem for their lives two centuries ago now brings thousands of visitors to Salem every year” (Essex Institute 1895, 5). Sites of tragedy have long become destinations for curious visitors. Alternatively known as dark tourism or thanatourism, scholars broadly define this phenomenon as “the act of travel to sites associated with death, suffering and the seemingly macabre” (Stone 2006, 146). This form of tourism is controversial and holds inherent risks and challenges for public history, such as meeting visitor expectations, addressing existing visitor knowledge (Rose 2016, 34–47), risking sensationalism, and commodifying tragic events for the sake of commercial gain (Dunkley 2017, 110). Bristow and Newman offer the term “fright tourism,” a subset of dark tourism in which tourists seek out thrilling or shocking experiences such as ghost walks or dungeon tours (Bristow & Newman 2005, 215). These sites are often held up as examples of dark tourist experiences that exploit tragic history for profit (Stone 2009, 167–185). Sites of difficult history walk a fine line, as they seek to engage and respond to audience expectations without demeaning or minimizing past tragedy. These challenges are especially pronounced in a place like Salem, Massachusetts – famed for its devastating witchcraft trials and often criticized for veering into sensationalism and commercialization. Though driven by an array of interests, many visit Salem because of the city’s dark history. There is no short supply of available experiences related to the witch trials in Salem, including museums, walking tours, witch-centered attractions, and two witch trial memorials. Since https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-016

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the 1980s, other attractions related to the legacy of witchcraft and, more broadly, “all things macabre,” have also emerged throughout the city, including ghost tours, haunted houses, metaphysical shops, and tarot card readers (Weir 2012, 196). This tourism industry continues to draw considerable crowds each year, with the highest rate of visitation during Salem’s Haunted Happenings festival, a month-long autumnal celebration. This festival has grown dramatically with each passing year; Salem experienced record-breaking crowds in October of 2022, with 993,900 arriving to partake in the festivities (Fox 2023). Sites of public history in Salem, Massachusetts must constantly navigate the tension and intersections between difficult knowledge, historical education, and entertainment. This is a particularly tricky endeavor, given the contrast between the popular perception of the witch and the dark origins of this figure. If asked to describe a witch, the average person is more likely to a list a set of fictional characteristics than describe the original criminal offense. Today, people typically envision witches as women, often older, haggard, or evil, who wear pointed hats, fly on broomsticks, cook over a cauldron, and own a black cat. For many, the witch is a figure from childhood, one spent reading fairytales, watching The Wizard of Oz, or trick-or-treating on Halloween. In recent years, the witch has also become an important spiritual figure, viewed by many Neopagans as a religious identity. Thousands of individuals currently identify as Wiccans or witches, with a significant community living and working in Salem.1 Amidst these many contemporary iterations of the witch, the reality of witchcraft trials often remains obscured. It is thus no surprise that the average Salem visitor has a minimal or distorted grasp of this dark history. The Salem Witch Museum serves as an example of how popular interest in dark tourism can provide an opportunity for education.2 Founded in 1972, this was one of the first organizations in Salem dedicated to telling the story of the 1692 witchcraft trials.3 Lacking an artifact collection, this museum could not be

 In 1986, Margot Adler estimated there were at least 400,000 practicing Wiccans in the United States. This number has certainly increased in recent decades (Adler 1986, 104).  Rachel Christ-Doane has been the Director of Education at the Salem Witch Museum since 2018. She holds a BA in History from Clark University and MA in History and Museum Studies from Tufts University. As Director of Education, she engages in an array of research, curates the museum’s exhibitions, works with students and teachers, and creates educational programming. This critical reflection provides internal insight into this museum, surveying the practices and methodologies employed by this organization.  The Salem Witch Museum is predated by just one organization as the longest continually operational witch trials-focused museum in Salem. The Witch House, a historic house museum which opened its doors in 1948, was once the home of one of the magistrates who presided over the witchcraft trials. “The Old Witch Jail and Dungeon” was the only other preceding witch-centered

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created in the traditional, walk-through gallery style. Instead, the organization chose to experiment with different forms of educational engagement. The result is an immersive museum experience divided into two exhibition spaces. The first allows visitors to shed preconceived notions about the Salem witch trials as they experience an audiovisual presentation. The second exhibition, added to the museum in 1999, incorporates varied interpretive methods to confront audiences with the larger history of witchcraft, the evolving image of the witch, and the connection between witch-hunts and the enduring phenomenon of scapegoating. By utilizing theatrical immersion and engaging storytelling, the Salem Witch Museum works to engage the array of popular interest exhibited by Salem’s visitors without distorting or demeaning the tragic history of the 1692 witchcraft trials. This educational strategy seeks to widen existing knowledge, encourage greater personal connections with this often-misinterpreted subject, and, most significantly, highlight connections between witchcraft trials and contemporary acts of scapegoating. This critical reflection will consider how the Salem Witch Museum has employed these methods of immersion and storytelling to affect visitors and meet expectations, while also challenging its visitors to question their preconceived notions and connect this history to social justice messages past and present.

Creating an Immersive Experience As noted by Alke Gröppel-Wegener and Jenny Kidd in their work Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling, the term “immersion” is both broad and open ended. It can refer to advanced technology, such as Virtual or Augmented Reality, or to more simple immersive experiences, such as interactive theatre or living history museums (Gröppel-Wegener & Kidd 2019, 1).4 At the Salem Witch Museum, audiences enter an environment which conveys a sense of esoteric mystery and drama through the ambience of the building, an affecting theater in-the-round style experience, and the strategic use of life-size tableaux. The immersive atmosphere begins before visitors enter the museum, as the building itself has a striking effect. Housed in a Gothic Revival-Style building, the imposing brownstone and brick structure was constructed between 1844 and 1846

experience. Created in 1935, this makeshift attraction was run out of a private home built on the site of the original seventeenth century jail. It is unclear precisely how long this tour was offered, but the attraction was certainly closed by 1956, when the building was razed (Weir 2012, 192).  For a discussion of immersive storytelling, see also the chapter by Jana Hawig in this volume.

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Figure 1: Salem Witch Museum illuminated at dusk, 2019, © Salem Witch Museum.

for Salem’s East Church congregation (see Figure 1). Serving as a fully operational church until the 1940s, much of the exterior remains unaltered from the original design. The interior also includes many visual reminders of the building’s past, including arched doorways, wrought-iron light fixtures, and spiral staircases visible (though not accessible to the public) in the front vestibule. Though this architecture is of course anachronistic to the colonial period, it aligns closely with the popular perception of the witch. The effect of this dark aesthetic is significant; younger visitors sometimes inform museum staff that they believe the building is a castle. Many inquire as to whether the building was once a church. Given the evident age of the structure, staff are frequently asked if the museum is haunted (to which they reply, “it is not,” often to the disappointment of the inquirer). Visitors sometimes arrive at the admissions desk under the impression they are about to enter a haunted house rather than a history museum. These are often visitors who appear primarily interested in “fright tourism” experiences, seeking a shock or thrill rather than a colonial history lesson. The macabre attraction of the building’s exterior is further heightened upon entrance into the first exhibition. Visitors enter a darkened auditorium illuminated by a glowing red circle embedded in the floor. This room, once the main

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congregation space of the church, is the oldest part of the museum, as it was converted into an audio-visual exhibition in 1972. Anticipation and excitement can be heard in the comments of the visitors entering this space. What will be revealed? Will something move in the darkness? Once seated, ominous organ music signals the beginning of the presentation. Over the next 22 minutes, a low, booming male voice tells a story, providing an overview of the Salem witch trials. The sonorous voice of the narrator has a conspicuous effect, as the tone is reminiscent of horror legend Vincent Price (some visitors insist Price voiced it, going so far as to argue the point with museum staff). As the presentation begins, the narrator positions himself as a dramatic storyteller as he breaks the fourth wall and welcomes the audience to the Salem Witch Museum. The presentation intentionally establishes a feeling that one is about to be told an eerie tale, as the resonant voice informs the audience that they are going to hear about the witchcraft trials that took place in Salem in 1692. Though initially creating a sense of mystery and anticipation is essential, the exhibition goes on to present a non-sensationalized account of the witchcraft trials. As the presentation begins, visitors are immersed in scenes of colonial history in a theatre-in-the-round style, as multiple tableaux raised several feet above the audiences’ heads are illuminated around the room, revealing a new scene from the darkness as the narration proceeds. These displays rely on lighting, music, and simple emotive sound effects (the rushing of wind, the murmurings of a crowd, ominous organ music, etc.) to create a sense of drama without sensationalizing the narrative.5 This method of interpretation allows visitors to witness pivotal moments from the witchcraft trials, such as the initial diagnosis of witchcraft or the trial of the elderly Rebecca Nurse, a beloved and respected member of the community. This format also subtly challenges certain prominent misconceptions associated with these events— such as the idea that witches were burned at the stake in Salem or the accused really were evil, Devil worshippers. This use of strategic immersion is one significant method the museum utilizes to connect to the macabre association with witchcraft without overstepping into sensationalism for the sake of entertainment. It is true this format does not align with the expectations of all visitors—some are disappointed, for example, to learn they cannot see artifacts or walk through a gallery space on their own. Nevertheless, this format makes this piece of tragic history engaging for an array of

 At the time of this publication, the Salem Witch Museum is working to update this presentation space. This project is not expected to dramatically alter the format of this presentation or incorporate significant new technology. It will instead remove elements of dated scholarship from the narration and refresh the tableaux.

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visitors. In his 2009 monograph, The Making of Salem: The Witch Trials in History, Fiction and Tourism, Robin DeRosa recounted his own observations following a recent visit, “I noted the throngs of campers and counselors and the large number of families with children at the presentation . . . The [Salem Witch Museum] manages to wrap its thrills in a cocoon of morality and historicity that makes its heightened drama into a methodology for education in the eyes of its visitors” (DeRosa 2009, 171).

Storytelling Techniques The use of storytelling further compliments this immersive atmosphere. In the initial presentation space, the exhibition utilizes an omnipotent, third-person narrator to convey the story of the witchcraft trials. Though an abbreviated account of the Salem trials, the narrative emphasis of this presentation seeks to make the actions of the colonists understandable and, to some degree, relatable to a modern audience. An important element of this narrative is underscoring the way panic can take hold during a time of escalated tension, resulting in the scapegoating of innocent people. The narration begins by describing the fears inherent to colonial New England, citing the danger of Indigenous attacks, the spread of smallpox, and the removal of the colony’s charter (an act threatening the colony’s autonomy). The narrator explains this was an environment ripe with suspicion, as colonists often interpreted acts of misfortune as the work of the Devil: “They could hear [the Devil] in the howling of wolves, in the creaking of an old house on a winter’s night . . . [Satan] had come to New England, so preachers like Cotton Mather said, to undo God’s Kingdom, setting snares for the unwary” (Fair 1972). The context introduced at the start of the story seeks to explain a worldview that may be unfamiliar, one where the Devil and his followers were often used to explain disaster or tragedy. As the narrator moves on to share the story of the mysterious illness of nine-year-old Betty Parris and eleven-year-old Abigail Williams, a prolonged sickness which eventually led to a diagnosis of witchcraft, the audience learns how these underlying fears could be channeled into accusations of witchcraft during a moment of unexplainable misfortune. The second exhibition utilizes storytelling on a smaller scale, though in this case through the use of first-person perspective rather than third-person narration. After the first presentation, visitors enter the exhibition Witches: Evolving Perceptions. This exhibition was created in 1999 in an effort to address the diverse and ever-growing interests of modern audiences. This space again utilizes tab-

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leaux, in this case for the purpose of representing three distinct definitions of the witch: its tragic original usage, a stereotypical/Halloween witch, and the modern witchcraft religion. As a docent guides visitors through the room, they view each tableau and hear a short speech, accentuated by music and sound effects, conveying the sense that this figure is telling its own story. Unlike the first exhibition, these tableaux speak in the first-person, intended to foster a personal connection between the storyteller and audience, a method that is particularly important given the scope of information conveyed in this exhibition. In the first tableau, visitors hear stories of women accused of witchcraft during the height of the European witch trials. The women introduce themselves, noting where they are from (the first is from Scotland, the second from the Holy Roman Empire, two areas which experienced some of the largest and most lethal witchcraft trials), before telling the stories of their accusations – in both cases, a random act of misfortune which led a neighbor to suspect they were to blame. Fear, anger, and sadness can be heard in the voices of these women, reminding visitors of the tragedy and violence experienced by those first labeled as witches, while also echoing the stories included in the main presentation narrative. After hearing from the first tableaux, the audience directs their attention to a more familiar figure, a green-skinned woman astride a broom. This figure talks more abstractly from the perspective of the fictional witch, explaining how an image slowly emerged from the convergence of stories and writings produced during the witch trials era, over time solidifying into a stereotypical image. The voice of this figure begins in a shrill tone (similar to that of the Wicked Witch of the West), and is accompanied by theatrical sound effects, such as the bubbling of a cauldron. As the narration goes on, her voice softens and gentle music begins and she discusses how she slowly transformed into a figure that is now commonly represented as beautiful, kind, and intelligent. Audiences often react positively to this secondary figure – as, for many, this is a familiar face, so to speak. Visitors sometimes pose for pictures in front of this display or follow up with docents about aspects of this figure not specifically addressed by the narration (i.e., why do witches wear pointed hats?). In this way, this tableau provides a helpful vehicle for addressing audience expectations while also expanding existing knowledge to connect this familiar figure with the dark history of witch trials. In the final display, two modern witches discuss their religion from a firstperson perspective. The tableau includes a man and woman dressed in ordinary clothing standing in a forest scene. This scene can have a particularly strong impact for some visitors, as individuals who identify as modern witches often visit the museum. Sometimes these visitors become emotional in this space. On one memorable occasion, a visitor informed a docent they were from a place where they faced ridicule and even danger because they identify as a witch and was moved to see this

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element of the exhibition. While many visitors have no personal connection to these figures, or are even frightened by the idea of modern witchcraft, this tableau speaks to an important contemporary element of the evolution of the witch. Whereas this exhibition utilizes other forms of communication, including two artifact displays, information panels, and a guided tour, the three tableaux are typically the most engaging elements of this space.6 Those who may not be interested in reading display panels (such as children, teenagers, or more visually inclined learners) are often more receptive to such displays. By creating personified stories to convey the complex and evolving story of the witch, these tableaux seek to make this history relatable, emotional, and engaging for learners at a variety of ages and educational backgrounds.

Morality Narratives Emphasizing the enduring pattern of scapegoating is arguably the most important component of the exhibitions at the Salem Witch Museum. The museum’s core mission statement articulates this theme, “to be the voice of innocent victims of witch-hunts from 1692 to the present day,” and it is both implicitly and explicitly articulated throughout both exhibition spaces. Frequently, sites of difficult history include a call to action or social justice emphasis, a reminder that these events can and do happen in the modern world (Rose 2016, 53–55). The formula “fear + a trigger = a scapegoat” displayed in the secondary exhibition offers a clear message; the fears, pressures, and choices which drove witchcraft trials are not limited to the early modern period. A floor-to-ceiling display shows the formula on a ghosted backdrop of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army vs. McCarthy hearings in 1954. Below the formula are four examples of events in American history that followed this pattern of behavior: the Salem witch trials, the internment of thousands of Japanese Americans following the bombing of Pearl Harbor, the Communist blacklists compiled by the House Un-American Activities Committee during the Cold War, and the scapegoating of the gay community during the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s. The tour of this space ends with

 The museum began actively acquiring artifacts in 2018. It is a modest collection, comprised of objects related to the history of witchcraft (including early modern demonology and skeptic books) and the evolving image of the witch (such as a first edition of L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz). Two artifact cases were added to Witches: Evolving Perceptions in 2019. While the museum hopes to add additional relevant objects to this space in the future, there are no plans to make artifacts a dominant feature of this exhibition.

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Figure 2: “The Witch-Hunt Wall,” 2005, © Salem Witch Museum.

a discussion of how this formula can help to explain what happened in Salem in 1692 as well as these three events from twentieth century American history. Given the contemporary connections articulated in this space, visitor interaction is essential. The museum has received both positive feedback and condemnatory criticism relating to the Witch-Hunt Wall (see Figure 2) since the creation of the Witches: Evolving Perceptions exhibition in 1999. Though many are familiar with the comparison between Senator McCarthy’s Communist blacklists and the Salem witch trials, an example made famous by Arthur Miller’s allegorical play The Crucible in 1953, the other examples provided by this display sometimes elicit vitriolic reactions. The idea to create an interactive component to this display was developed following a rise in anti-Muslim sentiment following the Boston marathon bombing in 2013. The need for such a method of individualized visitor engagement became even more pronounced in the wake of the 2016 US presidential election, as the term “witch-hunt” began appearing frequently in US political discourse. Beginning in 2017, postcards showing an image of the Witch-Hunt Wall on one side, and a blank formula on the other, were made available for visitors as they exited. On this card, a prompt asks about events from history or the modernday that may follow this formula and informs visitors they can send back the

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card or visit a website with an online template to submit an example. A space for the name of the postcard’s author, their city, state, and country of residence, month of visit, and email are also available, though not all choose to provide this information. Submissions, both from physical postcards and virtual entries, have been visible on the museum’s website since 2019.7 All examples are posted as submitted, the only exceptions being those which include hate speech, vulgarity, or are unintelligible. Guests can check the website in the weeks after their visit and see their suggestion added to the database. At the time of this publication, the museum has received over a thousand submissions. Some reference historical acts of scapegoating, such as the treatment of Jews in Germany during the Second World War. Others reference contemporary events, such as the blame assigned to individuals of Asian ancestry during the COVID-19 pandemic. Submissions sometimes forgo the blank formula and use the cards to offer a comment or suggestion. One postcard, submitted in October 2019, states, “Humanity uses those who are different because when we have someone to blame it gives us control.” Another undated postcard reads, “Not really sure how to say it but liberalism vs. conservatism has resulted in too much division.” Others use this space to criticize the social justice message articulated in this space or specific examples included in the display. A card submitted in 2019 states, “totally disappointed with infection + AIDS = Gay. You should take that off.” Another, submitted in October of 2017, reads “When will the Hillary Clinton room be finished?” The consistent visitor engagement with this space has been an encouraging mark of the success of this project. The Witch-Hunt Wall postcards not only support deeper audience engagement with the lessons of witchcraft trials but have also allowed the museum to facilitate a dialogue, encouraging visitors to participate in an important, ongoing social conversation. At the time of publication, two researchers are analyzing this data for a quantitative psychological study. The museum will use this data to create further learning opportunities, including, but not limited to, pamphlets relating the findings of this study and educational events about the contemporary implications of the witch-hunt formula.

Conclusion Since its foundation in 1972, the Salem Witch Museum has long been faced with the challenge of finding an appropriate balance between education and entertainment. A framework articulated by Duncan Light provides a valuable context for  See www.salemwitchmuseum.com/witch-hunt (May 1, 2023).

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understanding the strategy employed by this unusual museum. As Light notes, when considering the phenomenon of dark tourism, it can be beneficial to shift the conversation from “what is dark tourism?” to “what does dark tourism do?” (Light 2019, 131). In the case of Salem, Massachusetts, a city infamous for its dark history, the Salem Witch Museum has utilized the evident public interest in the macabre as a vehicle for education, working to create exhibitions that both entertain and underscore the endurance of hate, exclusion, and scapegoating. The success of this methodology is both inherent in the popularity of this museum, which has long been one of the most visited attractions in Salem, but also through visitor feedback (DeRosa 2009, 171; Weir 2012, 204). Visitor surveys administered in the fall of 2019, asked “How do you prefer to learn?” Nearly half of the respondents recorded a preference for visual learning. Several specifically noted the effect of the presentation, in one case explicitly stating: “I am a visual learner so a presentation like this one is a great way for me to learn” (ChristDoane 2019). In the same visitor survey, respondents signaled a preference for storytelling or performance-based experiences as a method of learning (ChristDoane 2019). While a limited survey, these responses indicate a positive reception to this educational format. Anecdotally, docents also frequently hear encouraging conversations from those exiting the museum. Some report hearing visitors positively remarking, often with surprise, about their experiences and sometimes continuing discussions regarding the witch-hunt formula while lingering in the museum store. Lacking a traditional collection, the Salem Witch Museum has the unique opportunity to curate an experience rather than a selection of artifacts. By utilizing an immersive atmosphere, varied methods of storytelling, and establishing a core social justice message, the museum has worked to bridge the gap between audience expectation and the reality of this difficult history. Though not a typical museum, this organization introduces visitors to the complex and ever-evolving history of witchcraft and invites them to look past the popular culture green witch and understand this figure as a piece of our shared and difficult past with innumerable lessons essential for our modern world.

Bibliography Adams, Gretchen. The Specter of Salem: Remembering the Witch Trials in Nineteenth-Century America. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008. Adler, Margot. Drawing Down the Moon: Witches, Druids, Goddess – Worshippers and Other Pagans in America. New York: Penguin Books, 1986.

