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Paper short abstract:

This paper analyzes the role of personal memories of repression in the museum exhibition “Ingrians – The Forgotten Finns”. It explores the potentials and challenges related to heritagization of difficult memories and discusses the role of personal experiences in contemporary strategies of memory, heritage, and history making more generally.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyzes the role of personal memories of repression in the museum exhibition “Ingrians – The Forgotten Finns” held at the national museum of Finland in 2020 from the perspective of heritage making. Ingrians or Ingrian Finns are a Finnish-speaking historical minority of Russia and the Soviet Union. During the 20th century, Ingrian Finns experienced multiple forced and voluntary migrations, including mass deportations and voluntary transitions within the Soviet Union as well as migrations abroad. As an exhibition explicitly aiming at raising awareness amidst the Finnish audience about Ingrian Finns and their status as part of the Finnish people, the museum exhibition focused especially on the history of Stalinist repressions, and its consequences by making use of historical information, material heritage, and most importantly, by remediating personal narratives of people of different ages with Ingrian identities. Visually, the exhibition space was dominated by photographs that presented landscapes in Siberia and portraits of individuals whose personal experiences were included in the setting. Interestingly, personal experiences of the exhibition’s creators Lea and Santeri Pakkanen were also included. In fact, they operated as the exhibition’s meta-narrative. By critically engaging with the exhibition as a project in which personal memories were relegated to the sphere of national and public memory in Finland, this paper explores the potentials and challenges related to these kinds of heritagization processes and discusses the role of personal experiences in contemporary strategies of memory, heritage, and history making more generally.