Paper short abstract:

The architectural heritage of the Icelandic turf house was rejected and consequently eradicated. In this paper I will critically discuss the care museums have for the fragments of these houses.

Paper long abstract:

Preservation and care of the architectural heritage of Iceland is best described as difficult. On the one hand, the architectural heritage of the turf house was rejected on the basis of modernist dogma, and consequently it was violently eradicated. As a result, only a handful of turf houses still remain, the majority of them safeguarded by museums. On the other, museums and heritage advocates have strived to salvage architectural remains with limited resources and an epistemology of hope. In this paper I will discuss these contrasting movements with ethnographic examples from the museum scene in Iceland. In particular, I will examine architectural fragments of turf houses that have become part of museum collections but, as fragments, their performative truths as artifacts for research and/or display is materially limited. The fragments display resilience to notions of collective truths and responsibility, but at the same time reveal contestation and paradoxes in heritage preservation and care of cultural understanding. This paper is based on a long term research on the histories of turf house eradication and preservation technologies between 1850-2022.