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Bristow, Robert, and Mirela Newman. “Myth vs. Fact: An Exploration of Fright Tourism.” Proceedings of the 2004 Northeastern Recreation Research Symposium. Ed. Kelly Bricker and Sarah J. Millington. Newtown Square, PA: USDA Forest Service, 2005: 215–221. Christ-Doane, Rachel. Salem Witch Museum Visitor Questionnaire. Salem Witch Museum, Salem, Massachusetts, September 2019. DeRosa, Robin. The Making of Salem: The Witch Trials in History, Fiction and Tourism. Jefferson: McFarland & Company, 2009. Dunkley, Ria. “A Light in Dark Places? Analyzing the Impact of Dark Tourism Experiences on Everyday Life.” Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation. Ed. Glenn Hooper and John Lennon. Oxfordshire: Routledge, 2017: 108–120. Fair, Charles. Salem Witch Museum Presentation. 1972. Theatrical script. Fox, Kate. Interview by Author with Executive Director of Destination Salem. January 31, 2023. Gröppel-Wegener, Alke, and Jenny Kidd. Critical Encounters with Immersive Storytelling. New York: Routledge, 2019. Light, Duncan. “The Undead and Dark Tourism: Dracula Tourism in Romania.” Dark Tourism: Practice and Interpretation. Ed. Glenn Hooper and John J. Lennon. New York: Routledge, 2019. 121–133. Salem Visitor’s Guide. Essex Institute, 1895. Stone, Philip R. “A Dark Tourism Spectrum: Towards a Typology of Death and Macabre Related Tourist Sites, Attractions and Exhibitions.” Tourism: An Interdisciplinary International Journal 54.2 (2006): 145–160. Stone, Philip R. “It’s a Bloody Guide: Fun, Fear and a Lighter Side of Dark Tourism at the Dungeon Visitor Attractions, UK.” The Darker Side of Travel: The Theory and Practice of Dark Tourism. Ed. Philip R. Stone and Richard Sharpley. Bristol: Channel View Publications, 2009. 167–185. Rose, Julia. Interpreting Difficult History at Museums and Historic Sites. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016. Weir, Robert E. “Bewitched and Bewildered: Salem Witches, Empty Factories, and Tourist Dollars.” Historic Journal of Massachusetts 40.1/2 (2012): 179–205.

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“Use Me, When Needed Again”: Performing Heritage at Monuments of the Yugoslav Era Introduction When German political scientist Claus Leggewie introduced the image of “Battlefield Europe” in 2009, he reflected about the necessity of a pan-European awareness, which had to integrate the multitude of conflicts, expulsions, and ethnic cleansings within and beyond Europe in the twentieth century as an explicitly shared memory. However, Leggewie’s article focuses primarily on the obstacles to a transnational remembrance as he observes an “existing asymmetry of European memory” (Leggewie 2009, 4). By this, Leggewie simply stresses the fact that neither the Holocaust nor the Gulag mean the same things for people and nations throughout Europe and that the wars in Europe were followed by a battle over memory. Consequently, historians, art historians, cultural scientists, and representatives from other disciplines have produced innumerable accounts of what it means to narrate the past as conflicted or shared European history. One of the reasons for the ongoing asymmetry of memory lies in the various degrees of its visibility, of the sheer quantity of medialized and iconized content, and its prosumers. In this respect, monuments of the former Yugoslavia are an interesting case materializing the battle over memory, which is in their case simultaneously highly visible and alarmingly unseen. Spomeniks, the most used SerboCroatian-based term for this specific group of monuments, are undergoing a visible entry into art and popular culture today. Images by renowned or amateur photographers are flashing social media platforms or hitting the front page of art exhibitions. At the same time, contemporary discourses around these monuments (especially those from an “outsider” gaze position) are unaware of their historical inscription, which is the idea of Yugoslavia, its history, its ambitions, and its end. Furthermore, Spomeniks carry the narratives of Yugoslavia’s aftermath. They embody the told and untold narratives of the Balkan Wars of the 1990s that finally erased any sense of shared experience for people living in the new post-Yugoslav states. They testify to a war in Europe that made their existence redundant, and today they often emblematize a threat to various contemporary nationalistic currents in the former Yugoslavia’s successor states, still intending to forget the narratives of their past(s). As Claus Leggewie puts it:

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the biggest obstacle to addressing the Yugoslavian catastrophe from 1991 onwards could be that it was not the authoritarian Tito regime that was responsible for causing the antagonism between the incompatible Serbs and Croats, Bosniaks and Kosovo-Albanians, so much as the illiberal democracies, whose nationalist majorities could not – and cannot – care less for the protection of ethnic and religious minorities (2009, 5).

In focusing on monuments of the former Yugoslavia, we address a highly contested case of heritage narratives, the often-uncomfortable multilayered histories engraved in stone – the tale of a socialist country not belonging to the Soviet Union, but not aligning with the West either, and the tale of the bloody civil war of the 1990s. The contemporary uses and misuses of Spomeniks were the subject of excursions and field work undertaken in recent years in order to explore performativity as a tool of a critical and first and foremost bodily encounter with heritage today. The methodological approach presented in this paper is by no means accidental, as the monuments themselves are aesthetic objects, which need to be perceived as (figurative) bodies among (human) bodies. We argue that both the existence of bodies and the inexistence of bodies are crucial in the context of conflicted narratives of the past. The case of monuments of former Yugoslavia is a spectacular one in this sense, as the bodies that once narrated the story of a certain context are gone, but the bodies of the monuments (mostly) still exist.

Monuments as Museums and Stage When the Second World War was won, the new Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was formed and the process of identity building based on the ideals of antifascism and unity began, with an emphasis on the success of the social revolution. For this purpose, the state developed and employed a temporal identitybuilding strategy, based on formulating visions of the past, the present, and the future. Various practices – from building monuments and memorials, developing exhibitions and collections, to designing firm history curricula for elementary and secondary schools – were aimed to join the past, present, and future within the same site and in the same moment in time. The joining of the three was usually achieved by instigating encounters between veterans, the working people of Yugoslavia who were building the new society, and student youth, within the same practices of memory. For example, the performance scores of commemorations by rule entailed an homage to the fallen comrades led by the veterans, which was followed by narrational introduction of references to the contemporary relevant political occurrences or infrastructural achievements. Each perfor-

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mance of this type concluded with a cultural program that actively involved youth and pupils as creators and performers. Official formulations of the past, including the founding myth of the new state, were framed within narratives of the Second World War and the undeniably won freedom and victory over fascism, as the recent and most triggering story, as a still living memory. Due to the dominance of war-connected narratives (either the glorification of combats or paying respects to the victims) the state framed its didactic cultural production logically within the scope of memorial art. “The monuments were used in an effort to master the past in order to control the future. Even though monuments mostly commemorated fallen soldiers, they were also used to articulate a spirit of optimism and collective will, directed towards a utopian classless society” (Musabegović 2012, 20). Across the state, this strategy could be seen in the erecting of monuments dedicated to the Peoples’ Liberation Struggle (NOB). With the funding support, from public institutions and private initiatives, SUBNOR (the Association of Fighters of the Peoples’ Liberation War) conducted a highly elaborated building endeavor. The Association supervised the building and placement of close to 14,402 diverse memory markers until 1961, “almost three monuments per day for each day of sixteen-year period” (Bergholz 2007, 65). From a contemporary standpoint these grand-scale monuments can be interpreted in terms of a heritage network, or even heritage route (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2006), as they were connected both on the level of narrative and on the level of visitors’ commute by intentionally placing them along the routes of major roads and railways. Additionally, due to their dominant artistic style, they can be counted as a form of open-air museum that even today operate in a similar manner but now focused primarily on their aesthetic qualities, often disregarding the narratives they were built to mark. The process of musealization of immovable tangible heritage was present from their conception. During the state’s existence, they were presented together in publications dedicated to the cultural heritage of Yugoslavia and by specialized tourist guides. They entered the international art scene with Yugoslavia’s Pavilion at 39th Venice Biennale in 1980 (Bogdanović 2017) marking the beginning of their transformation to artworks, that the contemporary moment has taken even further by almost completely disregarding their function and placing them into the frames of architectural brutalism. However, the musealization of the sites and narratives they were dedicated to accompanied the construction of the memorials. This is especially visible within the planned structure of the sites that carried an allYugoslav significance, i.e., that either carried a memory of a great victory or of mass civilian casualties. On those occasions the architectural solution for the elaborate memorial parks incorporated the museum (or museum-like) spaces. These institutions did indeed function on the principles we encounter in history museums today. They collected, preserved, and exhibited artifacts related to the history of the spe-

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cific sites and were therefore responsible for both documenting the past and for making it comprehensible to broad audiences. Although the interpretation of these sites has drastically changed in the past thirty years both in the local and international context, they still function as an over-dimensionalized open-air museum or maybe even a sculpture garden, within which the historical or contemporary societal context becomes secondary and the visual and formal aspects are consumed as their most important trait. The truly vast and diverse research volume, ranging from art history and anthropology of heritage to memory and cultural studies (Dadić Dinulović 2017; Denegri 2017; Horvatinčić 2012; Karge 2010; Kirn & Burghardt 2011; Kulić 2018; ManojlovićPintar 2008; Musabegović 2012; Niebyl at al. 2018; Pejić 2012; Putnik-Prica 2017; Šuvaković 2017), considers these monuments an archetype of the time of hyper-expansion of artistic form in the new Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia after 1948, when the state distanced itself intentionally from the Soviet Union. The plethora of formats used is extensive: it reaches from memory plaques and inscriptions on birth houses, schools, or other objects of importance in the life of local communities to large-scale monuments and elaborated memorials (Karge 2010). Assembled, they form a collection that greatly vary in size and aesthetic solutions – from a rather conservative socialist realism of poor quality to the large compositions that can be seen as masterpieces of Yugo-specific modernism. The latter are for example the works of Bogdan Bogdanović,1 who among others created the Memorial Park Popina in Serbia (see Figure 1). It uses a design that oscillates between figurative and abstract forms and is equipped with an engraving, which would translate into English as “Use me, when needed again.” Given the highly metaphorical semantics that Bogdanović utilized in his works, it remains ambiguous if this engraving refers to the continuous need for fighting fascism, as in the combat between German troops and Partisans in Popina in October 1941, or to the overcoming of any such antagonism in the name of the Yugoslavian third way. However, with the abolishment of the human body from the new visual vocabulary, a new set of forms such as deconstructed and alienated stars, fists, wings, flowers, and rocks were adopted, and some truly modernist forms were produced. Today, scholars consider it a genuinely specific memorial typology that linked the memory of WWII to the promise of the future brought forward by the socialist revolution. Instead of formally addressing suffering, modernist memorial sites were intended to catalyze universal gestures of reconciliation, resistance, and modern progress (Kirn & Burghardt 2011, 6).

 https://www.arhivamodernizma.com/autori/bogdan-bogdanovic/ (August 9, 2022).

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Figure 1: Memorial Park Popina, Serbia. Photo by Vladimir Kulić, 2014.

Alongside the new aesthetic principles of their design, selecting an appropriate site had a significant role in their construction. When planned outside urbanized areas, they were placed so that more than one type of visitor activity could be combined. These sites were at the same time sites of leisure, education, and paying respect and therefore almost mandatorily incorporated an amphitheater into their design, transforming the monument into a stage – a scenography for the scripted performance. The memorial network of NOB was built and maintained in continuity until the violent dissolution of Yugoslavia with a varying frequency of conservational care. Nevertheless, the erected memory sites played their role in the community with a firmly defined rhythm of annual commemorative events and state holidays. However, the final decade of the twentieth century altered life as it was known in the region for almost a half a century, the community was destroyed to the level of unrecognition and Yugoslavia and its memory and heritage were left to the mercy of time and the (ideological) needs of new societies. Historical revisionism entered the stage, and to this day, a consensus on the meaning and use of Yugoslavia’s heritage is not achieved among its successor states. Nevertheless, the future use of the outlandish memorial sites and monuments seems to be a provocative question.

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Spomeniks: Happily Colonized After almost two decades of silence surrounding the faith of this monument network, both local and international interest slowly penetrated the public domain in the early 2000s. It is important to note that these sites often were and still are registered as cultural properties by heritage institutions and are frequently used to demonstrate new ideological and societal needs. However, the locally specific value and the historical context of these sites did not cause the renewed regional and international interest. The novel curiosity was and is based on their interpretation through an aesthetic lens; they are understood primarily as artistic expression and peculiar extraterrestrial objects placed “in the middle of nowhere.” In the past fifteen years, there have been several research, exhibition, and art projects focused on the memorial network of NOB – from documenting their number and current physical condition, such is the Inappropriate Monuments project2 and Spomenik Monument Database (Niebyl et al. 2018) to numerous artistic productions centered around their stylistic and historical significance that can be seen in the works of David Maljković,3 Igor Bošnjak,4 Elena Čemerska,5 or Ana Vujanović and Marta Popivoda.6 A potential culmination of international recognition of their artistic value certainly is the exhibition Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia, 1948–1980 by Philip Johnson and Vladimir Kulić staged at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2018.7 However, the first appearance of this monument network in the broader public forum can be attributed to the work of Jan Kempenaers. The work of the Belgian photographer gained significant recognition, with the work Spomenik #6 (Kozara) even finding its way to the digital collection of the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.8 In 2010, he published a book under the title Spomenik (Kempenaers 2010) and veneration of the monument network of NOB became a practice for brutalism lovers, as a new format of the Grand Tour. Coining of the word “Spomeniks” followed (Horvatinčić 2012) and instigated a sort of aesthetic colonization. Memory sites were cleared of memorial and social practices and their nar-

 https://inappropriatemonuments.org/en/ (August 18, 2022).  https://www.metropictures.com/exhibitions/david-maljkovic/selected-works?view=slider#6 (August 18, 2022).  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TvFwUBIIzhY (August 18, 2022).  https://spomeniknaslobodata.mk/gligor-serafimov/ (August 18, 2022).  http://www.anavujanovic.net/2018/06/landscapes-of-revolution/ (August 18, 2022).  https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/3931 (August 18, 2022).  https://collections.vam.ac.uk/item/O1313804/spomenik-6-kozara-photograph-jan-kempenaers/ (August 18, 2022).

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ratives were adjusted so they could fit the perception of the totalitarian East. The European Council defined and declared the heritage tourism route,9 pursuing its strategy to introduce a European collection of pan-European networks (Kaiser et al. 2014), and dubious internet platforms such as Atlas Obscura offered a new high-priced product.10 This process can be seen as cultural appropriation in a classic form. Vladimir Kulić claims that despite the world-wide exposure that was granted to Yugoslavia’s monuments, appropriating them as a matter of taste is nonetheless Orientalism, and the proclaimed benefits of globalized exposure are still not seen. “Rather than becoming identifiable in their own right, socialist buildings have only become further integrated into the economy of digital images, with the same anonymous detachment that ignores both their original meaning and their artistic merit” (Kulić 2018, 3). Imported tastes became the main principle of locally produced interpretation and regardless of the urgent voice of the local professional community, these sites were swiftly transformed into a commodity than can be used as a backdrop for any activity, including light-art performances, music videos, sci-fi movies,11 commercials, and fashion editorials. The “indigenous” product is made without consulting the local communities as to if and how they use these sites in their daily and extraordinary activities, and these monuments are transformed into an image of global taste and spectacularity.12 With a steady influx of contemporary pilgrims, #spomeniks can be found in many corners of the internet, giving the gloomy atmosphere of the bipolar world in front of and behind the Iron Curtain, conveniently forgetting that the sites in question stood on the curtain itself, that they were and are more than stone, and that they mark the good, bad, and ugly of the humanity and ideology of the former state. Today, critical commentators mark Spomeniks as social media clickbaits. Owen Hatherley cites the Croatian activist and curator Tihana Pupovac: “If we want to revive whatever we think can be found of politics in the aesthetic of these monuments, we need to go past nostalgia and past the sheer fascination.

 https://www.coe.int/en/web/cultural-routes/atrium-architecture-of-totalitarian-regimes-of-the20th-century; https://www.rcc.int/news/606/rcc-presents-balkan-monumental-trail-a-new-re gional-tourism-route (August 18, 2022).  https://www.atlasobscura.com/users/abiinman/lists/balkans-trip-april-2018 (August 18, 2022).  https://www.vecernji.hr/kultura/na-petrovoj-gori-njemci-za-netflix-snimili-postapokalipticnuseriju-o-razorenoj-europi-1375616 (August 18, 2022).  A rare example of bottom-up heritage-based practices involving the local community is Heritage from Below | Drežnica: Traces and Memories 1941–1945. https://www.ipu.hr/article/en/761/ heritage-from-below-dreznica-traces-and-memories-1941–1945 (August 18, 2022).

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Because, again, these monuments in themselves are not that unique, what was unique was the lived historical experience of socialism” (2016). The complex and above all uncomfortable history of the former Yugoslav region since the start of its violent dissolution imposed significant limitations on dealing with its heritage, especially with regard to Second World War monuments. For decades the professional heritage interpretation, management, and protection community within the region circled around the issue, trying not to address it at all. The once built open-air museum collection was divided and often deaccessioned from the new national heritage ‘depot’. The route of heritage was broken, and for a long time a replacing bodily action that would link them together was not found. Veneration of socialist antiques brought the first instance of renewed, but thoroughly decontextualized encounters, as indicated above. The question is if and how can future interactions with sites be framed? In addition, and even more importantly: should the appeal these sites hold beyond their very local context be so easily dismissed? The truth is they are spectacular. Both by their sheer magnitude and their specific figuration, they create a sense of awe (see Figure 2). They cannot not be perceived as artworks in themselves and as a museum collection overall; they are Land Art years before Western curators popularized this term. Hence, it is counterproductive to contextualize the monuments of the Yugoslav era without regard to their aesthetic narrative. Rather, one should take up this narrative as a quest for a different way to deal with the monuments today. Consequently, Sanja Horvatinčić makes a strong call for “the development of new research and mediation methodologies and practice” (2020, 113). Following this notion, we propose the use of performing heritage as a methodological tool in the heritage sector, as one possible investigative direction coming from the specific potentials these sites offer when approached as an aesthetic practice and not as aesthetic objects.

Performing Heritage In heritage studies, the lack of analyzing practice itself – and not solely the narrative conveyed – is encountered even when the examples of performances at heritage sites are being emphasized or criticized. Most often, studies place the focus on the appropriateness of the act and not on the bodily interaction occurring within the site. The apparent lack of acknowledging the necessity of bodily presence, movement, and expression of the intended message is what creates room for introducing performativity into the heritage arena (Jackson & Kidd 2011). As much as the call for appropriate behavior is valid and needed in the case of me-

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Figure 2: Monument Battle of Sutjeska, Memorial Park Valley of Heroes, Tjentište. Photo by Luka Skansi, 2018.

morial sites, one may ask: how does a visitor know what is appropriate and what is not, if bodily conduct is not explained or investigated? In his “Manifesto for Performative Research,” the Australian practice-researcher Brad Haseman suggests to “lead research through practice” (2006, 100). Referring to John Austin’s concept of performativity, Haseman strengthens the idea of knowledge production that becomes self-referential: “[a dance, a novel, a contemporary performance] not only express the research, but in that expression become the research itself” (2006, 102). Even though we do not necessarily agree with the emphasis that practice, and more specifically artistic practice, “is the principal research activity” (Haseman 2006, 103), we take his advice to explore the presentational forms of our knowledge production in alternative ways. “When research findings are made as

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presentational forms,” Haseman argues, “they deploy symbolic data in the material forms of practice [. . .]” (2006, 102). In this case, we would argue that the material forms of practice are based on the body(s) of the performer. Bodies perform a dance, an act of remembrance, or research. Hence, any research findings on (in our case) the monuments of the Yugoslav era, which show themselves as presentational forms, reflect their status as findings of the body. As they oscillate between research and performance, they force the researcher/performer to deal with their own body, which simultaneously signifies something and brings this something physically into existence. Judith Butler states that any claim is “not only spoken or written, but it is made precisely when bodies appear together or, rather, when, through their action, they bring the space of appearance into being” (Butler 2015, 89). In this sense, we can apply the terms “space” by Butler or “social reality of a performance” by Erika Fischer-Lichte (2012). They are the product of the “pre-discursive” status of a body in action, i.e., space is subjected to discursive adjustment only after it appears as an aerial field of narrative, as ideological and discursive vacuum. To go a bit further into Butler’s argument, for an action and space to gain meaning, they firstly need to be observed as practices of the body – and that is where the potential of practice-based research can have its rightful place in the heritage sector. Although practice-based research has become a visible and influential methodology within the arts and performative studies in the last two decades, in the field of museum and heritage studies, performativity is hardly used as a means of alternative knowledge production in dealing with the past. Mechtild Widrich (2014) was possibly the first scholar to directly link theories of performativity with monuments and the sector of heritage production. She defines performative monuments as both an aesthetic and political practice that is based on the presumption of its social consequences and therefore binds together bodily presence, history, and politics. By applying principles of performance, she advocates for the necessity of two orders of participants in making a performative monument – the performer and the observer. However, she conceptualizes the performative monument according to one of the dominant criteria of performativity – the blurring of boundaries between producing art and receiving art, between the stage and the audience (Goldberg 1998). In the context of heritage, this means that performativity can be used as a tool to reflect on the gap between the result of the monument and the process of perceiving the monument as a continuous challenge of active sense-making between the body(s) of the audience and the body(s) of the monument. The specific postmodern problem of who disposes of history (Deines et al. 2003) performs itself rather than being solved. In this way, a monument keeps its form of a living object – an object with a continuous purpose that helps create and reflect the contemporary (emancipatory) struggle. Furthermore, the exchange of qualities, both physical and symbolic, creates a sense of understand-

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ing between the audience/practitioners and consequently a performative monument becomes a matter of perceivable reality. Whereas Widrich looks out for monuments that in her understanding are inherently performative, as in the often-cited works of Jochen Gerz and Esther Shalev-Gerz, our approach aims at using performativity as a methodological tool which, hypothetically, can be applied to any monument. We argue that transforming the process of perception of the monument into a presentational form will re-insert the body into the main narrative of heritage production. Presentational forms come in many shapes and sizes from photography, performing arts, poems – as suggested by Gal Kirn (2016) and his score of a partisan poem used anew – to semantic wordplays and the creation of #spomeniks. The practice of producing a presentational form as a bodily tool for working with heritage allows researchers, as well as practitioners, to approach its specific historical context and to simultaneously create awareness of the contemporaneity and contingency of such an act. Furthermore, application of a presentational form transforms an aesthetic object of heritage into an aesthetic practice of heritage, making it possible to act and be seen. For memorial sites of former Yugoslavia this would allow them to be used to address the needs of the communities surrounding them, as Horvatinčić highlights “their potential as contemporary and political tools for bridging ethnic divisions and conflicts” (2020, 113). The proposed notion of applying diverse presentational forms in order to interact and interpret heritage came as a result of research through observation. Namely, through three consecutive student seminars held in the region of former Yugoslavia and where open-ended deliverables were produced, it became clear that the conditioning of the body and the movements of visitors achieves the highest impact of heritage sites, as such sites carry a significant level of selfreferentiality due to their physical configurations (Đorđević 2021). This can be seen, for example, when a group of students applied the presentational form of Follow-Me-Around-Videos in the process of investigating, and therefore encountering, the Partisan Fighter Monument in Podgorica (Montenegro). In the video ASMR – Monument Edition, they used contemporary aesthetic techniques to reflect the physical presence of their bodies through close-ups of them interacting with the site or through their own breathing being fortified at certain moments. They never show more than a detail of the monument as if to reject a coherent grasping of the past. Instead, it becomes visible that their bodies frame the perception of the monument physically: “This is what it looks like” is a repetitive phrase as the smartphone camera strolls across stones, weeds, and leftovers, retracing the movements of the body/bodies. In this specific case, the student/performer imagines a medialized audience and engages in the act of self-spectating

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through the means of anatomically deconstructing her own body and the site by focusing on dissecting the physical and material qualities of heritage production. Alongside the presentational form produced, the process of documenting the act taking place marks a significant aspect of what is to be performing heritage. By creating references that can be observed, an aesthetic object is produced and can be reflected regardless of location and context. The act of documenting the practice is one of the vital elements of performing heritage as a tool in heritage management and interpretation, especially in terms of determining the appropriate and inappropriate manners of performing within a memorial site. The document of practices transforming a site into heritage can be one starting point for the necessary deconstruction of the colonizing appropriation of Yugoslavia’s heritage. If the practices are known in all their iterations, exercises such as Parkour art and climbing (Kulić 2018) would not be possible as performance acts. This means that a site would not only be a stage for the “outsider” gaze but an active participant in the interaction as the life of the monument within its community can be precisely traced. Furthermore, if practices as presentational forms are known, monuments of NOB can have a contemporary use and presenting them as alien exotic objects is no longer sufficient. In terms of contemporary museum narrative creation, the understanding of an object as more than a material relic, as a presentational form, as an active participant in sense-making that does impact the ways in which the body of the audience behaves in its presence, can significantly alter the principles of participatory practice. There is a possibility to relocate the investigative focus away from the relations between audience/practitioner groups. Thus, it is possible to establish the interaction with the “artifacts” as the primary interest, and therefore explore the bodily techniques of communication coming from other fields of investigation, such as trauma coping mechanisms. The practice-based method that we are proposing rests on the main principle of bodily interaction that is always occurring here and now. It offers, as a core task of the heritage sector, the possibility of exploring presentational forms that can prolong and reflect the life of a monument within the local and broader community. As observed through numerous study visits, when (human) bodies perform with (figurative) bodies they deconstruct the othering of the gaze; and to deconstruct is to decolonize “when needed again.”13

 Inscription Memorial Park Popina (Serbia), Bogdan Bogdanović, constructed 1978–1980.

