Paper short abstract:

To participate, yes – but in what? The lecture presents a project that takes a museum as its starting point, but understands it as an actor of more fundamental concerns than participation. What interests a place of rapid change? What stories of relevance can be told with it and for its inhabitants?

Paper long abstract:

Participation in cultural heritage and by relevant institutions is a declared goal of contemporary cultural policy that is hardly ever questioned in public. But what if there is none with relevance for the society concerned? Respectively what heritage is of interest to local civil society if it has few ties to the place and has little to do with its past?

The lecture presents a project located in the agglomeration of Zurich, a place that has changed dramatically in several waves in the post-war period. In the last fifteen years, it has undergone an unprecedented post-industrial transformation; economic and structural change has been accompanied by growth and an exchange of population through diverse forms of migration. In the midst of all this, there is a traditional museum, whose presentations depict a distant local past but stays quite invisible. Our project proposes to create a real life-laboratory at and with this museum, in which not only relevant objects and narrations are sighted and collected, but also the question of the possibilities of participation is raised. Can such a museum today still contribute to developing a sense of belonging? And can kind of a new cultural heritage emerge through participation, which perhaps no longer has much to do with its traditional local shape?

The lecture explores the challenges of ethnographic museum studies using participatory experimental arrangements. It investigates the necessity of expanding museum methods and seeks to discuss first proposals for creating socially relevant local memories in fluid social and spatial figurations.