Short Abstract

In this workshop we ask how small-scale, affectively charged local memory-making/musealisation practices, so called vernacular, wild, commons or amateur museums, constitute claims for recognition as part of larger (& smaller) political movements, which they seek to transform, and are transformed by.

Long Abstract

Since the 1960s, museum democratisation efforts continued while lay-curators quietly built collections, founding amateur, vernacular, wild, and commons museums. Often labouring from the margins, the museumification or folkloristics practices of local enthusiasts have gained momentum worldwide. The wide ranging motives of collectors and curators deserve more attention. Often anxiety over the loss of a lived or imagined past drives the preservation of practices, knowledge, and objects. However, these local practices are also future orientated, as the collective process of knowledge production support community struggles. In the process of narrating their own past, marginalised groups can gain recognition and contest dominant narratives, but in doing so risk fixing self-constructed identities and reproducing or reinforcing ethnonational claims of exceptionalism and superiority.

In the spaces where emerging museums grow, what are the multidimensional processes that animate lay-curation? Who moves whom — collectors, curators, objects, practices or visitors? What emotions and affects motivate musealisation practices? What affects do lay-curators hope to provoke in visitors? In which ways do embodied and sensory encounters with exhibits and spaces differ from conventional museums? Who is included or excluded from knowledge production and therefore the resulting community of memory? The workshop will engage with these questions to explore the affective dynamics of curating and visiting commons museums and the entanglement of local "folkloring" with identity politics. We invite contributions from researchers, enthusiasts, practitioners and their networks to grapple with these questions and ponder together the material politics of collecting and displaying objects of community life.