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Bibliography Bergholz, Max. “Među rodoljubima, kupusom, svinjama i varvarima: spomenici i grobovi NOR-a, 1947–1965 godine.” [Among Patriots, Cabbage, Pigs, and Barbarians: Monuments and Graves to the People’s Liberation War, 1947–1965] Godišnjak za društvenu istoriju [The Annual for Social History] 14.1–3 (2007): 61–82. Bogdanović, Ana. Exhibitions in the Yugoslav Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1938–1990). Doctoral dissertation. Belgrade: Faculty of Philosophy, Department for Art History, 2017. Butler, Judith. Notes Toward a Performative Theory of Assembly. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015. Dadić Dinulović, Tatjana. “Arhitektura kao scenski tekst: studija slučaja sedamsto hiljada stubova.” [Architecture as a stage text: case of the seven hundered thousand pillars.] Arhitektura i urbanizam 44 [Architecture and Urban Design 44] (2017): 14–20. Deines, Stefan, Stephan Jaeger, and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). Historisierte Subjekte – Subjektivierte Historie. Zur Verfügbarkeit und Unverfügbarkeit von Geschichte. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2003. Denegri, Jerko. Jugoslovenski umetnički prostor. [Yugoslav art space], http://www.sveske.ba/bs/con tent/jugoslovenski-umetnicki-prostor. Sarajevske sveske, No. 51 from January 26, 2017 (August 1, 2022). Đorđević, Marija. Jugoslavija pamti: mesto, telo i pokret za prostore izvođenog nasleđa [Yugoslavia Commemorates: Site, Body and Action for Spaces of Performing Heritage]. Belgrade: Europa Nostra Serbia, 2021. Fischer-Lichte, Erika. Performativität: Eine Einführung. Bielefeld: transcript, 2012. Goldberg, Roselee. Performance – Live Art Since the 60s. London: Thames & Hudson 1998. Haseman, Brad. “A Manifesto for Performative Research.” Media International Australia; incorporating culture and policy 118.1 (2006): 98–106. Hatherley, Owen. Concrete clickbait: next time you share a spomenik photo, think about what it means https://www.calvertjournal.com/articles/show/7269/spomenik-yugoslav-monument-owenhatherley. The Calvert Journal from November 29, 2016 (August 18, 2022). Horvatinčić, Sanja. The Peculiar Case of Spomeniks: Monumental commemorative sculpture in former Yugoslavia between invisibility and popularity. https://www.academia.edu/3362073/The_Peculiar_ Case_of_Spomeniks_-_Monumental_Commemorative_Sculpture_in_Former_Yugoslavia_Be tween_Invisibility_and_Popularity. Lecture held at the II. Lisbon Summer School of Culture/ Peripheral Modernities from July 9–14, 2012 (August 18, 2022). Horvatinčić, Sanja. “Between Memory Politics and New Models of Heritage Management: rebuilding Yugoslav memorial sites ‘from below’.” ICOMOS – Journals of the German National Committee 73 (2020): 108–115. Jackson, Anthony and Jenny Kidd. “Introduction.” Performing Heritage: Research, Practice and Innovation in Museums and Live Interpretation. Ed. Anthony Jackson and Jenny Kidd. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011. 1–10. Kaiser, Wolfram, Stefan Krankenhagen, and Kerstin Poehls. Exhibiting Europe: Institutions, People, Collections and Narratives in History Museums. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2014. Karge, Heike. Steinerne Erinnerung – versteinerte Erinnerung? Kriegsgedenken in Jugoslawien (1947–1970). Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz Verlag, 2010. Kempenaers, Jan. Spomenik. Amsterdam: RomaPublications, 2010. Kirn, Gal. “How to Return to Partisan Memory?” Identities 13.1–2 (2016): 64–84.

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Kirn, Gal and Robert Burghardt. “Yugoslavian Partisan Memorials: Between Memorial Genre, Revolutionary Aesthetics and Ideological Recuperation.” Manifesta Journal 16 (2011): 66–75. Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “World Heritage and Cultural Economics.” Museum Frictions: Public Cultures / Global Transformations. Ed. Ivan Carp, Corinne A. Kratz, Lynn Szwaja, Tomás YbarraFrausto. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006. 162–202. Kulić, Vladimir. “Orientalizing Socialism: Architecture, Media, and the Representations of Eastern Europe.” Architectural Histories 6.1 (2018): 1–6. Leggewie, Claus. ”Battlefield Europe. Transnational Memory and European Identity.“ Eurozine (April 28, 2009): 1–14. Manojlović-Pintar, Olga. 2008, “Uprostoravanje ideologije: spomenici Drugoga svetskog rata i kreiranje kolektivnih identiteta.“ [Spatialization of Ideology: monument to WWII and making of collective identities], Dijalog povjesničara/ istoričara [Historian Dialogue], 10/1. Ed. Igor Graovac. Zagreb: Friedrich Neumann Stiftung, 2008. 287–306. Musabegović, Senadin. “Symbolic Significance of Monuments in Bosnia and Herzegovina.” MOnuMENTI: The changing face of remembrance. Exhibition catalogue. Ed. Daniel Brumund and Christian Pfeifer. Belgrade: Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst, 2012. 18–22. Niebyl, Donald, Damon Murray, and Stephen Sorrell. Spomenik Monument Database. London: Thames & Hudson, 2018. Pejić, Bojana. “Yugoslav Monuments: Art and the Rhetoric of Power.” MOnuMENTI: The changing face of remembrance. Exhibition catalogue. Ed. Daniel Brumund and Christian Pfeifer. Belgrade: Forum Ziviler Friedensdienst, 2012. 10–14. Putnik-Prica, Vladana. “From Socialist Realism to Socialist Aestheticism: Three Contrasting Examples of State Architects in Yugoslavia.” The State Artist in Romania and Eastern Europe. The Role of the Creative Unions. Ed. Caterina Preda. Bucharest: University of Bucharest, 2017. 347–373. Šuvaković, Miško. Kulturalna politika i moderna umetnost od socijalističkog realizma do socijalističkog modernizma – slučaj socijalističke Jugoslavije 1945–1991. [Cultural policy and modern art from socialist realism to socialist modernism – case of the socialist Yugoslavia] http://sveske.ba/en/ content/kulturalna-politika-i-moderna-umetnost-od-socijalistickog-realizma-do-socijalistickogmodern. Sarajevske sveske, No. 51 from January 26, 2017 (August 1, 2022). Widrich, Mechtild. Performative Monuments: The Rematerialisation of Public Art. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2014.

Selma Ćatović Hughes, Ena Kukić, and Sabina Tanović

Uncementing Narratives: Memorial Architecture as a Way to Support Intergenerational Remembrance and Contest Dominant Memory Politics in Sarajevo Introduction When the design competition for Germany’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (MMJE) was published in 1994, Sarajevo was under a brutal siege that lasted from April 1992 until February 1996. In December 1995, the war was officially over when the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed in Paris. Visiting in 1997 to pay a pre-Christmas visit to German troops in Sarajevo protecting a fragile newborn peace, German Chancellor Helmut Kohl – one of the key figures behind both the Dayton Peace Agreement and the process of creating the MMJE in Berlin – met Bosnia and Herzegovina’s three members of the collective presidency and instructed them to work with the world on cementing that peace. In a way, this is what Chancellor Kohl aimed to do with remembering the Holocaust in Germany with the MMJE. The lengthy and contested process of creating the MMJE started in the late 1980s and developed parallel to the discussion about how to memorialize the existence of the Berlin Wall in the 1990s. Upon its inauguration in 2005, the MMJE became one of the most famous case studies for addressing multiple crises of the contemporary world and the rising interest among both scholars and the public in re-examining memorial architecture in terms of purpose and agency in the transmission of memory. The contested process of “cementing the remembrance” through memorial architecture, however, only demonstrated how very complicated official materializations of remembrance can be regardless of whether a society is dealing with the traumas and difficult heritage of historical or living memories, which is the case in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Importantly, the process of creating the MMJE also demonstrated that the designer is pivotal in the process of creating permanent memorial architecture that translates collective sentiment into a built space. Given the highly specific nature of memorial architecture and its social significance, the defining role assigned to the designer calls for considerable integrity. This critical reflection will focus on the context of Sarajevo to demonstrate how conceptual design and paper architecture can be an incentive for critical engage-

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ment and aid the preservation of authenticity as a way to stimulate social engagement and inclusiveness in collective remembrance of difficult pasts. The reflection focuses on an official site of remembrance, the Memorial Complex Tunnel D-B, and explores two architectural design proposals – “ZE912” (2017) and “Kenopsia” (2017) – created simultaneously unbeknownst to the designers and in different contexts. The first project proposal emerged from an anonymous international design competition, whereas the second originated as a master-level graduation project. As a result, the first proposal works with a set of concrete guidelines in a given contextual setting whereas the second design adopts a more radical conceptual approach. Belonging to different generations that experienced the Siege of Sarajevo, the designers, who are also the authors of this reflection, use autoethnographic and research-by-design approach to propose practices and visibilities that radically re-examine current-day memory politics, animate participatory and therapeutic work of remembrance, and inspire possibilities for non-spatial but place-related collective remembrance.

Memory Matrix and the Tunnel D-B Memorial Complex Instead of “cementing the peace,” Bosnia and Herzegovina’s leadership worked on cementing ethnic divisions (and still does) in the never-ending “post-Dayton status quo” – a state of uncertainty with ongoing political and ethnic tensions and a lack of international engagement to reinforce viable constitutional reform between the two entities, the Federation of Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Republika Srpska. In the immediate post-siege period, destroyed Sarajevo grappled with complexities of the new reality in a divided country in which official remembrance constituted in-situ markings of military battles and civilian massacres. A “Tunnel of Hope” (1997) emerged as a private memorial museum dedicated to a clandestine project entitled “Communication Dobrinja – Butmir.” That project had been conceived by the Army of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina to connect the besieged city and free territory through an underground passage underneath Sarajevo’s UN-controlled International Airport. It had opened without notice in 1993, after military and civil defense had secretly created a 785-meterlong tunnel pipe by digging simultaneously from opposite sides and meeting at a point approximately five meters beneath the runway under the watchful eyes of both the UN and the occupiers. The tiny museum, emerging in the aftermath of the Siege, resonated with Sarajevo’s destroyed urban and social fabric. It would go on to serve as an important stop for numerous humanitarian and diplomatic visits to the city, since it represented the post-war landscape modified by war, de-

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struction, and defense. It showcased only 25 meters of the original tunnel pipe connected to a family home that served as one of the entrances/exits. Framing the authentic remains, the museum’s modest exhibition chronologically narrated the story of the Tunnel D-B, starting with the dire conditions in which hundreds of citizens were murdered by the Army of the Republika Srpska when crossing the airport runway. Before the Tunnel was created, they had attempted to get to the so-called free zone on the outskirts of the city for food or to escape. The museum narrative concluded with the end of the Siege and the closing of “the Tunnel that did not exist” (Burns 1993). At the twentieth commemoration of the beginning of the Siege, the Memorial Fund (a governmental institution responsible for war cemeteries and memorials) took over the private museum and started developing what is now the Memorial Complex Tunnel D-B, technically comprising both sides of the airport runway. This entailed recreating warlike atmospheres, reconstructing existing parts and adding new spaces to “display for visitors the wartime state as realistically as possible” (Vojvodić 2013, 10). The interventions demonstrate the tension between a memorial space being authentic (as it was during the Siege) and appearing authentic (as dramatized to create a feeling of authenticity among visitors). Several substitute memorial interventions reflect an eagerness to have it both ways: to resist charges of creating fake heritage while persisting in a “war-like” phantasmagoria, supporting the blooming business of so-called dark tourism focused on narratives of Sarajevo as a “martyred city” (Naef 2016). A number of private initiatives, such as the Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide (2016) or the War Hostel (2016) – a hostel decorated to produce a semblance of and dramatic atmospheres from during the siege period – are part of this trend geared toward reincarnating terror and trauma. Approaching the thirtieth anniversary since the Siege of Sarajevo officially ended, the city’s public and private spaces witness considerable concretization of mourning and memory in monuments, memorials, and memorial museums. The majority of these memory sites are dedicated to soldiers and tend to look generic (name plaques, fountains, benches and symbolic sculptural additions), ossifying the living memory and delegating it to the past. In the country’s nascent institutionalization of remembrance, since recently supported by the Memorial Fund, architectural competitions and direct commissions commonly conceive of remembrance projects in a top-down approach. They do so through either public architectural competitions or direct commissions, such as the Liberation War Heroes, a permanent exhibition at Memorial Fund’s headquarters (2019) and the Museum of Suffering of the Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina (2023), located at the former torture chambers on the outskirts of Sarajevo.

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Notable examples such as the History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s permanent exhibition The Siege of Sarajevo (2003) and the War Childhood Museum (2017) are more inclusive and go beyond being self-proclaimed ambassadors of a collective experience. These museums invite citizens to contribute to the museological program through donating artifacts and sharing personal narratives to contextualize traumatic experiences of survival beyond the borders of the Siege experience. For example, in 2017, the History Museum launched the cross-disciplinary “Wake-up Europe, Sarajevo Calling” initiative as a way to internationalize their permanent exhibition whereas the War Childhood Museum extends its curatorial work to the ongoing war in Ukraine and the Middle East. These museums demonstrate Jan Assmann’s juxtaposition of communicative and cultural memory in defining the connection and gap between potential and actual cultural memories: one being stored in museums, archives, and libraries, and the other (re)interpreted with new meaning for current socio-political contexts, as a reminder that collective memories and dispersion of historical facts have an inspirational impact on second-hand witnesses and future generations. Notwithstanding, in the paradoxical construct of diverging remembrances, making sense of others’ personal memories is daunting. The multiplicity of historical (and memory-based) narratives becomes especially problematic if the meaningmaking invitations do not allow space for critical engagement with the official remembrance. This extends to the state sanctioned remembrance of other historical events and periods aiming to invigorate the culture of ignorance and erasure. For example, the public remembrance of the First World War centenary in Sarajevo juxtaposed narratives around Gavrilo Princip, the student who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand: a European narrative in which Gavrilo Princip is seen as a terrorist in order to uphold a shared European past and a celebration of peace, solidarity and reconciliation, and an ethnonational narrative in which Gavrilo Princip is celebrated as a hero, along with the war criminals from the most recent war, to invigorate a turbo-folk culture of remembrance that nourishes historical amnesia. This amnesia, Adla Isanović argues, originates in an insufficient process of transitional justice, necropolitics, and in the growing specter of fascism in Europe, manifested in Sarajevo – its “rotten heart” (Isanović 2017). In this light, the Tunnel memorial site should also be scrutinized, especially for its dubious architectural developments such as the recently semi-accurately reconstructed 100 meters of the B-side tunnel pipe. The original Tunnel was, at its highest, 160 cm high and one meter wide. In contrast, the reconstruction is now much higher and wider. Meanwhile, the 25-meters of the original Tunnel are in sore need of preservation since some 140,000 visitors (mostly tourists) annually walk over and pass through it. Still, the Tunnel D-B holds a special status in Sarajevo mainly because it is not only an artifact of trauma but also of resilience. Dug

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with pickaxes, hammers, and shovels, secretly and under extreme conditions, it instantly became a symbol of hope. Citizens and military entered from the besieged city, Dobrinja (D side), and exited into the free-zone of Butmir (B side) through an incredibly dangerous way of crossing (i.e., lack of air, high underground water, unsecured gas installations, and electricity cables, etc.), which had no emergency exits.

ZE912: Collective Participation and Remembrance The 2016 design competition had a three-fold goal: to bolster the socio-historical importance of the site, to facilitate educational efforts, and to create a spatial landmark to attract tourists, and, at the same time, represent an incentive for new urban developments in the area (Tanović 2019). The third author (of this contribution) participated in the competition and the jury selected her work as the best solution with a plan to implement it in the following years. The proposal, participating as “ZE912” (first two letters of “zemlja” or soil in Bosnian language), as a way of responding to the competition’s requirement for office, educational, and storage spaces, took a step further in positioning architectural design as an ancillary tool for a participative work of remembrance and musealization. The design concept focuses on transmitting living memory to new generations through collective participation and materiality. Local soil and debris comprise the building material since the Tunnel itself was originally created by extraction of nearly 3,000 cubic meters of soil. Hence, the soil re-emerges as an etymon of the past that now directly features in the remembrance as revitalized building material. Tanović intentionally proposed an unorthodox and potentially difficult rammed-earth building that demands rather time-consuming and laborious work as a way to invite public social engagement. The design explores subtle kinesthetic effects to frame the permanent museum exhibition. Following the historical narrative that starts with the collapse of Yugoslavia, a visitor gradually descends into the ground until being completely submerged underground where the exhibition screens explain the beginning of the Siege and the onset of the Tunnel. Closed off by soil, the underground environment is heightened by the absence of daylight and a slight difference in the rammed-earth technique tailored to invigorate spatial qualities through sound, olfactory, and haptic enhancement – a mixture of soil and isolation properties-enhance the sense of place. The reappearance of daylight signals the end of the exhibition, whereupon visitors enter a short sequence of the original tunnel – preserved following the 3R rule (maximum retention, sensitive restoration, and careful repair) (see Figure 1).

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Figure 1: Above: infographics indicating the wartime position of the Tunnel D-B. Bottom left: an impression of the new rammed-earth museum and memory-boards displaying the wartime and post-war evolution of the site. Bottom right: the new museum meets the 25-meter original segment of the Tunnel D-B. © Sabina Tanović, 2017.

Considering that the siege-time construction of the Tunnel was a collective effort, the proposal posits that present-day construction of the memorial complex needs to be a collective effort as well. This hands-on materiality method in a context of public participation on an authentic site resonates with our growing knowledge on how engaged commemorations can positively impact the psychological health of individuals and support post-atrocity resilience as was, for example, the case with the construction of the Kornat dry-stone wall Fallen Fireman memorial (2010) in Croatia. It is also a designer’s response to the general absence of psychological support for victims of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina (Comtesse et al. 2019). The proposal demonstrates how memorial museums can provide a framework for meaningful collective remembrance that invites participation and individual contributions to address the collective trauma. With careful planning, the collective building process can extend to future generations as was the case with workshops that were put in place between 2014 and 2018 for people to commemorate the 600,000 dead of the First World War by making clay figurines for the artwork “ComingWorldRememberMe” in Flanders Fields. In this active approach to both intergenerational remembering and healing through participatory design processes, resonating the site-specific work of Hanna and Hila Lulu Lin FarahKufr-Bir’im, the museum building is also a material resource for and a constituent part of remembrance.

