Paper short abstract:

Our paper analyses presentations of and identifications with scales of ‘home’ in European museums. It examines issues of object interpretation, the ‘exhibitionary complex’, emotional responses and dissonance, which are characterised by the challenging nature of home as both ‘everywhere and nowhere’.

Paper long abstract:

While making the concept of 'Europe' synonymous with ideas of 'home' may be seen as the utopian vision of both EU policy-makers and migrants alike, research from the project MeLa* European Museums in an Age of Migrations, indicates that identifications with these terms are significantly more nuanced, characterised by varieties of scaling, layering and oppositions.

Using 'home' primarily in the emotional sense of 'Heimat', a feeling of belonging to a place, a group of people, or a culture, rather than merely in the literal sense of a birthplace or a place of residence, this paper examines the scales of understandings of home as presented by European museums at different scales, which address issues of migration. It analyses a national museum, a regional museum and a city museum in relation to understandings of 'home' and identity in today's Europe. The paper therefore looks not only at scales of home in terms of the city/region/nation/Europe as a home, but also at questions arising from moving to a 'new home' from an 'old home', and the issue of 'lost' home(land)s. How do visitors and non-visitors of different backgrounds see their understandings of home reflected in the same museum? What objects are used to evoke or relate to ideas of home? And how are concepts of home interpreted and reflected both via individual objects, and within the 'exhibitionary complex' of the museum? What emotional responses (expected or otherwise) may be roused by these museum presentations and what dissonances are addressed or hidden in them?