Paper short abstract:

This paper considers what the construction of difficult heritage in museums about communist atrocities do in corporeal, sensorial or emotional terms: how they actively use the physicality of space and objects to affect and engage visitors through the full range of bodily senses.

Paper long abstract:

The memorial museum is a museum founded on sights or scenes where past human rights abuse, crimes against humanity, war crimes, or genocide was committed. They consist of physical spaces that are places of mourning, and in some cases healing, for victims and survivors. This contemporary, global museological practice is related to the idea that efforts to collectively remember past human rights abuse and atrocity can contribute to a more democratic, peaceful, and just future. They confront the legacies of atrocity by using material representations of the past to teach lessons about democratic citizenship and human rights. Thus scenes of crime transformed to public memorials have become sites of conscience and tools of human rights education in the broadest sense, where the affective power of the space is considered. Drawing on examples from post-conflict memorial museums in Hungary, Lithuania, and Romania, I examine the importance of space and spatial effects in the museum experience. The memorial space is analyzed as a kind of metonymic contact point which stands for the physical, sensory experiences of the bodies that are absent. Memorial museums actively use the physicality that engages visitors through the full range of bodily senses. Thus, memory is a product of people's active engagement with the past, not least in structured ritual spaces within which visitors engage in carefully choreographed ritual practices of mourning and memory.