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In the years following the official competition, the designer has initiated conversations with curators and managers of the memorial site to concretize the conceptual design as a social project. She argued that the memorial site needs to invest in organizing rammed-earth workshops as a way to bring citizens together to invigorate their appropriation of the site. For example, the workshops, next to being useful for the construction process, are opportunities to collect participants’ narratives for the museum’s living archive, ensuring meaningful social dynamics for both present and the future that expand beyond the original borders of the memorial complex and point toward a socially sustainable place of remembrance. Similar discussions elsewhere, such as the post 9/11 memorial-building processes in the United States or, more recently, dialogue surrounding the commemoration of Norway’s victims of 2011 terrorist attacks, are insightful examples. In terms of space, the design proposal also understands the existing site as a place of difficult past that, up to now, spontaneously and haphazardly developed accumulating architectural layers and ad hoc changes. Embracing what can be described as messiness of semi-institutionalized remembrance and perceiving even contestable interpretations of the site as legitimate layers of history, the design aims to emphasize the evolution of the site by archiving stages of development and using digital tools (such as interactive memory boards), while removing physical layers that inhibit authentic narration. Hence, the goal is to clearly delineate the Siege and post-Siege periods and substantiate these with narratives of people and place to create a platform for sharing memories, experiences, and historical facts from a multiplicity of actors and stakeholders. Initially, both the managerial team and curators of the Tunnel Museum welcomed proposed actions, and the collaboration with the designer even resulted in a public colloquium and brain-storming ideas about possible projects in the future – oriented toward citizens of Sarajevo as much as toward tourists. Participants even discussed the opposing views on reconnecting the two sides by fully reconstructing the Tunnel to allow tourists to travel through in safety wagons (using large concrete profiles that the government installed in 1997 in an effort to preserve the rest of the 785-meter-long tunnel pipe). The discussion focused on the designer’s Ruskinian argument that a reconstructed tunnel can never convey the conditions of the original experience and that reconstruction would reinforce an uncritical and misleading transmission of memory – a hazard for the already fragile balancing act of meaningful memory-work on the memorial site. The museum managers countered with their own argument that the museum must somehow maintain its focus on tourists while only slowly introducing more community-oriented narratives and projects. The debilitating grip of the global pandemic, however, interrupted the dialogue and left the prospect of the concept proposal in limbo. Regardless, it proved

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that the agency of a designer can open up entrenched perceptions about what constitutes collective remembrance.

Kenopsia: Addressing Second-Hand Memories Envisioned by a designer who belongs to the second-hand memory generation1 and who passed through the Tunnel herself when she was a young child, Kenopsia2 proposes an architectural project that radically challenges the current memorial practice at the site. Critiquing its urbanistic, programmatic, and spatialsensory sense, the proposal combats the prevalence of touristification and ethnonationalization of memory to open space for unexpurgated education and critical thinking – key problems in the current Tunnel D-B managerial and curatorial approach. The designer’s starting point in developing the concept was to reconnect this important spatial artifact of the city’s war history with the city itself. Therefore, instead of having a museum on the rural side as is the case now (side B), the new museum is positioned on the urban side of the Tunnel (side D). In place of the current museum, the proposal envisions a memorial as a place for contemplation, reflection, and reckoning with the past, commemorating a massacre of people who waited to enter the Tunnel in 1995. Reconceptualizing the memorial complex with a museum on the city’s side and a memorial on the rural side is a way to add weight to historical facts regarding the authenticity of how the Tunnel was used – civilians had to wait to embark on this one-way underground passage, with the advantage initially reserved for the military and, eventually, for booming black-market profiteers as well. The memorial is conceived as an ensemble of concrete monoliths that replicate civilian houses (that served as entrances and exits of the Tunnel) in their original wartime appearance. Prior to building the memorial, the project proposes to destroy the existing houses (including the existing Tunnel D-B museum) characterized by their misleading post-war additions and beautifications. The monoliths of the memorial are a negative concrete cast of the original houses, capturing the space and emphasizing their absence. In this way, the memorial  In her work, Marianne Hirsch introduces “postmemory” recollections – a phenomenon of intense generational and social retelling and sharing of experiences that results in descendants growing up with mainly inherited memories that dominate their lives without them actually experiencing them.  Titled in a reference to John Koenig’s neologism kenopsia that stands for the eerie atmosphere of a place that was once bustling with people but is now so quiet that it feels not just empty but hyper-empty (Koenig 2021).

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will purge the accumulated post-war layers of the location’s history. Visitors will only find replicas of authentic houses from the time of the Siege that exist no more. The architectural language here is reminiscent of Stećaks,3 building upon a local culture of remembrance. Aiming to mark one specific fragment of the Tunnel’s timeline, it is also influenced by the works of artist Rachel Whiteread, who described her projects as the mummification of space. On the side D, the museum seeks to encourage reflection and critical questioning of the inherited memories in space. Here too all post-war physical layers are removed. Instead of catering to tourists, the proposal is primarily focused on restoring the connection with the survivors and their families – people who have their own authentic experience of the Siege and new generations of city residents who will or already have established second-hand memories of the Siege. The proposed approach is in stark contrast to what is currently considered the key to “successful” museological work: prioritization of economic sustainability based predominantly on tourism. Importantly, the designer argues that the current politics of memory at the Tunnel D-B site advances the ethno-nationalization of collective memory – a process that already started during the war. For example, during the field research in 2018, the museum exhibition and sales items clearly positioned the identity of the institution within one specific ethnoreligious group, most clearly visible in the museum’s gift shop displaying artifacts bearing Islamic symbols and dolls wearing Ottoman traditional attire (accompanied by the exhibition featuring a single female untitled figure wearing a headscarf). The museum reflected, as Kukić argues, a dominant presence of a conservative Bosniak identity in the context of today’s Sarajevo rather ethnically homogeneous identity.4 Kenopsia aims to complicate this tendency of devaluing the multiethnic identity of pre-war Sarajevo precisely because omitting other ethnic groups from the forefront of the official history translates to purposeful forgetting – a politics of memory recognized as a model for perpetuating what Viet Than-Nguyen depicts as “unjust memory.” Looking through the lens of a second generation with scarce living memory about the Siege, Kenopsia’s engagement with the historical site is not only an opportunity to reposition the Tunnel within the social and cultural fabric of the community but also to highlight the problems of the existing commemoration paradigm.

 Stećak is a regionally distinctive medieval tombstone found in Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, and Croatia. Notable for their inter-confessionalism and carved from limestone, Stećaks (original plural Stećci) appear as monolithic objects featuring a wide range of decorative motifs and inscriptions. See: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/1504/ (March 23, 2023).  Since the 1991 census, the Bosniaks (Muslim) population has increased from 49% to 83%, while the Serbs and Croats numbers have dwindled down significantly. See: http://fzs.ba/index.php/ popis-stanovnistva/popis-stanovnistva-1991-i-stariji/ and https://unstats.un.org/unsd/demographic/ sources/census/wphc/BIH/BIH-2016-06-30.pdf (March 23, 2023).

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Figure 2: Renderings of Kenopsia Museum as seen from the street; courtyard; interior (left to right). © Ena Kukić, 2017.

Visitors will experience the new museum in sequences that alternate between narrow sheltered passages and a wide-open plateau which invite visitors to ponder the experiences of people who, before the Tunnel was dug under the airport in 1993, tried to escape from the besieged city by being exposed to sniper fire while running across the airport runway. Aiming to create a specific outdoor atmosphere as a designer’s own memory recollection, sudden changes of scale through alternating spaces define the overall spatial framework. By not allowing the visitor to anticipate the experience, the design aims to stress the necessity for observation and reflection and, hopefully, incite empathy toward the original users of the complex. In this way, the visitor is positioned as a witness – an active participant in the ongoing work of memory (see Figure 2). In an effort to reinterpret the identity of the Tunnel as a subterranean building, the entire museum is located underground. The only part of the project above the ground is a delicate metal frame in the form of the ordinary house that served as a secret Tunnel entrance. The choice of materials is informed by the history of the site. Using reduction as a representation method for the house emphasizes its ordinariness – it could be any of the neighborhood houses. The museum provides flexible spaces for education and dialogue between visitors, always retaining at least one transparent vertical element and allowing a visual relationship with either the Tunnel or the museum’s courtyard. It seeks to render a neutral and minimalistic basis for the main artifact – the original 25 meters of the Tunnel itself, minimizing the spatial possibilities for adding inauthentic material.

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The design offers several viewpoints on the Tunnel to symbolically denote a multitude of experiences of passing through Tunnel D-B throughout the Siege. Contrary to the current practice, Kenopsia prohibits future visitors from entering the authentic segment of the Tunnel. Visitors, as outsiders, can only observe it behind the glass to try to imagine the discomfort of the original structure. Rooted in the designer’s own experience of passing through the war-time Tunnel, the decision to deny the visitors the possibility to use it inextricably links the original structure to its war context. Preserving the authentic segment of the Tunnel as an artifact and not reconstructing its full length is the only responsible way of narrating the Tunnel story without mistaking it for a false first-hand experience. The eerie emptiness of the Tunnel is part of its peacetime identity, and its kenopsia invites us to ponder evolving stages and priorities of preserving memory for future generations.

The Future of the Memory Matrix The two conceptual design approaches envision different futures for the Tunnel D-B site, but they ask the same question: What is the narrative that the current Memorial Complex Tunnel D-B nourishes for the future by creating a Siege-sentiment showcase for tourists in which the Tunnel appears grander and more beautiful, instead of shabby and perilous as it really was? Producing faux-narratives is dangerous in the current global climate that sees worrying equalizations of fascist and anti-fascist politics through architecture, as Robert Bevan reminds us in the Monumental Lies; examples such as the “well-meaning” reconstruction of “Crematoria I” at Auschwitz memorial site or Dresden’s Frauenkirche show how architectural fakery can feed destructive powers of necropolitics, historical revisionism, and denial (Bevan 2022, 206–207, 73–81). Instead, we need to look for more organic examples of spatial remembrances. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, survivors and witnesses that lived through the spatial division organized their personal and collective narratives to preserve not only the physical remnants of the barrier, but to further develop this historic site (Bailey 2020). The Berlin Wall Memorial designed by Kohlhoff & Kohlhoff eventually evolved into three parts – documentation, art, and religion – where viewers can choose their path and direction to delve into the fragments of history and reveal the consequences that resonated in the region and beyond. Similarly, the first author explores in her design practice how Sarajevo is constantly (un)veiling throughout history, overlapping political, social, and religious influences on its people. Using visual storytelling in a project entitled “re-Tracing

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Figure 3: City map diagram of once uninhabitable boundary of danger and a rendering of re-Tracing the Veil as a non-material memorial museum. © Selma Ćatović Hughes, 2021.

the Veil,” Ćatović-Hughes juxtaposes the existing urban condition and citizen’s narratives. Unlike the two proposals discussed above, the designer envisions a non-material memorial museum for the future of collective narratives in which one may experience two timelines simultaneously, demarcating the intersection between cultural memories archived and presented through institutionalized spaces (museums, memorial sites) and potential remembrance (re)interpreted with new and evolving meaning for current socio-political contexts (see Figure 3). Designed as a series of installations threaded around the urban landscape, seeking its participants and co-creators to engage with it daily, the concept illustrates the process of (re)constructing memories into experiential episodes by retrieving information to (re)digest the past. Archival data from the period of the Siege and the post-war documentation process are integrated together with personal accounts to cultivate a collective approach in reconceptualizing remembrance of time and space. In a way, “re-Tracing the Veil” aims to do something seemingly impossible: it references mechanisms of survival (e.g., improvised sniper fabric shields as a visual reminder) and outlines the implied Siege-related once uninhabitable boundary of danger (i.e., Sarajevo’s river axis). Thus, it can facilitate a new dialogue for collective remembrance through critical discussion and reflection as a way toward building a depository for cultural memory. The concept suggests how to approach still impermeable walls that divided the city during the Siege and now divide narratives. The quest for opening tangible and intangible divisions in a collective narrative is central to the two concept designs for the Tunnel. The first concept embraces the problematic nature of the memorial site and argues for an organic evolution, whereas the second cuts all ties with the memory politics dominating the last three

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decades of remembrance. Both approaches propose a critical lens as a precondition for a responsible second-hand memory transmission in the future. Instead of dubious reconstructions and architectural interventions organized in a top-down approach – a slippery slope toward Disneyfication that can easily lead to antagonistic views of war heritage – the proposals discussed here approach the events of the past (that aggressively changed the boundaries, flow, and fabric of the city) meaningfully and in a more sustainable way to continue to educate and evolve. Monumental in collective efforts from its conception, the Tunnel serves as a reminder for an architectural intervention of resilience as well as a testimony that the dichotomy of simultaneous remembering and forgetting of traumatic events often transforms individual memory into a convoluted collective narrative, failing to create spatially relevant places of remembrance. Inviting designers to take an active role in uncementing the status quo, as conceptual proposals demonstrate, is a thoughtprovoking starting point in a conversation about how we create socially sustainable museum narratives.

Bibliography Assmann, Jan, and John Czaplicka. “Collective Memory and Cultural Identity.” New German Critique 65 (1995): 125–133. Bailey, Spencer. In Memory of: Designing Contemporary Memorials. New York: Phaidon, 2020. Bevan, Robert. Monumental Lies: Culture Wars and the Truth about the Past. Verso, 2022. Burns, John F. “A Crude 1,000-Yard Tunnel Is Sarajevo’s Secret Lifeline.” The New York Times, August 15, 1993, section 1:1. Comtesse, Hannah, Steve Powell, Andrea Soldo, Maria Hagl, and Rita Rosner. “Long-Term Psychological Distress of Bosnian War Survivors: an 11-Year Follow-up of Former Displaced Persons, Returnees, and Stayers.” BMC Psychiatry 19.1 (January 3, 2019): 1. doi: 10.1186/s12888018-1996-0. Higgins, Andrew. “No Bed, No Breakfast, but 4-Star Gunfire. Welcome to a War Hostel.” New York Times, November 28, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/28/world/europe/bosnia-warhostel-sarajevo.html (March 23. 2023). Hirsch, Marianne. The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture After the Holocaust. Columbia University Press, 2012. Isanović, Adla. “Sarajevo: Politics and Culture of Remembrance and Ignorance.” AM Journal 14 (2017): 133–144. Koenig, John. The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2021. Kukić, Ena. “Das Kriegstunnelmuseum von Sarajevo.” Internationales Städteforum Graz Magazin, 2018: 14–19. McDowell, Sara, and Máire Braniff. Commemoration as Conflict: Space, Memory and Identity in Peace Processes. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

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Naef, Patrick James. “Tourism and the ‘Martyred City’: Memorializing War in the Former Yugoslavia.” Journal of Tourism and Cultural Change 14.3 (2016): 222–239. Tanović, Sabina. “Architecture and Collective Remembrance at the Tunnel D-B Memorial Site in Sarajevo.” Change Over Time 9.1 (2019): 14–33. Vojvodić, Dušan. “Technical Description.” A Replica of Mine Field, Bunker, and Other Constructions for the Memorial Site “Tunel Spasa D-B.” Concept proposal. Sarajevo: Architectural office Ginko d. o. o. Ilidža, 2013.

Maria Kobielska

Narrative and Resilience: Museum Exhibitions under Forced Change – A Case Study of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk Introduction In contemporary museum practices and research on museums, it is common sense that a modern exhibition of a narrative and experiential type, and a permanent one in particular, is a complex, structured, and comprehensive creation similar to an artwork.1 However, the problem of possible modifications to such exhibitions, especially ones that are already open, and the broader effects of these changes are rarely subject to in-depth analysis. Paradoxically, permanent exhibitions of contemporary historical museums need to be transformed or revised relatively often. This might be due to obsolete technology or the changing discourse on the past (the decolonization of Western museum collections would be a paradigmatic example of the latter; the interventionist movement in the museum world involves recontextualizing existing displays and putting them in new perspectives). Minor changes, e.g., the continuous replacing of items on display with their equivalents from museum storage, are often due to maintenance and preservation or because of the aspiration to publicly exhibit the largest possible part of the collection. However, when public pressure or political decisions drive changes, even minor ones, the case may face more publicity. There are several well-documented examples of museums under the external pressure of public protests, including the Enola Gay exhibition controversy at the Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum in 1995 (Crane 1997; Zolberg 1996) and the modified Air War section of the 2005 permanent exhibition of the Canadian War Museum in Ottawa (Jaeger 2020, 69–71). Interestingly, in both cases, it was the war veterans who successfully protested in defense of their good memory. In his thought-provoking notes on the exhibition in Ottawa, Stephan Jaeger writes that it was the very moment of introducing an “openness, or at least a perspective that diverged from the national master narrative” that provoked the protests, even though the exhibition as a

 The work was supported by the National Science Centre, Poland, under research project “New Polish historical museums,” grant no. 2018/31/D/HS2/03123. https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-019

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whole was essentially in line with this national Canadian perspective (2020, 71). This would suggest that the general public may be determined to demand explicit messages and narratives that offer more “mnemonic security,” i.e., a promise to secure a community’s stable sense of self (Mälksoo 2015), which shows that they think only in terms of history rather than memory (and its possible plurality of perspectives). Pressures for changes to existing museum exhibitions can therefore stem from diverse mnemonic agendas. While, for instance, there are interventions that intend to pluralize and differentiate the memory of the past, tendencies toward securing an already established version of a group memory lead to opposite results. In particular, in their attempts to enforce their memory and identity politics, illiberal or authoritarian governments in various countries influence exhibition policies of museums, most notably those which are publicly sponsored institutions. Polish and Hungarian museums may be a case in point. Recent Polish exhibitions have been compared with their Hungarian counterparts by Ljiljana Radonić (2020). The author demonstrates that “mnemonic warriors” are even more likely to initiate new museums rather than merely take over and reshape those already in operation. From the very beginning, these institutions are designed to implement national memory regimes and to compete with existing museums, “inherited” from the preceding governments of “mnemonic pluralists” (for terminology, see Bernhard & Kubik 2014). Direct interference in existing exhibitions undertaken by governments remains relatively rare. Whatever the reasons, in all such situations, it seems more common to open a completely new exhibition replacing a previous one than to partially modify a contested exhibition while retaining its original, general shape. An important reason for this lies in the specifics of the contemporary museum genre whereby exhibitions are seen as meaningful, integrally designed, and carefully structured entities. The selection of their components is equally important: their composition and arrangement add to the production of meaning and communication with visitors. Elements of such exhibitions are necessarily interrelated; as such, they produce various narrative and experiential effects that have to be integrated in the visitors’ perceptions. Consequently, a “local” interference may create inconsistency or disruption – or, in other cases, remain unnoticed – rather than reorganize the narrative as intended. The authors of the classic contemporary description of what they coined “a narrative museum,” pioneered by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, Jeshajahu Weinberg and Rina Elieli, made an interesting point about the possible changes in an exhibition of this type: Since the containing structures that hold the [. . .] exhibits are physically integrated in the continuum of the narrative presentation, changes in the composition of the exhibition are

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more often than not liable to necessitate costly changes in these structures. Thus, once it is installed, a narrative museum has a relatively high level of resistance to any change in the choice and arrangement of its three-dimensional exhibits. (1995, 51, my emphasis)

The argument by Weinberg and Elieli is obviously a practical one in that they point out possible difficulties encountered by those, typically museum practitioners, who might face a challenging task of redesigning existing narrative exhibitions in their work. However, their observation on museum exhibitions’ “resistance to change” is only a starting point for my attempt to revisit this issue in a broader context. My aim is to consider the genre of contemporary historical museum and, more precisely, their permanent exhibitions when confronted with changing political or ideological narratives. As I examine the hypothesis of “museums’ resilience” to forced changes, I will investigate the conditions that make an exhibition resist modifications, as well as those that allow modifications and make them effective. To do this, I will explore the mechanisms of exhibitions’ resilience and vulnerability to change, taking into account real examples of interventions executed in particular display contexts. What I call exhibition resilience can be characterized as a potential for reaction. When a change is introduced in a narrative of an exhibition, its messages do not necessarily follow the suggested course. Instead, a new constellation of meanings builds up as the exhibition structure absorbs new content. Resilience – and for this reason I do not describe it merely as “resistance” – is understood here as a kind of inner force of the exhibition, not its stiffness or rigidity. It does not necessarily mean that an exhibition is a fixed construction that directly and blatantly opposes any change, somewhat statically, by virtue of its stability. Rather, there is a dynamic power within it that translates into a certain flexibility: in terms of meaning production, any deformation is not its final step but is followed by a chain of transformations, thanks to continuous interaction between an exhibition’s elements. Thus defined, resilience is a consequence of an exhibition’s density, its multilayer structure, and intricate system of narrative and experiential features. The more the narrative form and space arrangement are tied to the original mnemonic agenda, the more resilient the exhibition will prove to be. In the course of my research, I have distinguished several ways in which resilience can manifest, and I will describe them as three variants of exhibition resilience: in the first, the exhibition modestly preserves traces of any change; in the second, it weakens the modifications’ intended meanings (as they are integrated into complex and already meaningful exhibitive structures); and in the third, the exhibition subverts newly introduced messages. My analysis is developed from a case study that uniquely models the question of change and resilience: namely, the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk, Poland, in which

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most of the exhibition design remained in its original form while multiple interventions were simultaneously taken with the intention to modify the original master narrative. Thus, it creates the opportunity to investigate to what extent it is possible to change the narrative in such circumstances. I believe that this analysis will also prove important outside of its original Polish context. Given the rising authoritarian tendencies in the contemporary world, museums may face an increased risk of forcible interventions to come.

The Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk The Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk (MSWW) can serve as the best recent example of such a forcible intervention by state power in the activities of a critical historical museum. It was founded in 2008 as a state institution by the initiative of the centrist Polish government of the Civic Platform (CP) party – the “mnemonic pluralists” according to Bernhard and Kubik’s framework (2014). In 2015, before the MSWW opened to the public, the CP had handed over power to the “mnemonic warriors” from the Law and Justice party. The latter levelled harsh criticism against the museum’s idea, mission, organization, and, above all, the shape of the yet uninstalled permanent exhibition. The general overview of the debate that preceded the museum’s opening in 2017 has been described many times in press and scholarly publications (Logemann 2017; Machcewicz 2017). Its critics identified the museum’s planned “mnemonic pluralism” as universalism that would result in downplaying the national Polish perspective, favoring a civilian perspective in preference to a military one, promoting anti-heroism, and disregarding figures and values that constitute the national Polish imagery. Yet, supported by civil society organizations and international institutions, the museum team managed to open the permanent exhibition in its originally planned form in March 2017. The vast exhibition space, exceeding 5,000 square meters, is located in the basement of an impressive museum building. The permanent exhibition occupies this space, which is divided into more than sixty separate rooms, including small chambers for special exhibitive purposes, labyrinthine corridors, and large halls and galleries. These separate rooms are organized into 18 main sections of various shapes and sizes, each with a specific theme (e.g., the rise of totalitarianism, occupation and collaboration, terror, and resistance), which eventually form the three principal chapters of the exhibition: “The Road to War,” “The Horror of War,” and “The Long Shadow of War.” By no means can the exhibition be thoroughly explored in a single visit. Its very size is enough to stagger visitors, who

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will be overpowered by the impression of being separated from the outside world, immersed in a multi-layered museum reality, and faced with a narrative of an exceptional multitude, intricacy, completeness, and persuasiveness. Across each of those components, the museum builds its anti-war message along several main thematic axes. War suffering forms the exhibition’s dominant theme. In its presentation, the exhibition emphasizes the civilian experience of “ordinary people” and graphic depictions of death and violence. A narrative focused on the perpetrators is the second most articulate theme, and it primarily shows war atrocities as a consequence of German and Soviet totalitarian regimes. The third axis of the exhibition is that of transnational parallels and juxtapositions that integrate the war experiences of different people, regardless of their situation, nationality, citizenship, historical moment, and locality. Finally, the tragic image of war is embedded in complicated temporalities, involving the multiple layers of the past, present, and future. The transnational approach toward the history of the Second World War is clearly not the only one that defines the exhibition’s framework. Contrary to “mnemonic warriors” and their criticism, foreign researchers have noted the leading role of the Polish historical narrative in the museum’s display (Jaeger 2020; Siddi & Gaweda 2019). According to Jaeger, the museum combines universal and Polish perspectives on war to propose a “double narrative framework” (2020, 189). While the former is embodied in transnational constellations presenting total war, the latter constantly reminds the visitors of Polish victimhood and German and Soviet totalitarian violence. Together, they form a complex and intertwined exhibition structure. Shortly after the exhibition’s opening, the government of “mnemonic warriors” dismissed Paweł Machcewicz, the first director of the MSWW, and installed a new museum management. Since then, about twenty changes of various character and scale have been introduced in the original permanent exhibition, against the will of the museum’s creators, their protests, and efforts to oppose them on legal grounds. As Jaeger aptly puts it, the changes were done with the “intent of creating a more Polish, heroic, battle-oriented museum and a less civilian-based, transnational museum” (2020, 183). The discussions of this case so far have mainly been reports on the content of the most important of the modifications, including the emphasis on the rescue of the Jews by Polish gentiles during the Holocaust or, more generally, the focus on national Polish heroism and martyrdom narratives. Arguably, this only reveals the flashpoints of the current populist historical policy and indicates its strategic goals. Therefore, this case is a clear example of a museum exhibition subjected to state censorship and of the results of this symbolic violence. It has already been discussed in some scholarly contexts, and some of the articles on the subject pro-

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vide interesting insights into contemporary remembrance politics. However, the conclusions offered do not form a coherent image. For instance, in their analysis of the original exhibition and its modifications, Marco Siddi and Barbara Gaweda (2019) focus on the concept of the transnationalization of historical memory. They note that the presence of forms of transnational memory in the MSWW was limited from the very beginning and even further reduced as changes were made. In this light, the changes may be evaluated as effective and the case as demonstrative of the power and success of nationalist politicians, who are able to “subvert transnational memory projects” by “dictating and controlling structural and narrative changes” to the exhibition (Siddi & Gaweda 2019, 11). However, for David Clarke and Paweł Duber (2020), who argue from the cultural diplomacy perspective, the case of the MSWW shows that nationalist remembrance policies ultimately turn out to be ineffective. Rather than efficiently reduce the presence of cosmopolitan memory in the museum in favor of the traditional Polish narrative, it generated significant losses “for Polish image and credibility” (Clarke & Duber 2020, 62). Therefore, the articles present partially contradictory conclusions on the subject. However, both works could provide a more careful investigation into how modified content was implemented in the exhibition space and the mechanisms utilized for the production of meaning in the modified exhibition. Importantly, Clarke and Duber notice that the ongoing debate on the case “took little account of the experiences of actual visitors to the museum” (2020, 62). These experiences would be built upon the actual shape of the exhibition, and from today’s point of view the only way to speculate on the differences between the experiences of those who visited the original exhibition in 2017 and the modified one is through the analysis of the exhibition space, content, and arrangement.2 The case may then, as these examples illustrate, be discussed from the perspective of Polish and East-Central European politics in the context of the authori-

 It would require a separate qualitative research to answer the question whether (or: to what extent) the visitors notice the changes. With no pretensions to exhaust the subject, I have browsed opinions and ratings of the MSWW on TripAdvisor and Google, starting from the most critical ones, in Polish and English. The users raise the issue of changes in the museum only exceptionally, and, if they do, they express general opinions of the new management’s activity as politicized, inscribing into the Law and Justice propaganda etc., rather than present their direct observations on the exhibition. This allows me to assume that the authors had already known about the memory battles before visiting the museum and their opinions are based on this preexisting knowledge (and sometimes they declare and recommend forgoing the visit to the museum because of the takeover). There are some isolated critical comments about the new final video, which is the most drastic modification of the original exhibition and the one that produces the most obvious incongruence (see below the section “Changes Reverted”).

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tarian turn and on the macro-structures of European memory discourse. Such knowledge is essential for civil society and its engagements, including grassroots activism and critical journalism. Still, I contend that this research approach is insufficient in the context of museum studies, where the focus is on museums as memory media or exhibitions as memory genres. Apart from a few publications, including parts of Jaeger’s analysis quoted above, little has been said about the changes in the MSWW in this context. This case is unique in that it offers an opportunity to examine two versions of the same historical exhibition that might differ only to some extent and yet are supposed to function differently as memory media. The exhibition’s first version articulated a model of memory contested by the “mnemonic warriors,” while the second is supposed to demonstrate the one they advocate; the elements that have been changed can be markers of the shift. While tracing the changes, not only their content but also the manner in which they were made should be taken into account. Where exactly were they placed? What meanings and affects are built upon them? What are their relations to other parts of the exhibition? To what extent do the changed parts stand out against the original background, and to what extent do they blend in? As a result, the current exhibition may be seen as a palimpsest: both a laboratory for modifications and a platform for narrative resilience.3

 Among other possible tools influencing museum visitors’ experiences, “external” to the permanent exhibition, there is a way in which it is framed (in this case, reframed) by what can be called “paratextual features” of the museum (I am grateful to Stephan Jaeger and Kerstin Barndt for their comments on this matter). The new agenda of the MSWW involves not only changes in the permanent exhibition but, even more prominently, the identity of the institution as a whole, reshaping other components of its activity: educational activities, special events, temporary exhibitions, commemorative actions, the way in which the museum’s professionals profile their expertise on the history of the Second World War in public space. Similarly to, for instance, press coverage of the museum, these activities may contribute to steering visitors’ attention, expectations, and attitudes even before entering the permanent exhibition, when their general understanding of the museum’s idea is produced in advance. Yet, I focus here solely on the permanent exhibition’s design and content due to my conviction that exhibitions as integral cultural entities deserve separate attention. Hypothetically, a different instruction for the museum’s tour guides could also be a potent tool to steer the experience of visitors (but only a minority group). This matter, however, is beyond the scope of this study and would require separate research, probably based on participatory observation and interviews and feasible only with the full cooperation of the institution. It is worth noting that the audio guide remains unchanged from 2017.

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Changes and their Traces In the following inventory, I draw upon my research conducted at the exhibition in September 2021 and juxtapose it with my research of the original display, conducted in April and July 2017. Complementarily, I have considered, on the one hand, a list of alterations introduced by the new management of the museum (Nawrocki 2020) and, on the other, a list of changes pointed out by the critics of the interventions, including the text of the lawsuit filed by the authors of the exhibition (Pozew o prawa 2018). I was able to record a total of 23 modifications, all of which are “pinpoint changes” inscribed in the existing infrastructure of the exhibition – no completely new scenography, themes, or sections were introduced. Referring to Weinberg and Elieli’s insights, it can be said that all these changes are essentially low-cost. At least one modification was introduced in nine out of the 18 main sections of the exhibition and in 15 out of 78 thematic sub-sections. Out of 23 recorded changes, nine can be classified as substitutions (replacements of a removed element with a new one) – five of which were made only to the text on the boards. Eleven are additions of new elements without deleting anything from the original exhibition shape. Three changes are more complicated to categorize, as they modified scenography or relocated an element within the exhibition with the simultaneous addition of new elements. Among all those modifications, in seven cases, they were made to database contents available via touchscreens (and not the core exhibition, i.e., the one to be literally experienced by visitors). Interestingly, three modifications have not been protested by the original exhibition’s creators, noted by the public, or criticized by liberal commentators and museum experts. Thus, statistically speaking, the changes affected a minimal portion of an otherwise huge exhibition. However, such an approach is obviously by no means decisive for their general impact on its messages. While monitoring the changes, before jumping to the level of master narratives, I wondered whether it was possible to distinguish any transformation markers on the micro-level of exhibition experience. As it turned out, such micromarkers do exist, and they may easily be identified in the very language of the newly introduced texts. Interestingly, the new texts tend to be visibly more detailed and lengthier than the relevant examples from the original presentation (this is particularly noticeable when checking the amount of text and data available via new touchscreens). They often cite specific numbers and formal nuances, especially on the military, sometimes to the effect that readers may feel overloaded. This can be interpreted as an attempt at fulfilling postulated narrative priorities without losing credibility. A separate and interesting complication can be found in the Polish version of the exhibition text, where an equivalent of the

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adjective “Soviet” is used. There are two possible translations of the word in the Polish language, the traditional form “radziecki” and the Russian calque “sowiecki,” often used in a negative sense and associated with the anti-communist post-1989 discourse. The former is widespread in the exhibition because it was consistently used everywhere in its original, pre-change shape. However, wherever the text is new or modified, it contains the word “sowiecki.” As a consequence, both formulations can be found on boards adjacent to each other in the exhibition space. This micro-marker of the new discourse meaningfully shows that it gives priority to expressing anti-communism over blending the changes in the existing content (and sustaining the integrity of the exhibition). The first and most modest variant of “exhibition resilience” will be therefore limited to the fact that the revised exhibition still bears the traces of change, at least in the form of incongruencies, ambiguities, and confusing repetitions that may produce an impression of “something being wrong,” even for a non-expert visitor. A case in point is the section on “Concentration Camps System,” to which two panels presenting the figures of “Polish heroes” were added. The original display already acknowledged one of them, Witold Pilecki, as the person who “established one of the most effective networks of camp resistance.” A showcase presenting the resistance movement contains Auschwitz mugshots of Pilecki and a page from his report on the conditions in the camp. Yet, the presentation of Pilecki’s merits was recognized as insufficient, and an additional, bigger-scale portrait of the hero, accompanied with a touchscreen, has been placed near the showcase. Two images and bios of Pilecki are now located in the very same space, almost facing each other, which is an obvious and puzzling repetition. This is a negligible example, but the mechanism is sometimes similar in cases where the change was probably intended to dominate (or at least seriously transform) the exhibition space. Some of the most prominent changes can be seen in the presentation of the Holocaust and, in particular, the rescue of the Jews by Polish gentiles, which is one the markers of the “mnemonic warrior” discourse (Jaeger 2020, 249–252; Radonić 2020, 46, 68, 78).4 The exhibition presents this particular theme in two sections: the one devoted entirely to the Holocaust and the one depicting the resistance movement (see below). Attitudes to the Holocaust were originally presented using the classic “Hilberg’s triad.” When entering the section, visitors are confronted with the photographs and fragments of testimonies that demonstrate the groups of (German) perpetrators, (Jewish) victims, and bystanders, represented mainly by Poles. Soon, however,

 For a discussion of museum representations of the Holocaust in Jewish museums, see the chapter by Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt in this volume.

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this landscape gains in complexity. Subsequent panels and display cases introduce and contrast various attitudes of “bystanders” toward the Jews, including indifference, animosity, actively supporting the Holocaust, as well as compassion and aid (but without trying to point out which one prevailed). The pogroms and the complicity of local people in occupied Poland, Lithuania, and Ukraine are discussed separately, with a specific focus on Jedwabne. This variety of attitudes permeates the whole section, and it is reiterated in the text on the board on “Non-Jewish Poles and Jews.” None of these elements, all of which belong to the original exhibition design, has been modified. They are a part of a bigger section focusing on the extermination of the Jews and leading the visitor to information about the ghettos and death camps and, finally, to a moving “space of reflection,” filled with panels presenting countless portrait photos of the victims. A significant modification to the presentation of the aid effort has, however, been introduced in the passageway from the informative part of the section (more precisely: its Auschwitz part) to the “space of reflection.” A large-scale photograph of the Ulma family now covers one of the originally empty walls of the passage. The choice of the photo is meaningful: the whole family of the Ulmas, including small children, was murdered by the Germans in 1944, together with the members of the Goldman, Grünfeld, and Didner families, whom they were trying to hide in their house in the village of Markowa (south-eastern Poland). Recognized as the Righteous Among the Nations by Yad Vashem, the Ulmas were beatified by the Catholic Church in 2023. Most importantly in this context, as rescuers-martyrs, they have recently become icons of the “mnemonic warrior” politics of remembrance, articulated by a new institution under their name: the Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II in Markowa (Wóycicka 2019). In the MSWW, their newly introduced image serves as an illustration for yet another panel on “Poles in the Face of the Holocaust,” as stated by a large headline. In this large-scale photo, a short text under the title “Saving their neighbors cost them their life . . .” is printed. The text is rather emotional, and its personal style stands in contrast with the factual descriptions in the earlier part of the section. The same can be said of the content of a touchscreen database that accompanies the “Ulma wall” and provides more material on Polish rescuers. Importantly, although the whole panel headline may echo the earlier comments on attitudes toward the Holocaust or “Non-Jewish Poles and Jews” and encourage visitors to reflect on “Poles in the face of the Holocaust” in general, the database is about “Poles saving Jews.” This substitution is typical of the manipulative discourse in which the Righteous Among the Nations are used as a national alibi. This change has several substantial consequences. Firstly, the “Ulma wall” concludes the whole history of the Holocaust in the exhibition. Secondly, it represents a shift in the narrative on the rescue of the Jews. The original strategy of the crea-

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tors of the MSWW exhibition comprised two equally important steps: first, the recognition and acknowledgment of the rescuers, with the use of recurrent memory themes such as the number of those honored by Yad Vashem; second, the contextualization of their actions by showing how exceptional they were, in what circumstances their actions occurred, and that they were just a small fragment of the Holocaust history. The “Ulma wall” puts it completely differently; it concludes the whole story with the image of Polish martyrs and suggests that they are representative of Polish wartime society. Thirdly, the change gives priority to commemorating the Righteous over producing a somber atmosphere of meditation on the tragedy of the Holocaust, which was the original purpose of the passageway and its photos. The feeling of respect and admiration now competes with those of horror or pity. All things considered, this is one of the most pronounced changes in the exhibition – not only for its content but also for its location, thanks to which the new narrative was so prominently expressed. For the same reason, however, the addition distorts the logical order of the whole presentation and produces a significant incoherence. The Holocaust section is generally organized in a causal and chronological manner, and, prior to the modification, it concluded in two ways: with an iconic photograph of the Birkenau gate, presented in a large-scale reproduction at the end of the death camp part, and with the space of mourning. The “Ulma wall” is located precisely between the two. Therefore, death (in the camp) and mourning were two final steps in the Holocaust narrative as originally presented. Placing the theme of Polish aid to the Jews between them makes no chronological sense – if any at all. The very logic suggests that it should be located earlier in the section, where, indeed, the issue has already been raised (and contextualized, which, as I mentioned, has not been modified). As a consequence, the new panel creates a disjointed narrative. More focused visitors will immediately spot confusing repetitions. Those who are the most interested will notice that it introduces a message that contradicts the one presented a few steps earlier. The original, nuanced narrative, in which the victims are given the most prominent place and various attitudes of non-Jewish people – Poles as well as other nationalities – are covered, is still here. Indeed, it is contradicted by the added content, but a mere addition of the “Ulma wall” is not enough to transform the message of the whole section into a song of praise to Polish heroism. It may be enough, however, to partially disorganize the narrative’s inner logic and leave a trace of the change imposed on the exhibition.

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Changes Undermined The interdependencies and tensions between the exhibition’s elements are predicated on the meaningful design, emblematic of the exhibitions like the type discussed in this article. Such exhibition space and scenography are not mere “containers for content” but active co-producers of the narrative. If so, the very exhibitive context may undermine any message that was supposed to emerge from the modified elements. The size of the exhibition contributes to this; the more elements are combined in the visitors’ experiences and compete for their attention, the less likely it is that individual changes will prove impactful. The section titled “Concentration Camps System” is a case in point: 22 identical showcases, made of wooden planks and reminiscent of camp barracks, were originally located in the exhibition space, each devoted to a specific theme. They present camp prisoners generally as a collective, and the emphasis is on camp conditions and the suffering they shared (Marszalec 2020). A twenty-third showcase of the same kind was later added: “The Massacre of the Clergy” is supposed to distinguish this specific group of inmates and invest them with particular importance. Yet, the very size and volume of the whole section, together with the homogeneous design of all its elements, hinders, if not blocks, this intention. Parallel design, so common and meaningful in the MSWW exhibition, is often used to highlight its transnational scope and universal approach to people’s experiences. This kind of space arrangement is likely to prove powerful: the very shape and division of a room or the allocation of the elements of scenography are thought-provoking and encourage searching for analogies and constellations. Parallel layout design clearly translates into parallel conceptualizations of particular themes, and this general frame resists any change, given that the design is left untouched. A section on partisan movements in Yugoslavia, Poland, France, and the Soviet Union is a good example of such an arrangement. Four panels, one devoted to each of the national histories, neighbor each other in the room. They share a common structure: a map in the background, a headline with the country name, a short slogan of the underground movement, a text summarizing the partisan struggle in the area, several photographs, and, below, a showcase with some military objects and a touchscreen panel for more data. The texts on each panel have been edited compared to the original version. The most obvious changes can be seen in the Soviet panel, which now highlights the anti-communist perspective. For instance, a mention that as many as “about 400 000–500 000 people of various nationalities fought in the red partisan movement over time” has been replaced with another estimation: “In the early 1944, Soviet partisan troops had about 180 thousand people, but their ranks significantly expanded in 1941–1945 [original spelling].” Simultaneously, the presentation of Polish and French resis-

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tance movements features not only the numbers of active partisans but also information on those sworn-in or supporting the underground (introduced in a new version), thereby suggesting the massive scale of the movement. Still, the texts, though re-worded in some details, continue to be an inherent part of the new design, which was meant to produce the impression of a common struggle against Nazi Germany, despite physical distance, different national agendas, etc. While all these examples show the limited potential of the changes, the last one covers the theme of Polish aid to the Jews. As mentioned above, the theme returns outside the Holocaust gallery, in the section on the resistance movement, not far from the partisan room discussed in the previous paragraph. The room in question, devoted to the Polish Underground State, was designed to resemble a basement, with pipes and other pieces of equipment placed on the walls and periscopes showing the official life on the ground. Naturally, this arrangement highlights conspiracy; it presents various actions of the Polish resistance movement and the way it was organized. In the furthest corner of the cellar room, partly obscured by the bend of the wall, a display space covering the topic of aid to the Jews is located; it consists of Irena Sendler’s portrait, a film story showing the rescue of the baby girl, Elżbieta Koppel (later Bussold and Ficowska), in which Sendler was involved, the baby’s photo, and a silver spoon that was taken with her from the ghetto. The board states that “thousands of Poles” aided the Jews “both individually, outside the underground organization, and within it.” It also mentions the risk of being blackmailed and highlights the number of the Polish Righteous. However, the meaningful location and design of this part of the exhibition suggests, and rightly so, that the aid effort should be perceived as “a conspiracy within a conspiracy,” a special if not exceptional case in the activity of the resistance movement. The design was used as a pretext for an intervention in this part of the exhibition; it was interpreted as an undignified mode of presentation that undermines the theme’s import (and unfairly damages the image of the Polish Underground State). To give it more exposure, a small window was cut in the wall, which, in turn, made Irena Sendler’s portrait more visible (see Figure 1). The new arrangement acts as an instruction for visitors and an encouragement to check the space hidden around the corner. Apparently, this part of the exhibition was likely to be missed in the past. The intervention allows for a better recognition of the original content; however, it also indicates a new strategy whereby heroes and heroines are celebrated and not subjected to other principles or goals, such as showing a broader picture of people’s attitudes and actions. Still, the display of aid to the Jews, barely visible, stays in the secluded part of the room, which strongly suggests that it was on the margins of the whole underground movement.

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Figure 1: Part of the Polish Underground State section with a view on the “Irena Sendler corner,” her portrait visible through a new window cut in a wall. Permanent exhibition, Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Photo by Maria Kobielska, September 2021, used with permission of the Museum of the Second World War.

These examples show the resilience of the MSWW exhibition, which results from its purposeful spatial construction. The structure of the exhibition is flexible enough to absorb a number of changes, especially those less invasive, and powerful enough to contextually reshape their messages and dissolve their meanings in the existing framework. To efficiently erase the transnationality of the partisan section or the idea of the “double conspiracy” involved in providing aid to the Jews, it would be necessary to find a novel spatial solution to express a new narrative and redesign the whole room accordingly.

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Changes Reverted The most prominent example of a drastic change in the exhibition, and the first one the new MSWW management introduced as early as October 2017, is that of its closure. The operation replaced a final video, described below, with The Unconquered, a 4-minute animated film produced by the Institute of National Remembrance and released in 2017 for educational purposes. Given the very position of the video within the exhibition narrative, the intrusiveness of the change is obvious: the beginning and the end are typically the most impactful parts of any work, and the conclusion offers the visitors a possibility to reflect on the overall narrative while guiding their interpretation.5 At the same time, the replacement can be reinterpreted, I believe, as the most potent example of the MSWW exhibition’s resilience. The replacement was made in the last exhibition room, crossed by a barbedwire wall embodying the Iron Curtain. The lasting impact of the war, namely, the division of Europe, constitutes the central theme of the space. Importantly, especially from the perspective of museum temporalities, a final stop on the visitors’ path reaches out to the beyond: it conveys the passing “from war to freedom” (as the exhibition board puts it), that is, to “the fall of Communism and removing the postwar division of Europe after 1989.” The narrative enumerates subsequent elements of the transition in East-Central Europe. It concludes with an emphatic statement on reconciliation and the enduring influence of war. The exhibition design made it clear that 1989, although shown as a watershed in the history of Poland, Europe, and the world, was by no means an “end of history.” The 5-minute film, created by Matt Subieta, looped and screened above the “Iron Curtain installation” and was intended to catch the visitors’ full attention in the gallery. With no spoken narrative commentary, it dominated the audio space by virtue of a dramatic soundtrack featuring The Animals’ “House of the Rising Sun” playing from loudspeakers; with its privileged upper positioning, well visible from anywhere in the room, it was almost certain to captivate the audience.  As already mentioned, the museum creators tried to oppose the changes on legal grounds: they demanded the restoration of the original shape of the exhibition by invoking their copyright. The final judgment in this case came in April 2023, after 6 years of proceedings. The court dismissed most of the plaintiffs’ claims, but decided differently precisely in the case of The Unconquered and ordered its removal. The current museum officials have announced that they will comply with the court’s decision (Sandecki 2023). Currently (October 2023), the film is no longer on display. The museum temporarily replaced it with visual material referring to the war in Ukraine, while it is working on new film footage (Zuzanna Szwedek-Kwiecińska, MSWW press officer, personal communication with Maria Kobielska, in October 2023). As a result, at the moment, it seems that the permanent exhibition is depicted without closure. When the new exhibit is installed this analysis shall be complemented by including a third version of the exhibition’s ending.

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The screen, divided in two parts, displayed snapshots showing momentous events in the history of the East (on the right) and the West, including Stalin’s death, Martin Luther King’s speech, a Beatles’ performance, the Vietnam war, the Moon landing, but also glimpses of everyday life. The outbursts of protests in the Eastern bloc countries were also presented, along with Lech Wałęsa’s speech and Solidarity demonstrations, followed by Pope John Paul II’s pilgrimage to Poland, and a scene of the destruction of a communist monument. However, the story continued after 1989, showing a series of scenes featuring recognizable world leaders, interspersed with snapshots of various demonstrations, riots, and acts of violence during the Chechen wars and the war in Ukraine. Here, the “left” and “right” images were no longer geographically organized, suggesting the idea of the globalized world and its tensions. Finally, two separate images on the divided screen joined to show moving scenes of the suffering of victims of contemporary wars and conflicts. Simultaneously, the music slowly faded, giving way to authentic sounds of explosions, crying, and screaming – producing a potent effect of returning to reality (and the present) a moment before exiting the exhibition. Therefore, this version of the conclusion carried a complex message that continued but also supplemented the story of the 1989 explained in the neighboring text. It acknowledged the lasting effects of the war and the significance of the 1989 transition. In a series of iconic images, it appealed to common historical memory. Dynamic montage in turn suggested complex causalities and multiple narratives, without reducing the second half of the twentieth century to a clearcut, simple storyline. And last but not least, it emphasized that neither the end of the war nor the fall of communism (which finally brought freedom to Poland and Europe) put an end to the history of violence in the world. Although the narrative of the new film The Unconquered also reaches beyond 1945, it could not be more different. A classic voice-over provides a straightforward explanation of the storyline whereby the Second World War actually “lasted half a century for Poland,” which had to endure two occupations, the German and the Soviet, the latter overlapping with the whole period of the Polish People’s Republic. The message of the story, consistently told from the first-person perspective of “us, the Poles,” glorifies Polish bravery and resistance and presents the Poles as victims of totalitarian regimes, a nation betrayed by the ungrateful allies. In the same vein, the narrative produces a particular effect of self-praise and generalization as it touches upon anti-communist opposition: “Despite our scars from the war, we still resist. The Pope gives us strength. Workers’ strikes spread throughout Poland. The communists lose. The Iron Curtain falls. The war is over. We prevail.” Pathos is the sole affective objective of the narrative, reinforced by the voiceover articulation and pompous music. The animation technique and style also

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count here. The images are kept in a limited palette of red, gray, and black. Quasirealistic scenes combine with those that create a symbolic space based on easy-toread metaphors, e.g., a giant machine with cogwheels standing for the activity of the Polish Underground State. Contrary to the “return to reality” effect produced by the original video, The Unconquered takes the visitors, who are just about to leave the museum, to a world which visually resembles a fantasy and, more specifically, the superhero fiction genre. What is even more important, such a style, persuasive as it may be, is virtually absent throughout the exhibition, despite its diversity. Animated films and comic strips are featured only a few times, and never so prominently. The style is only one of the reasons why the film does not fit within the exhibition’s narrative, all changes considered, and may make an odd impression on the visitors, disrupting their freshly acquired routine of experiencing the MSWW exhibition and their expectations for the continuity of the experience. The complexities of twentieth-century history are ignored: the utterly explicit story told by The Unconquered, concentrating on oppression, Polish heroism, and the fall of communism, draws to an inevitably logical and symbolic end, which itself overlaps with the end of communism. The exhibition has already covered the events that form the wartime part of its storyline but in a very different manner: contextually, as part of the transnational history of the war, mixing points of view, challenging the national interpretation. Consequently, it makes for an incomprehensible repetition, in a tone of revelation returning to the elementary events of the whole history of the Second World War and for a hybrid closure, as if transplanted from another exhibition. The structure of the exhibition space must also be taken into account. The double screening space above the “Iron Curtain” installation featured the original double video, which combined two simultaneous streams to show the world division in the first part and globalization in the second. To fill the space, a special video format is thus necessary, of a usual height and double width – or, in other words, two video streams, one to be screened over the left side of the “Iron Curtain wall,” one over the right side. The Unconquered is a film that was not created specifically for the MSWW, and its format is standard. How was this problem solved? In the simplest possible way: the video is displayed twice, side by side (with English subtitles on the left; see Figure 2). This means that the visitors at the closure of the exhibition see two identical streams featuring, for instance, a double image of a symbolic Polish soldier being crushed between two walls (illustrating an orchestrated invasion of Poland by Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union in 1939), of the execution of Polish officers in Katyn, or of the Auschwitz gate. A comprehensive interpretation of the museum space must acknowledge this striking duplication. What message does it create? Every Polish hero and every Polish suf-

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Figure 2: The Unconquered, duplicated, screened upon the “Iron Curtain” installation. Permanent exhibition, Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Photo by Maria Kobielska, September 2021, used with permission of the Museum of the Second World War.

fering are “cloned” and duplicated here, as if they were not convincing enough when presented in a single video. This is an excess, a travesty and caricature, and the perfect illustration of exaggerated Polish national pride, if not the absolute proof of its unreliability. This hyperbolic demand for recognition is nothing but counter-productive, and it inadvertently exposes the closure of the exhibition as non-credible. If that is the case, it shows the most potent variant of resilience among those analyzed: the spatial and narrative structure of the exhibition not only weakens the intended modification but reverts its effect.

Conclusion My analysis of the MSWW exhibition shows that the intended shifts in the exhibition narrative limit its multiplicity of perspectives and transnational scope; they also highlight the national Polish perspective, self-praise, and anti-communism. It

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was also possible to distinguish some more detailed aspects of the modifications, including their language and style. In general, the original version of the exhibition may be interpreted as less “mnemonically secure” for domestic memory users, and the changes are meant to secure their self-image and self-memory. However, my findings suggest that the implementation of the changes may not be seen as fully effective. On the one hand, an exhibition of a narrative and experiential type may be considered fragile. Such exhibitions are integral, which means that every change, even the slightest, matters, and additions and eliminations may modify their complex structure. On the other, it proves flexible and responsive: interventions have not been able to smoothly modify the experiential parameters of such exhibitions, i.e., their basic narrative mechanisms (even though they may gradually disrupt the work of these mechanisms). This potential power of an exhibition constitutes its resilience. Exhibition resilience manifests itself in three intertwined ways. Firstly, as a result of the intricate interdependencies between the elements of an exhibition, changes and revisions can be noted and traced, at least in a minimal form of inconsistency. This may be enough to prevent a transformed exhibition from smoothly expressing and promoting a new narrative. Secondly, the mere introduction of a change does not mean that it will influence an exhibition; the pre-existing context may undermine the change’s message in many entangled ways. Thirdly, the context may be powerful enough to dismantle the intended change, reveal its flaws and shortcomings, and even expose it as counterproductive. In this analysis, I provided an outline of the factors of resilience; or, in other words, conditions under which a change can be effective and under which its effectiveness is limited. The size, intricacy, and complex structure of an exhibition foster its resilience, and the correspondence between the spatial design of an exhibition and its narrative conceptual structure is its most powerful resilience factor. A productive change depends on the location within the exhibition structure and the way it is introduced – and not primarily on its content. Any incoherence between the new and existing elements of an exhibition (repetitions, contradictions, the incongruences of style and message, and the inadequacies between the intended shift and the pre-existing meaningful spatial design) hinders any possible effect of such changes. In the context of forcible interventions in the activities of historical museums, my analysis shows how exhibition design may – to a certain extent – contribute to securing the integrity of an exhibition.

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Bibliography Bernhard, Michael, and Jan Kubik (eds.). Twenty Years After Communism: The Politics of Memory and Commemoration. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. Clarke, David, and Paweł Duber. “Polish Cultural Diplomacy and Historical Memory: The Case of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk.” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 33 (2020): 49–66. Crane, Susan A. “Memory, Distortion, and History in the Museum.” History and Theory 36.4 (1997): 44–63. Jaeger, Stephan. The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum. From Narrative, Memory, and Experience to Experientiality. Berlin: De Gruyter, 2020. Logemann, Daniel. On ‘Polish History’: Disputes over the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk. Cultures of History Forum, March 21, 2017. https://www.cultures-of-history.uni-jena.de/debates/ on-polish-history-disputes-over-the-museum-of-the-second-world-war (September 18, 2022). Machcewicz, Paweł. Muzeum. Kraków: Znak Horyzont, 2017. Mälksoo, Maria. “‘Memory Must Be Defended’: Beyond the Politics of Mnemonical Security.” Security Dialogue 46.3 (2015): 221–237. Marszalec, Janusz. Mały przewodnik po zmianach w Muzeum II Wojny Światowej. ohistorie.eu, June 3, 2020. https://ohistorie.eu/2020/06/03/maly-przewodnik-po-zmianach-w-muzeum-ii-wojnyswiatowej/ (September 19, 2022). Nawrocki, Karol. Komunikat dr. Karola Nawrockiego dyrektora Muzeum II Wojny Światowej w Gdańsku, dotyczący sprawy sądowej wytoczonej MIIWŚ w przedmiocie żądania przez powodów usunięcia nowych treści wprowadzonych na wystawie głównej. March 31, 2020. https://muzeum1939.pl/komu nikat-dr-karola-nawrockiego-dyrektora-muzeum-ii-wojny-swiatowej-w-gdansku-dotyczacysprawy/aktualnosci/3297.html (September 19, 2022). Pozew o prawa autorskie do wystawy Muzeum II Wojny z dnia 6 września 2018 roku. Archiwum Osiatyńskiego, September 6, 2018. https://archiwumosiatynskiego.pl/archiwum/pozew-o-prawaautorskie-do-wystawy-muzeum-ii-wojny-z-dnia-6-wrzesnia-2018-roku/. (September 18, 2022). Radonić, Ljiljana. “‘Our’ vs. ‘Inherited’ Museums. PiS and Fidesz as Mnemonic Warriors.” Südosteuropa 68.1 (2020): 44–78. Sandecki, Maciej. “Prof. Machcewicz, współtwórca Muzeum II Wojny Światowej: Stawką w tym procesie jest wolność kultury i nauki.” Gazeta Wyborcza Trójmiasto, April 20, 2023. https://trojmiasto.wyborcza.pl/trojmiasto/7,35612,29677890,prof-machcewicz-stawka-w-tymprocesie-nie-sa-tylko-nasze-prawa.html (May 12, 2023). Siddi, Marco, and Barbara Gaweda. “The national agents of transnational memory and their limits: the case of the Museum of the Second World War in Gdańsk.” Journal of Contemporary European Studies 27.2 (2019): 258–271. Weinberg, Jeshajahu, and Rina Elieli. The Holocaust Museum in Washington. New York: Rizzoli International Publications, 1995. Wóycicka, Zofia. “Global Patterns, Local Interpretations: New Polish Museums Dedicated to the Rescue of Jews during the Holocaust.” Holocaust Studies 25.3 (2019): 248–272. Zolberg, Vera L. “Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: the Enola Gay Affair.” The Sociological Review 43.1 (1996): 69–82.

Notes on Contributors Kerstin Barndt is Associate Professor of German and Museum Studies at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA). Her research focuses on the intersection of museum and memory cultures, the colonial histories of scientific collecting, and the history of reading. Recent publications and curatorial projects include Object Lessons and the Formation of Knowledge – a co-edited volume (2017) and an exhibition that critically engages with 200 years of scientific collecting and museum building at the University of Michigan. She currently continues this work in two collaboratory projects: ReConnect/ReCollect. Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan and Meeting the Mnomen. Restoration of Wild Rice Populations for Environmental and Social Justice. Emma Bond is Professor of Italian and Comparative Studies at the University of Oxford (United Kingdom). She has published widely on transnational cultures and migration, and on representations of colonial histories in Italy and the United Kingdom. Emma founded the network Transnational Scotland: Reconnecting Heritage Stories through Museum Object Collections (2019–2020), which resulted in the publication of Scotland’s Transnational Heritage: Legacies of Slavery and Empire (Edinburgh University Press, 2022), and curated the Re-collecting Empire exhibition at the Wardlaw Museum, St Andrews (2022). Her third monograph, Curating Worlds: Museum Practices in Contemporary Literature, is forthcoming with Northwestern University Press in 2024. Selma Ćatović Hughes grew up in Sarajevo and received her Master of Architecture at the University of Colorado-Denver, USA. Her research about memory began as a subconscious form of therapy, influenced by the extraordinary circumstances while growing up during the war, creating a collection of individual and collective voices. Selma has exhibited a number of mixed media projects of different scales, materials, and functionality and currently teaches at the American University of Sharjah. Farai Mudododzi Chabata is a Senior Curator of Ethnography with the National Museums and Monuments of Zimbabwe. He is based at the Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences in Harare. A historian by training, Farai is responsible for the Organization’s Ethnographic Collection and has expertise in issues around Intangible Cultural Heritage management, community liaison, exhibition development, and conservation. Research interests include indigenous knowledges, identities, museum futures, collections biographies, and provenance history. His other interests are in contemporary art, having worked with several young visual artists in Zimbabwe. Rachel Christ-Doane is the Director of Education at the Salem Witch Museum. Within this role she trains museum docents, works with students and teachers, creates educational resources and programming, and oversees exhibition curation. She also engages in a range of research related to the history of witchcraft and public history. Recent publications include, “The Salem Witch Trials Memorial: Finding Humanity in Tragedy” (Smithsonian Folklife 2022), “The Untold Story of Dorothy Good, Salem’s Youngest Accused Witch” (American Ancestors 2023), and “The Salem Witch Trials and the Decay of the Great Puritan Experiment” in A Civil Society with No Hierarchy (Lexington Books, 2023). Marija Đorđević is a research associate of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Belgrade. Her main research interests belong to the domain of making, keeping, and contemporary use of

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cultural heritage and public memory, with a focus on bodily didactics of cultural practices and performances. In 2021, she published the book Yugoslavia Commemorates – Site, Body, and Action for Spaces of Performing Heritage (Europa Nostra Serbia). She continues to research and develop the concept of performing heritage as a form of emancipatory practices. Jana Hawig is curator at the DASA Working World Exhibition in Dortmund (Germany). Besides curatorial projects she is project leader of DASA’s research on the impact of storytelling. Her ongoing Ph.D. research in Museum Studies at the University of Würzburg (Germany) studies the role narratives play in exhibition design. Her publications cover the fields of storytelling in analog and digital exhibitions, exhibition analysis, and historical media in exhibitions about the twentieth century world wars. Stephan Jaeger is Professor of German Studies and Head of the Department of German and Slavic Studies at the University of Manitoba (Winnipeg, Canada). He researches and has published widely on contemporary narratives, representations, and memory of war and genocide in German and European museums, literature, film, and historiography. His publications include three monographs – most recently The Second World War in the Twenty-First-Century Museum: From Memory, Narrative, and Experience to Experientiality (De Gruyter, 2020) – and nine co-edited books. Current research projects discuss questions of immersion, empathy/emotion, storytelling, experientiality, empirical visitor-impact, and aspects of collaboration and perpetration in historical exhibitions. Ingvild Hagen Kjørholt is Associate Professor of Literary Didactics at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) and project manager at the Falstad Centre (Norway). She researches and has published widely within the fields of Comparative Literature and Memory Studies, with publications covering topics such as cosmopolitanism in Early Modern French literature, public uses of literature, digital Holocaust memory, and receptions of Holocaust narratives. As the manager of several projects exploring art, storytelling, and participation at Second World War memorial sites, she is experienced in curation and cross-disciplinary research in the museum sector. Recent projects and curatorial work include the European culture cooperation project Houses of Darkness: Images of a Contested European Memory (2020–2023) and the exhibition Faces of Power (The Falstad Centre, 2020). Maria Kobielska is Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Polish Studies of the Jagiellonian University (Cracow, Poland) and member of the Executive Committee of Memory Studies Association. She has published in Polish and English on contemporary Polish literature and culture in the context of memory and politics, and she has authored, among others, a monograph discussing national memory culture of the twenty-first century (Polska kultura pamięci w XXI wieku: dominanty. Zbrodnia katyńska, powstanie warszawskie i stan wojenny, 2016). Her current research project focuses specifically on new Polish historical museums. Stefan Krankenhagen is Professor of Cultural Studies and Popular Studies at the University of Hildesheim (Germany). He researches on the history of popular culture and consumer culture, on representations of history in popular media and the arts, and he is a member of the interdisciplinary research training group “Aesthetic Practice.” His publications include three monographs – most recently All these things. Eine andere Geschichte der Populären Kultur (Metzler 2021) – and ten co-edited books, among them Geschichte kuratieren: Kultur- und kunstwissenschaftliche An-Ordnungen der Vergangenheit (Böhlau 2017).

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Ena Kukić is an architectural designer and lecturer at the Graz University of Technology, Austria, where she teaches design studios and model making. Both her practice and her research as a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Design and Building Typology in Graz are centered around engaging with spatial fragments of collective memory in Yugoslavia. Her projects have been exhibited and awarded internationally. Julieta Lampasona has a degree in Sociology and a Ph.D. in Social Sciences (Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Buenos Aires). Currently, she works as a Researcher at the Institute for Economic and Social Development (IDES/UNTREF, Argentina). She is a member of the Academic Committee on Memory Studies (CIS-CONICET/IDES), where she also co-coordinates the Group “Places, Marks, and Territories of Memory.” She is part of various research projects related to the subjects of memory, recent past, and enforced disappearances, and has taught classes in specialized graduate and postgraduate seminars on the subject. In her doctoral thesis, she analyzed the biographical narratives of experiences of disappearances by Clandestine Detention Centers (CDC) survivors in Argentina, and her current research topics include testimony, CDCs’ survivors, and their incorporation into current memory sites’ narratives. Her articles on these topics have been published in national and international scientific journals. Florencia Larralde Armas is Associate Researcher at the National Scientific and Technical Research Council (CONICET), Research Institute in Humanities and Social Sciences (IdHCS-FaHCE-UNLP), Argentina. She holds an M.A. in History and Memory and a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the National University of La Plata. She is a member of the Academic Committee on Memory Studies (CISCONICET/IDES) and served as Editorial Coordinator of Aletheia, a journal in history and memory studies (2009–2016). She is member of the Editorial Committee of Aletheia and of Clepsidra, an interdisciplinary journal of memory studies. She is also the author of Relating with Light: Uses of the Photograph of the Disappeared (Edulp, 2018), EX ESMA: Memory Policies in the Former Clandestine Detention Center (2004–2015) (La Oveja Roja-Kamchatka), and of numerous articles published in Argentina and internationally. Rowan Light is Lecturer in History at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau. Dr. Light is also project curator (New Zealand Wars) at Auckland War Memorial Museum Tāmaki Paenga Hira. His research focuses on the cultures of war remembrance and commemoration in Aotearoa New Zealand since the nineteenth century, with a special focus on the role of museums and collections. His first book, Anzac Nations: The Legacy of Gallipoli in New Zealand and Australia, 1965–2015, was published with Otago University Press and explores how groups and institutions have shaped the cultural memory of the Gallipoli campaign. Jesmael Mataga is Associate Professor and the inaugural Head of Humanities at Sol Plaatje University, in Kimberley, South Africa. He has experience in teaching research, training, and community engagement in museum and heritage management on the African continent. His current research, situated in the emerging focus on critical and decolonial heritage, explores the role and place of communities in museums and heritage preservation. His work aims to contribute to new approaches to museum and heritage management practices that address challenges such as poverty, inequality, conflict, decolonization, migration, and social justice. His recent publications include Independent Museums and Culture Centres in Colonial and Postcolonial Zimbabwe: Non-State Players, Local Communities and Self-Representation (Routledge, 2022) and Museums as Agents for Social Change: Decolonisation at the Mutare Museum (Routledge, 2021).

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Daniel Morat is a curator at the Deutsche Historische Museum in Berlin and an adjunct professor of Modern History at the Freie Universität Berlin. From 2016–2021, he worked for Kulturprojekte Berlin as one of the curators of Berlin Global. His areas of interest include public history, media history, and museum theory and practice. His most recent book publications are Handbuch Sound. Geschichte – Begriffe – Ansätze (co-edited with Hansjakob Ziemer, Metzler, 2018) and Schlüsselbegriffe der Public History (co-authored with Christine Gundermann et al., Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2021). Sanna-Mari Niemi is a doctoral researcher funded through the University of Helsinki’s Doctoral Program in Philosophy, Arts and Society. In her dissertation, she combines theories of comparative literature and museum studies to examine spatial and fictional storytelling in contemporary museum exhibition narratives. She is a member of the European PhDnet “Literary and Cultural Studies” and is pursuing a bi-national degree in the University of Helsinki and the Justus-Liebig-University Gießen. She has several years of practical experience in the museum field. Jimena Perry is Assistant Professor of Latin American and Public History at Iona University (New Rochelle, New York). Her research focuses on memory museums and the ways in which grassroots Latin American communities decide to remember and represent atrocities they have endured. Recent publications include Museums, Exhibitions, and Memories of Violence in Colombia: Trying to Remember (Routledge, 2023) and the co-edited volume Comunidades digitales, museos e historia pública: Experiencias en torno a América Latina (Universidad Externado de Colombia and Universidad San Francisco de Quito, 2023). Since 2018, she has also been the Project Manager of the Explorers of the International Federation for Public History (IFPH). Mark W. Rectanus is University Professor of German Studies (Emeritus) in the Department of World Languages and Cultures at Iowa State University (Ames, USA). His research interests include print culture and media, cultural politics, museums and globalization, and contemporary art. Research publications include articles and essays in Performance Research, Museum and Society, Finance and Society, A Companion to Museum Studies, and The International Handbooks of Museum Studies – Museum Media. His most recent book is Museums Inside Out: Artist Collaborations and New Exhibition Ecologies (University of Minnesota Press, 2020). Anne Schäfer is a Ph.D. candidate at the Faculty of Social Sciences at Nord University in Bodø, Norway. Her research interests include Indigenous cultural rights, decolonization, and policy making. Anne is part of the transnational and interdisciplinary research project “INDHOME: Indigenous Homemaking as Survivance”; her research focuses on cultural resilience and the assimilating effects of Scandinavian welfare state policies. Anne holds a B.A. in German Linguistics and Literature and Scandinavian Studies from the University of Freiburg in Germany and an M.A. in Culture, Communication and Globalization with focus on the Arctic from Aalborg University in Denmark. Radmila Švaříčková Slabáková is Associate Professor of History at Palacký University Olomouc (Czech Republic). Her research interests encompass oral history, memory studies, gender, and historiographical trends. She is the author and co-author of five monographs in Czech, focused on nobility in the modern era, masculinity, and family memory. In 2021, she became co-chair of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) Working Group “Family Memory and Intergenerational Exchange.” Recently, she has edited Family Memory: Practices, Transmission and Uses in a Global Perspective (Routledge 2021). Her current research project deals with the sound memories of the Second World War at the intersection of museum and narrative studies.

Notes on Contributors

341

Amy Sodaro is Associate Professor of Sociology at the Borough of Manhattan Community College/ City University of New York (USA). Her research focuses on memorialization of atrocity in memorial museums. She is co-editor of Memory and the Future: Transnational Politics, Ethics and Society (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010) and Museums and Sites of Persuasion: Politics, Memory and Human Rights (Routledge 2019) and author of Exhibiting Atrocity: Memorial Museums and the Politics of Past Violence (Rutgers University Press, 2018). Her current project examines new museums that focus on slavery and its legacies in the USA. Sabina Tanović is an architectural designer, researcher, and lecturer. Sabina holds a Ph.D. in history of architecture and urbanism from Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands. Her research and practice focus on contemporary European memory and the construction of architectural commemorative projects with a special focus on the correlation between psychological aspects of bereavement and their integration into design processes. M. Elizabeth Weiser is an Arts and Sciences Distinguished Professor in the Department of English at The Ohio State University. Specializing in rhetoric and museology, her monographs include Burke, War, Words: Rhetoricizing Dramatism (University of South Carolina Press, 2008) and Museum Rhetoric: Building Civic Identity in National Spaces (Penn State University Press, 2017). She has also co-edited four anthologies and published numerous articles and chapters. Weiser is on the ten-person Executive Board of the ICOM International Committee for Museology, and she currently serves as the editor of the ICOFOM Study Series.

Index 9/11 Museum, New York (USA) 28, 35, 233 Aberhart, Laurence 178 Adams, Gretchen 277 affect, affective (museum representation) 10, 15, 26, 39, 45, 57–58, 78–79, 119, 143, 232, 246–249, 251, 253, 256, 259–261 African American Museum, Philadelphia (USA) 31 agency 20, 32, 52, 56, 58, 145, 151, 248–249, 303, 310 – visitor 3, 8, 10, 122 agonistic 18–19, 66, 236, 249 see also memory, agnostic Aijazi, Omer 248–249 Aine Art Museum, Tornio (Finland) 76, 78, 83 – Before the Night: Tornio Noir 75–76, 78–79, 81–87, 89, 91 Alamaunu, Anita 76, 78–79, 81, 83–87 American Civil War Museum, Richmond (USA) 225 amnesia 41, 139, 232 – historical 178, 224, 227, 306 Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki (Finland) 76 – Helsinki Noir: A Crime to Solve 75–84, 86, 88–89, 91 Andermann, Jens 27–28 Andersen, Jon Ole 190, 195, 199, 203 Anglo-Ndebele War of 1893 161 Anishinaabe (also Chippewa) 16–17 architecture, architectural 12, 17, 19, 50, 60, 65, 137, 159, 174, 179, 189, 191–192, 199, 203, 247, 251, 280, 291, 294, 303–307, 309–311, 313, 315 Argentina 3, 37, 266, 268 Arnold-de Simine, Silke 27–28, 45, 50, 52, 56 art (narrative function in exhibitions) 7, 57, 59, 61, 66, 78–79, 81, 86–87, 137–139, 141–142, 144–146, 147, 190–191, 194, 197, 200, 259–260 – black 235 – contemporary 131, 137, 191, 194 – installation 6, 57 https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110787443-021

– land 296 – looted 66, 161–162 – memorial 291 – modern 140 art exhibition 3, 11, 18, 75, 91, 194, 259, 289 art installation 246, 249–250, 256–257 artifact 7–8, 16–17, 25–26, 28, 30–32, 41, 45, 47–48, 52–54, 57, 76, 90, 99, 115, 153, 187, 189, 192, 195, 197, 202, 215–216, 221, 224, 227, 278, 281, 284, 287, 291, 300, 306, 310–313 see also object (museum) artistic, artists’, or art interventions 11, 91, 105, 131, 133, 173, 246, 250, 260, 305, 319–320, 324, 335 artwork 7, 82, 85–87, 108–109, 146–147, 188, 194, 203, 260, 308, 317 artwashing 133 assimilation, forced 17, 187 Attia, Kader 135–136, 249 audience 1–2, 11, 14, 18, 25–27, 39–40, 45, 100, 173–174, 176, 180, 183, 207, 210, 212–215, 223, 225, 227, 236–237, 253, 259, 260–262, 277, 279, 281–282, 286–287, 292, 298–300, 331 audio guide 8, 117–118 audionarratology 116–117, 119–120, 123, 126 audiovisual 48, 53, 119, 159, 266–267, 270–271, 279 Auschwitz 28, 325–327 Auschwitz Birkenau Memorial and Museum, Oświęcim (Poland) 28, 313, 333 Austin, Tricia 5 Australia 1, 16, 135 authenticity, authentic 26, 28, 36–37, 39, 43, 52–53, 85, 97–98, 108–109, 111, 113, 135, 154, 188, 274, 304–305, 308–311, 313, 332 Autry, Robyn 40 Bal, Mieke 45, 50–55, 57, 59 Balkan Wars (1990s) 289 Bangladesh 12 BaTonga Community Museum, Binga (Zimbabwe) 156–158 Battle of the Somme 7

344

Index

Bedford, Leslie 5, 45 Beier-de Haan, Rosmarie 4 Benjamin, Walter 26 Bennett, Tony 26, 75, 77, 90 Berlin Wall Memorial 303, 313 Bernhard, Michael 318, 320 Bitgood, Stephen 97–98, 109 Black Lives Matter (USA, 2010s and 2020s) 25, 222, 226, 234 Black Power Movement (USA, 1960s and 1970s) 233 Bogdanović, Bogdan 291–292 Bosnia-Herzegovina 3, 303–306, 308 Bošnjak, Igor 294 Boyle, Tiffany 144 Bristow, Robert 277 British Museum, London (United Kingdom) 6 – The First Emperor: China’s Terracotta Army 6 Bruner, Jerome 174 brutalism (architecture) 291, 294 Bubaris, Nikos 117, 120 Bunch, Lonnie 29–34, 40, 224 Burma (Myanmar) 12 Canadian Museum for Human Rights, Winnipeg (Canada) 31 Canadian War Museum, Ottawa (Canada) 317 Cappellin, Jarmay Michael Gabriel 147 care (politics of) 133, 144–146 Casey, Valerie 26–27 catharsis 260–261 Čemerska, Elena 294 Cento Bull, Anna 5, 17, 66 Christ-Doane, Rachel 11, 15, 287 Christie, Agatha 84, 87 City Museum of Berlin (Germany) 65–66, 68 Civil Rights Movement (USA, 1950s and 1960s) 25, 40, 42, 221, 233 Clarke, David 66, 322 Classen, Constance 115–116 Clifford, James 189 clue 11, 76–77, 80–81, 83, 85–87, 89, 91 co-narration, co-narrator 4, 8, 14–17, 20, 54 collective memory see memory, collective Colombi, Chiara 259

Colombia National Museum, Bogotá (Colombia) see National Museum of Colombia, Bogotá (Colombia) colonial, colonialist 1, 17–19, 66, 71, 131, 136–137, 140–142, 144–146, 151–158, 161–162, 169–170, 172–174, 177, 179, 183, 188, 192, 201, 209, 217, 277, 280–282 colonialism 2, 10, 16–18, 66, 131–133, 151–154, 156, 163, 189, 222, 294 coloniality 15–16, 151–153, 163 colonization 161, 167–168, 171, 174, 176, 180, 187, 198 colonial violence 2, 18, 167–168, 170, 173, 183 Colombia 18, 207–211, 213, 216 commemoration 3, 123, 169–170, 173–176, 183, 290, 305, 308–309, 311 communism 325, 331–334 community, communities, communal 1, 4–5, 14, 16–19, 28–29, 30, 36, 39, 46, 51, 56, 59, 68, 131, 137, 147, 152–153, 155–158, 161–163, 167–178, 180–184, 187–188, 190, 192, 199, 201, 207–208, 210–212, 214–216, 223–225, 230, 232–233, 235–238, 247–251, 256–257, 259–262, 278, 281, 284, 292–293, 295, 299 – local 36, 156–158, 176, 183, 251, 261, 292–293, 295–296, 300, 309, 311 – museum(s) 237 see also memory community community engagement 18–19, 156, 163, 182 conflict 18, 61, 102, 169, 173, 175, 178, 180–181, 210, 245–252, 255–256, 259–262 – colonial 167, 169–170, 172, 173, 177, 179, 183 – social 246, 253, 261 Conflictorium, Ahmedabad (India) 15, 245–248, 250, 253–254, 256, 259–262 Conn, Steve 26–27, 39, 43 contact zone 117, 158, 189 cosmology 17, 170, 194 Cotton, Shane 178 COVID-19 (coronavirus pandemic) 28, 65, 245, 286 Cox, Rupert 123 Crenzel, Emilio 269 crime fiction 75–79, 81, 89–90 see also detective fiction critical knowledge 8

Index

critical museology 5 Crooke, Elizabeth 28 cultural memory see memory, cultural curation, curatorial 3, 14, 18, 27, 67, 71, 73, 76, 78, 90, 115, 131–132, 142–143, 147, 152, 155–157, 160, 173, 177–178, 214, 217, 223, 247, 256, 259, 267, 274, 306, 310 – curator, curatorial team 29–30, 53, 66, 68, 76, 79, 132, 147, 170, 178, 183, 207, 211, 214, 259, 270–271, 273–274 – curatorial practice 3, 73, 259 – curatorial reading 133, 145 Czechoslovakia 125 dark history 34, 277–278, 283, 287 dark tourism 277–278, 287, 305 DASA Working World Exhibition, Dortmund (Germany) 95, 100, 106 – Pia says Goodbye 95, 100–113 death (exhibited) 3, 10, 47, 53, 78, 80, 84–85, 88, 95–96, 98, 100–103, 105–107, 112, 277, 321, 326–327, 332 decolonial 4, 15–18, 143, 151–152, 155, 161, 163, 171, 180 – post-decolonial 152–154, 162 decoloniality 15–16, 18, 151–152, 154, 211 decolonization, decolonize, decolonizing 3, 18, 132, 151, 154, 157, 161–163, 169–171, 183, 187–189, 200–201, 210–212, 224, 300, 317 Denmark 8–10 DeRosa, Robin 282, 287 detective fiction 75–78, 81, 83, 88–91 see also crime fiction Dierking, Lynn 59–60 difficult history 5–6, 13, 17, 228, 277, 284, 287 difficult knowledge 3, 12, 15, 19–20, 278 difficult past 40, 225, 287, 304, 309 digital archive 158–159 digital storytelling see storytelling, digital diorama 16, 195, 197–199 displayed withholding 17, 200–203 distance (from or for visitor) 11, 42, 54, 56–57, 98–99, 106, 113, 117, 120, 133, 139, 162, 217, 270, 329 diversity (cultural) 15, 18, 67, 70, 75, 131, 154, 160–162, 207–217, 226, 236, 333 Domanska, Ewa 27, 42–43

345

Dorn, Marion 139–140 Douglass, Frederick 25 Doyle, Arthur Conan 75, 77, 89 Duber, Paweł 322 Dunkley, Ria 277 Edinburgh Printmakers, Edinburgh (Scotland) 137, 141 – Transparency 137, 139–140 Elieli, Rina 318–319, 324 embodiment, embodied 8, 14, 25–26, 33, 117, 155, 174, 194, 223, 227, 249, 251, 260–261, 289, 321 emotion, emotional (narrative or representation) 3–8, 10–11, 13, 27, 39, 54, 57, 79, 95, 97–100, 102–104, 107–109, 111–113, 115–119, 124–126, 223, 225–226, 228, 232, 249, 260–261, 283–284, 326 emotionalization 98, 107, 111 empathy 79, 99–100, 108–109, 124, 226, 246, 254–255, 312 empire 18, 131–133, 138, 283 empirical data 95–96, 106, 113, 175 enslavement 25, 32, 34 see also slavery epideixis, epideictic (rhetoric) 19, 221, 223–225, 227, 230, 232–235, 237–238 Equal Justice Initiative (EJI) 25, 34, 226 equality 32, 34 ESMA Site Museum, Buenos Aires (Argentina) 14, 265–266, 268, 272–274 ethno-national, ethno-nationalization 306, 310 ethnological, ethnology 65–66, 211 eurocentrism 212 experiential, experience 9, 14, 27–28, 35, 39, 41–42, 55–56, 67, 97–100, 106–109, 116–117, 247–249, 251–252, 259, 261, 279, 314, 317–319, 335 experientiality 13, 121 eyewitness 267, 273, 275 fable 253, 255 Falk, John 59–60 Farah-Kufr-Bir’im, Hanna 308 Farah-Kufr-Bir’im, Hila Lulu Lin 308 fascism 10, 120, 126, 214, 291–292, 306 Feld, Claudia 266, 269, 272, 274

346

Index

fiction, fictional (in exhibitions / museums) 4, 7, 11, 14, 50, 59, 75–81, 83, 85, 88–91, 96, 98–99, 101, 106, 113, 124–125, 253, 278, 283, 333 film (in exhibitions / museums) 28, 88, 119–120, 122, 124–126, 142, 228, 233–234, 260, 329, 331–333 Fiorin, Fausto 151 First World War 71, 135, 139, 168–169, 177–178, 306, 308 Flierl, Thomas 66 focalization, focalizer, focalized 7, 10, 55–58, 86 forgetting 11, 154, 170, 178, 183, 225–226, 295, 311, 315 France 6, 139, 328 freedom 14, 32–34, 123, 152, 226, 233–234, 237, 262, 291, 331–332 freedom papers 31 futures (of museums) 3, 16, 39, 151–155, 161–163, 181, 247, 261–262, 293, 313–314 futurity 15, 19 Garoian, Charles R. 248 Gaweda, Barbara 321–322 Genette, Gérard 45, 50 genocide 3, 10, 12–13, 28, 46, 53, 56, 212, 221, 305 Gerbich, Christine 67 Germany 3, 9, 66, 71, 95, 100, 286, 303, 329, 333 Gerz, Jochen 299 Ginzburg, Carlo 77 globalization 66, 71, 333 Gorer, Geoffrey 98 Graham, Brett 180 Greenberg, Stephen 6 Greenwood Rising Center, Tulsa (USA) 19, 227, 229–230 Gregg, Melissa 249 grief, grieving 11, 95–101, 103–105, 107–113, 231 Gröppel-Wegener, Alke 6, 279 Groys, Boris 247, 255 Gujarat 246, 250, 252–253, 256, 258 Gulddal, Jesper 76–77, 80–81, 89–90 Hall, Stuart 188–189 Hapū 170–172, 174–175 Harrison, Rodney 151, 262

Hartog, François 70–72 heritage 11, 16, 19–20, 60, 73, 135, 146, 151, 153, 155, 158, 160, 162, 187, 197–198, 200, 202, 222–223, 227, 234, 247, 251, 256, 261–262, 289–293, 295–300, 305, 315 – affective 39 – architectural 65, 137 – critical 262 – difficult 224, 303 – immaterial, intangible 1, 160, 210 heritage network 291 heritage route 291 heroism, heroic (narrative/representation) 123, 125, 161, 215, 227, 233, 238, 320–321, 327, 333 Highland Clearances 142 Hilden, Irene 69 Hirsch, Marianne 45, 47 Historicity 70, 200, 203, 282 History Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) 306 Holocaust 10, 14, 45–50, 52–58, 60–61, 289, 303, 321, 325–327, 329 Hologram 9–10, 37–39, 41 Hooper-Greenhill, Eilean 77 Horak, Joseph 226 Hoskins, Andrew 50 Hourston Hanks, Laura 5, 247 Hudson, Martin 38 Hühn, Peter 78, 81, 91 human remains 28, 153, 161, 171 human rights 18, 42, 208, 255, 265–266, 269, 274 Humboldt Forum Berlin (Germany) 1, 11, 65–66, 73 – Berlin Global 11, 15, 65–73 – Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters 1, 2, 6, 16 Hungary 9, 318 Ijlal, Baaraan 260 image-text (relation) 46, 52, 76, 84, 125, 253, 260 imaginary (social) 7, 45, 238, 251, 253 immersion, immersive (museum representation / experience) 4, 6–7, 11, 14–16, 20, 67, 95–100, 106–113, 115, 120, 123, 125, 158, 279, 281–282, 287 – simulation, simulated 6, 11, 38, 97–98, 115, 124

Index

Imperial War Museum, London (United Kingdom) 49, 120 imperialism, imperial 1, 132, 134, 136, 138, 141, 146, 153, 155, 162, 168, 169–170 implicated, implication 2, 4, 15, 133, 141, 146, 167, 169, 174, 183, 230 incarceration 25, 34–35, 38, 226 inclusion, inclusive 15, 155, 158, 160, 162–163, 188, 207–209, 213, 269 India 3, 138–140, 144, 245–246, 250, 252, 254–255 indigenization, indigenize 3, 10, 17, 157, 169–171, 173, 180, 183 indigenous 1, 17, 20, 156, 158, 167, 169, 171–173, 177, 187–190, 199–204, 208–209, 212–216, 221, 282, 295 see also specific terms including Anishinaabe, Hapū, Iwi, Khoi, Māori, Sámi, San, and Wampanoag indigenous epistemologies, knowledge 1, 16, 19, 160, 172 indigenous sovereignty, governance 17, 169 indigenous storytelling 1–2 injustice 32, 38, 42, 151, 156, 171, 214, 222–223, 235, 238 – racial 34–36, 43, 227 interactive (museum representation / experience) 4, 6, 14, 27–28, 41–42, 67, 97, 99–100, 106, 109, 159, 207, 209, 215, 279, 285, 309 intermedial 76 Irwin, John T. 80–81 Iser, Wolfgang 55, 59 Iwi 170–172, 174–176 Jaeger, Stephan 13, 50, 120–121, 123, 317, 321, 323 Jåks, Iver 190–197, 199 Jelin, Elizabeth 269 Jewish Museum Berlin (Germany) 49 Jewish Museum, Trondheim (Norway) 10, 46, 60 – Home. Gone. The Holocaust in Trondheim 46–48, 51–52, 56–58 Jim Crow era 41, 222 Johnson, Philip 294 juridical 267–270, 274 justice 233, 236–237 – racial 227–228, 234

347

– restorative 19, 230–232, 238 – retributive 230–232, 238 – social 3, 5, 19–20, 30, 70, 73, 156 Kamel, Susan 67 Kawiti 181–182 Kawiti, Evelyn 181 Kene, Whaea 182 Khoi 158 Kidd, Jenny 6, 247–248, 279, 296 Kinzel, Till 116–117, 123 Kubik, Jan 318, 320 Kuckartz, Udo 107 Kuma, Kengo 131 !Khwa ttu Heritage Centre, Cape Town (South Africa) 158–160 land art see art, land Landkammer, Nora 252 Landsberg, Alison 39 landscape 1, 7, 48 – ethical 147 – memory 11 – monument 20 – Scottish 141–142 Landwehr, Achim 70–71 Laqueur, Thomas 266 Latin America 209, 211–214, 217 Legacy Museum, Montgomery (USA) 10, 19, 25–26, 34–43 Lehrer, Erica 3, 15 Lemieux, Jamilah 231 Lien, Sigrid 190–191, 194, 200 Lithuania 28, 326 Lonetree, Amy 16–17, 199 Lorenz, Chris 70 Macdonald, Sharon J. 4, 73 Machache, Sekai 19, 131, 141–143 Machcewicz, Paweł 321 Maihi, Toi te Rito 167–168, 170, 175, 178 Maljković, David 294 Mälksoo, Maria 318 Māori 170–178, 182–184 Martin, Kene Te Uira 181 master narrative see narrative, master Matchitt, Paratene 178

348

Index

material culture 4, 30, 172, 207, 257 McCarthy, Joseph Raymond 285 Meister, Robert 42 memorial 11, 27, 35, 60, 118, 123, 177, 179, 221, 232, 277, 290–294, 305, 308–310 memorialize 18, 48–49, 58, 303 memorial architecture 303 Memorial Complex Tunnel D-B, Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) 304–315 Memorial Park Popina, Štulac (Serbia) 292–293, 300, 313 memorial site 20, 266, 268, 292–293, 299–300, 306, 309, 313–314 Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (MMJE), Berlin (Germany) 303 memory – agonistic 17–18 see also agonistic – collective 170, 172, 222, 247, 311 – cosmopolitan 322 – cultural 10, 45, 57, 257, 262, 306, 314 – entangled 170 – living 18, 291, 305, 307, 311 – multidirectional 18 – national 10, 18, 318 – public 17, 42, 277 – shared 175, 289 – transnational 322 memory boom 115, 168, 175 memory collectives 4 memory community 45, 56, 59, 175 memory culture 10, 17–18, 173 memory site see memorial site mend, mending 19, 131, 134–136 Michelet, Marte 61 Mignolo, Walter 16, 18, 152 migration 3, 10, 12, 45, 140, 207 Mikaere, Buddy 178 Mildorf, Jarmila 116–117, 123 Miller, Arthur 285 Miller, Carolyn 238 Milton, Cynthia E. 3, 15 mnemonic 318–320, 335 mnemonic warriors 318, 320, 323, 325–326 modernism, modernist 78, 292 Möller, John Michael 72 monument 20, 29, 72, 123, 289–300, 305, 332

mourn, mourner, mourning 15, 37, 57, 95, 99, 101, 103, 108, 110, 221–222, 226, 239, 305, 327 Mukherjee, Rollie 259 multiculturalism, multicultural 60–61, 169, 187, 216 multimedia (exhibition) 1, 4, 6, 8, 14, 41, 67, 99, 106, 117–119, 121–123, 125, 141, 143–144, 238 multiperspectivity, multiperspectival 4–5, 12, 14, 69 multisensory / multi-sensorial 5, 8, 15, 67, 98, 115, 117 multivocality, multivocal 3, 14–15, 20, 65, 67–70, 73 museology / museum studies 5, 15, 21, 39, 49, 70, 76, 131, 152, 323 see also critical museology and new museology museum – community 16–17, 156, 158 – history, historical 31, 75, 115, 117–118, 126, 221–222, 279–280, 291, 317, 319–320, 335 – Jewish 10, 45–61 – memorial 27–28, 39–41, 123, 173, 184, 304–305, 308, 314 – living 155–156 – of conscience 238 – open-air 291–292, 296 – narrative 318–319 – private 156, 305 – public 75 Museum of Conflict (MoC), Ahmedabad (India) 245–262 – To stories rumoured in branches 259 – Change Room 260 Museum of Crimes Against Humanity and Genocide, Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) 305 Museum of Cultures of Milan (MUDEC), Milan (Italy) 147 Museum of Free Derry, Londonderry (United Kingdom) 28 Museum of Mankind, Paris (France) 212 Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Santiago (Chile) 28 Museum of Modern Art, New York City (USA) – Toward a Concrete Utopia: Architecture in Yugoslavia 1948–1980, 294

Index

Museum of the Second World War (MSWW), Gdańsk (Poland) 14, 317–335 Museum of the Slovak National Uprising, Banská Bystrica (Slovakia) 10, 115–126 Museum of Suffering of the Citizens of Bosnia and Herzegovina, Vogošća (Bosnia and Herzegovina) 305 music (as exhibition technique) 108, 116, 119–120, 124–125, 174, 226, 281, 283, 332 music (as museum object) 32, 34, 103, 235 myth, mythic 32, 41, 173, 214, 221, 274, 291 mythological, mythology 80, 142, 191, 193–194, 197–200, 203, 237 Nagarwala, Bachuben 245, 250–251 narration 4, 8, 14, 19, 42, 45, 50, 54–55, 57, 97–99, 107, 113, 179, 224, 227, 234, 281–283, 309 – co-narration 4, 8, 14–17, 20 narrative – affective 39 – chronological 72, 180 – collective 176, 313–315 – cultural 59–60 – digital 6 – exhibition 3, 10, 17, 58–60, 77–79, 97–99, 106–107, 113, 173, 217, 331, 334 – fictional 11, 50, 76, 78, 91, 98, 124, 253 – grand 15–16, 90, 207, 247 – hero, heroic 61, 125 – historical 3, 8, 11, 30, 40–41, 71–73, 183, 222, 248, 255, 262, 307, 321 – humanitarian 266, 269, 274 – immersive 100, 113 – judicial 269 – linear 6, 46, 56, 73 – master 10, 119, 124, 126, 222, 237, 317, 320, 324 – museum 3–5, 10–11, 14, 17, 19–21, 45, 58–59, 76, 88, 91, 131, 175, 247, 249, 251, 267, 269, 274, 300, 305, 315 – national 20, 25, 60–61, 223, 236, 306 – of conflict 245, 248, 252, 256, 262 – of progress 6, 40, 73, 210 – political 173, 249, 252 – social 61 – visual 17, 116

349

narrative media 2, 6 narrative theory 20, 59, 76, 97, 116, 172 narrativity 96–97 narratology, narratological 10, 14, 20, 45, 49–50, 58–59, 67, 70, 95–97, 112, 116 see also audionarratology narrator 12, 50, 53–58, 174, 224, 257, 281–282 – co-narrator 8, 14 nation-building 179, 254–255 National Air and Space Museum, Washington, DC (USA) 317 National Army Museum, London (United Kingdom) 168 National Civil Rights Museum (NCRM), Memphis (USA) 19, 232–233, 235 National Memorial for Peace and Justice, Montgomery (USA) 35, 232 National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC), Washington, DC (USA) 10, 25–26, 29–35, 39–42, 224, 234–235 National Museum of American History (NMAH), Washington, DC (USA) 29, 221–223, 226–227, 239 National Museum of Australia, Canberra (Australia) 1–2 – Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters 1–2, 6, 16 National Museum of Colombia, Bogotá (Colombia) 15, 18, 207–217 – Glasshouses: Human Diversity and Paul Rivet 207–217 nationalism, nationalistic, nationalist 2, 178, 224, 289–290, 322 Nazism 120, 126, 211, 224 new museology 4–5, 27, 30, 67, 90, 210 New Zealand (Aotearoa me te Pounamu) 3, 16–18, 135, 167–184 New Zealand Wars 17, 169–184 Newman, Mirela 277 Nielssen, Hilde Wallem 190–191, 194, 200 Norway 3, 17–18, 45–61, 187, 190 Novaro, Marcos 274 O’Regan, Tipene. 177 object (museums, exhibited) 4–5, 8, 25–36, 39, 41–43, 48, 52, 57–58, 67–69, 71, 75–77, 80–81, 83, 88–91, 97–99, 102, 118–119,

350

Index

133–146, 153, 157–162, 168, 171–173, 176–183, 187–191, 195–202, 209–210, 212, 215, 217, 246–247, 256–257, 262, 270, 290, 292, 294, 296, 298–300, 328 see also artifacts (museums) Oklahoma City National Memorial and Museum (OKC), Oklahoma City (USA) 228–230, 233 Onciul, Bryony 201 open-ended (narrative, plot) 80, 89, 91, 172 oral history 181–182, 207 oral tradition 171, 193 orientalism 295 Orsini, Carolina 147 Oslo Jewish Museum (Norway) 45–49, 60 – Remember Us Unto Life – Jews in Norway 1940–45 46–60 Palermo, Vicente 274 Pandhal, Hardeep 137 participation / participatory (museum) 15, 29, 67–68, 73, 90, 99, 155–156, 213, 246–247, 249, 300, 304, 307–308 Partisan Fighter Monument, Podgorica (Montenegro) 299–300 Parzinger, Hermann 66 past, present, and future 10, 14, 20, 70, 211, 290, 321 see also temporality, temporalization and pluritemporality, pluritemporal performativity, performative 6, 14–15, 18, 20, 28, 247–248, 250, 253, 256–258, 260–261, 290, 296–299 performing (heritage / museum) 15, 27, 289, 296, 299–300 perpetrator 17, 28, 85, 87, 122–123, 223, 226, 228, 230–231, 238, 268–269, 321, 325 persecution 45–46, 54–55, 6, 198, 255 Plain, Gill 83 pluritemporality, pluritemporal 11, 65, 67, 70–73 Poland 3, 319, 326, 328, 331–333 Popivoda, Marta 294 positionality 5, 133 post-critique, post-critical 131, 133 postcolonialism, postcolonial 66, 90, 142, 151, 154–157, 169 postmodernism, postmodernity, postmodern 28, 90, 152, 298

preservation [museum artifacts / authentic space] 136, 160, 208, 304, 306, 317 prisoner 28, 38–39, 269, 273, 328 – of war 71 Pupovac, Tihana 295 race 19, 25–26, 32, 34, 39–40, 211, 215, 224, 227, 229, 232, 234, 237, 249 racism 34, 40, 131, 142, 147, 211, 214–215, 221–222, 228, 234, 237 Radonić, Ljiljana 318, 325 Raggio, Sandra 269 Ralph Appelbaum Associates (RAA) 31, 40–41 rape 38 Ravelli, Louise J. 79, 89 readability 77, 89–91 reconciliation 17, 30, 39, 146, 168, 170, 175, 182, 188, 223–226, 228, 231–232, 236–237 redress 2–3, 18–19, 133, 153, 156, 235, 238 reenactment 7, 12 refugee 8–11, 71, 208 Refugee Museum of Denmark, Oksbøl (Denmark) 8–11 remembrance 110, 169–170, 174–177, 184, 298, 303–315 – collective 304, 308, 310, 314 – community 36, 182 – critical 177 – future 45 – historical 170, 174 – Holocaust 46, 60 – of colonization 167 – official 306 – public 169–170, 306 – spatial 313 – transnational 289 repair (social) 1, 3, 15, 17–20, 131, 133–137, 139, 142–143, 146–147, 226, 245, 247–249, 258–262 reparation 25, 142, 146, 238 reparative (reading) 15, 19, 131, 133–134, 136, 143, 145–146 repatriation, repatriate 1, 146, 151, 157, 161–162, 168, 171, 224 Requejo, Dolores 119, 125 resilience (human) 11, 32, 34, 101, 223, 226–228, 233–236, 238, 306, 308, 315

Index

resilience (narrative) 3, 14, 317, 319, 323, 325, 330–331 resistance 10, 32, 52, 61, 118, 142, 146, 169, 212, 217, 223, 227, 234–236, 238, 248–249, 292, 319–320, 325, 329, 332 restitution 19, 66, 162, 168, 223, 230–232 restorative justice 19, 230–232 restorative (rhetoric) 223, 226, 234–236, 238 revisionism 293, 313 RiddoDuottarMuseat-Sámiid Vuorká-Dávvirat (SVD), Karasjok (Norway) 190, 193, 196 Rohingya 12–14 Roppola, Tiina 79 Rose, Hanahiva 180 Rose, Julia 277, 284 Ross, Angus 146 Roth, Marty 80, 82 Roundtable of Santiago de Chile 210 rupture 18, 20, 131, 147, 225–226, 236, 238, 245, 249–250, 262 Russia 187 Ryan, Marie-Laure 97–99 Sacco, Joe 7–8, 12 Salem Witch Museum, Salem (USA) 11, 15, 277–287 Sámi 17, 187–188, 190–204 San 158–159 Sather-Wagstaff, Joy 5 scapegoat, scapegoating 3, 10–11, 15, 279, 282, 284, 286–287 scenography, scenographic (museum representation) 1–2, 4, 6–7, 48, 57, 78, 100, 117, 293, 324, 328 Schaeffer, Jean-Marie 97–98, 238 Schafer, Murray R. 115, 119 Schützeichel, Rainer 98 Scotland 3, 19, 131–135, 137–138, 146, 283 Second World War 14, 28, 46, 61, 71, 140, 168, 178, 214, 286, 290–291, 296, 317–334 Seigworth, Gregory 249 Semu, Greg 178 sense, senses, sensuous (museum representation) 5, 79, 115–117, 247, 298, 300, 310 see also multisensory / multisensorial Serrell, Beverly 106

351

settler (colonial) 16–17, 146, 156, 169, 175, 221 see also colonialism, colonial, colonization Shalev-Gerz, Esther 299 Shelton, Anthony 5 Shepherd, Michael 178 Siddi, Marco 321–322 Sieg, Katrin 66 Siege of Sarajevo 11, 303–315 Simon, Nina 67–68 Simon, Roger I. 3, 14–15 slavery 10, 18, 25–26, 32–36, 38–39, 41–43, 131–133, 222, 226–227 see also enslavement Slovak National Uprising 10, 115–125 Slovakia 118, 120, 123 Snarby, Irene 195 socialism, socialist 118, 290, 292, 295–296 solidarity 18, 208, 306 sound (museum design / installation) 10, 16, 41, 51–52, 115–117, 119–126, 159, 234, 250–251, 253, 260, 273, 281, 283, 307, 331–332 soundscape (museum representation) 10, 78, 115, 119, 121, 123, 125 South Africa 3, 156, 158, 160, 231 South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission 231, 236 sovereignty 17, 169, 171, 173, 177 Soviet Union 290, 292, 328, 333 space, narrative (also spatial narrative) 97, 99–100, 106, 112, 175, 200, 245–248, 250, 259, 261 space, spatial (spatial dimension of museum representation) 8, 11, 13, 19–20, 45, 52, 97, 99, 123, 126, 139, 141, 173, 176–181, 183, 200, 275, 307, 310, 312–313, 315, 330, 334–335 spirituality, spiritual 153, 159, 162, 171, 194–196, 200, 258–259, 278 stereotype(s) 8, 13, 200, 203, 217 Stevenson, Bryan 25, 35–36, 236 Stills Photographic Gallery, Edinburgh (Scotland) 141 Stone, Philip R. 277 storyboard 260 storyline 12, 173, 332–333 storytelling 1–2, 4–8, 11–15, 20, 41, 67, 95–100, 107, 112–113, 159, 168, 173, 175–176, 178, 188, 202, 247, 279, 282, 287 – agonistic 5

352

Index

– critical 4, 45 – decolonial 15 – digital 5, 8, 12, 75, 119 – engaged 279 – experiential 28 – fictional 4, 11, 75–76, 85 – immersive 6, 11, 14, 16, 20, 97, 106–108, 112, 279 – indigenous see indigenous storytelling – multiperspectival 4, 12 – object-based 176 – oral 202 – performative 28 – pluritemporal 72–73 – visual 313 storyworld 5, 8, 11, 14 Sturken, Marita 28, 36, 38, 43 survivance 224 survivor (of genocide/atrocities/violence) 12, 48, 54, 56–57, 225, 228, 258, 265–267, 270, 272–275, 311, 313 Táíwò, Olúfémi 154–155 Tāmaki Paenga Hira Auckland War Memorial Museum, Auckland (New Zealand) 17–18, 167–184 Tamhane, Swapnaa 131, 144–146 Te Papa Tongarewa Museum of New Zealand, Wellington (New Zealand) 169 technology (museum/exhibition design) 4, 6–12, 20, 27–28, 30, 35, 40–41, 115, 118, 125, 178, 279, 317 temporality, temporalization 4–6, 8, 10–11, 15, 17, 20–21, 25, 39, 41, 49–51, 54, 61, 70, 124, 126, 266, 269, 274, 321, 331 see also past, present, and future and pluritemporality, pluritemporal testimony, testimonial 14, 41, 48, 52–56, 83, 137, 198, 227–228, 265–275, 325 – judicial 269, 274 textile (art) 132, 134, 138, 140, 142 Than-Nguyen, Viet 311 Thiemeyer, Thomas 99, 117–118 Thiepval Museum of the Historial de la Grande Guerre (France) 6–7, 10 Tjanpi Desert Weavers 2

tourism, tourist 4, 39, 59, 117, 261, 277–278, 280, 282, 291, 306–307, 309, 311, 313 – heritage 295 see also dark tourism touristification 310 Transatlantic Slave Trade 32, 41 transnational 3, 14, 19–20, 132, 138, 141, 176, 289, 321–322, 328, 330, 333–334 trauma, traumatic 10–11, 16–20, 45, 101, 136, 142, 151, 169, 172–174, 176, 183, 221–223, 225–226, 230–232, 236, 238–239, 248–249, 266, 300, 303, 305–306, 308, 315 truth, truth-telling 17, 19, 25, 28, 39, 50, 86, 115–116, 155, 175, 188, 223–227, 230–232, 236–238, 248, 265, 267–269, 274 Tunnel of Hope (also known as the Sarajevo Tunnel), Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) 304–305 Tuol Sleng Genocide Center, Phnom Penh (Cambodia) 28 Ukraine 306, 326, 332 Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews in World War II, Markowa (Poland) 326–327 UNESCO 155 – World Heritage 262, 268 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Washington, DC (USA) 12–13, 28, 31, 318 – Burma’s Path to Genocide 12–13 unlearning 252 USA (United States of America, U.S.) 3, 10, 18, 26, 34, 36, 38–41, 43, 221–222, 226–227, 229–230 V&A Dundee, Dundee (United Kingdom) 18, 131–132, 134–137, 144–145, 147 Vergo, Peter 4, 27, 30, 210 victim, victimized, victimhood 14, 17–18, 40, 49, 53, 55, 58, 71, 79–80, 82–88, 120, 122–123, 152–153, 174, 223, 228, 231–232, 235, 265, 268–269, 273–275, 284, 291, 308–309, 321, 325–327, 332 Victoria & Albert Museum, London (United Kingdom) 294 video (in exhibitions / museums) 12, 15, 35–36, 38, 53–55, 84, 101, 118, 120–121, 216,

Index

227–228, 234, 236, 272–273, 295, 299, 331–334 violence 2, 10, 12, 17–19, 27–28, 32, 35–36, 39–40, 45, 132, 136, 145–146, 167–168, 170, 173–174, 176, 183, 207, 210, 212, 215, 221–222, 226–228, 233, 248, 252–253, 258, 260, 269, 272, 283, 321, 332 Violi, Patrizia 274 visitor (museum), transformed 10, 27 see also agency, visitor visitor emotions 4, 6, 10 see also emotion, emotional (museum narrative / representation) visitor engagement (also to engage visitors) 5, 8, 10, 13, 15, 38, 45–46, 55, 57–59, 67, 75, 118, 195, 202–203, 207, 230, 236, 245–248, 252–253, 256, 277, 285–286, 314 visitor evaluation 95, 107, 112 visitor survey 50, 287 visitor studies 90 visual (museum representation) 7, 17, 57, 80, 115–116, 119–121, 124–126, 142, 146, 159, 173, 176, 200, 233, 259–260, 270, 280, 287, 292, 312–314, 333 visualize 101, 159, 197 Vujanović, Ana 294 Vultur, Ioana 97–98 Wampanoag 221–222, 226 War Childhood Museum, Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) 306 weave, weaving 2, 139, 167, 172, 195

353

Weinberg, Jeshajahu 318–319, 324 West Virginia Mine Wars Museum, Matewan (USA) 224 whispers / whispering (sound museums) 123–126 Whiteread, Rachel 311 Whittle, Alberta 19, 131, 137–143 Wilkens, Robert L. 29 Wilson, Rodney 178 Winter, Jay 115, 168, 174, 176 witchcraft / witchcraft trials 277–287 Witchcraft Suppression Act 153 Witcomb, Andrea 6, 14, 58, 183 withholding, displayed 17, 200–203 witnessing, witness 3–4, 12, 35, 54, 82, 100, 137, 247, 268–274, 306, 312–313 Wolf, Werner 96 Yad Vashem: The World Holocaust Remembrance Center, Jerusalem (Israel) 326–327 Young, Rose 178 Yugoslavia 289–300, 307, 328 Zavadski, Andrei 69 Ziibiwing Center for Anishinaabe Culture and Lifeways, Mount Pleasant (USA) 16–17 – Diba Jimooyuung (Telling our Story) 16 Zimbabwe 3, 141, 153, 156–158, 161–162 Zimbabwe Museum of Human Sciences, Harare (Zimbabwe) 157