Paper short abstract:

This paper is part of a larger research project investigating how economic realities and new public management affect how museums hone their collections for the future. It will show how museum rejects invite communities and financial stakeholders to preserve outside museum institutions.

Paper long abstract:

Hip heritage: when the locals take it back.

New museums, old collections, and the trajectory of rejections.

This paper is part of a larger research project investigating how economic realities and new public management affect how museums of cultural history organize, manage and develop their operations. The larger project asks, "When the budget is tight, whose heritage counts most?" (Gradén & O'Dell 2019). This paper discusses what happens to objects, collections, and ideas rejected when museums shed their skin and focus on elite consumers and financially resourceful constituencies. Building on fieldwork in the American Pacific Northwest, this paper will show how such museum deaccessions and rejects are far from lost to oblivion. Instead, they engage communities, financial stakeholders, and preservationists outside museum institutions. As our examples will show, objects that a museum finds no longer interesting for the museum's future development can change hands and value (Thompson 2017). In the case we present, members of a local shipyard decide to take more significant pieces of a museum's core exhibition and object, which was no longer anything the museum had a place for and put it on display in new ways.

Gradén & O’Dell 2019. Hip Heritage and Heritage Pasts: Tensions when refashioning institutional culture. In: Karin Ekström (ed) Museum Marketization: Cultural Institutions in the Neoliberal Era. Pages 115-133: London: Routledge.

Thompson, Michael 2017 (1979). Rubbish Theory: the creation and destruction of value. New edition [Second edition] London: Pluto Press

Paper short abstract:

The collections at the Nordiska museet testifies of magic, practiced in Sweden up til the turn of the century 1900. This paper discusses ongoing attempts to revive this long dormant material, through analytical perspectives and curation, in awareness of the failures of anthropocentric modernity.

Paper long abstract:

Natural grown curved branches to cure sick children. Small bundles with animal bones, stones and other charged material. The collections at the Nordiska museet in Stockholm holds rich testimony of strong and popular belief in cure, protection, and other forms of active magic, practiced in different regions of Sweden around of the turn of the century 1900. Whereas the written and some visual material as well has been published in our scientific fields the material objects have usually remained dormant in storages. A possible explanation for this might be their dual cultural status as “objects and practices considered outdated or dangerous”.

The disenchantment of modernity (Weber) has recently been questioned by historians of religion (Asprem, Thurfjell) as well as eco-political theorists (Bennett), arguing both that magical thinking and practice never were totally erased and, for the latter, the potential of enchantment and vibrant materiality to interrupt anthropocentrism and cold rationality. Inspired by this, an ongoing research project (in collaboration with Flora Bartlett) at the Nordic Museum, explores “the forest in the archives and the forest as an archive” attempting also to break the long isolation of said material collections of folk beleif. Activating them, in curation and analysis, might put an end to the perfect imagination of Swedish secular modernity to allow instead comparison with global folk traditions. On display, such testimonies of old grown forests and of relation to their more-than-human agencies, might inspire comfort and courage to audiences having to deal with the growing loss of damaging forestry.

Paper short abstract:

The ethnographic collection preserved at the Lisbon Science Academy hosts, among other Amazonian objects, a bamboo tablet belonging to the Kambeba people. While museum’s curator decided not to put it on display, the original population considers it highly representative of its history and identity.

Paper long abstract:

The ethnographic collection preserved at the Science Academy of Lisbon hosts a wide range of Amazonian objects. Among them we find a bamboo tablet belonging to the Kambeba people of the Upper Solimões region that was used in the practice of cranial deformation. It was collected between 1783 and 1792 by Alexandre Rodrigues Ferreira, who found it appropriate to represent Kambeba’s monstrosity and alterity compared to European civilization. It is a materially very simple object, aesthetically quite insignificant. Probably for this reason, museum’s curators decided not to put it on display, using other objects to talk about Kambeba people instead. However, it is of great importance for the original population. The practice of cranial deformation occurred during the baptism of a child and represented his/her social birth. The whole ritual, called Kãnga Pewa (“flat head” in tupi nheengatu), was silenced during the colonial period because of discrimination and missionary persecution but is currently part of a broader process of cultural revitalization and ethnic emergence. Within it, the practice of cranial deformation is being reintroduced and interpreted as a symbol of existence and resistance of Kambeba people. Thus, also the objects which carry its memory are given a specific cultural and political meaning, proving to be highly representative of Kambeba people of the past, of the present and of the future.

Paper short abstract:

A popular way of thinking about natural history museums is as spaces that conserve and fix memories of the natural world. Here I argue that they do the opposite: the museum regularly destroys old memories to produce new ones. This is illustrated and problematised through select curatorial practises.

Paper long abstract:

A popular way of thinking about natural history museums is as spaces that conserve and fix memories of the natural world, material and immaterial. Closer inspection of museum practices however reveals that these museums also regularly do the opposite: old ways of ordering collections, names, species or knowledge are discarded for new ones.

Based on interviews with curators and ethnographic visits to the backstages of museums, I illustrate this process by looking at three curatorial practises: the spatial rearrangement of taxonomic groups, the digitisation of collections and the transfer of specimens from one type of container to another. While some elements of these memory objects are indeed conserved, a great amount of information and references are forever cut off, erased or forgotten, with no possibility to recover or rejoin them.

This aspect renders museums and their idea of natural history problematic: is natural history preserved and fixed, or rather reshuffled, reordered and reinvented? If the latter is the case, then what does and what should happen to the specimens and data that are discarded? Are there better and worse ways of grinding up memory?

Paper short abstract:

This paper transfers Gennep´s and Turner's concept of liminality to museum objects. Discussing the examples of the former Feuchtwanger mikveh and engraved stone slabs on the walls of the Franconian Museum Feuchtwangen, the paper provides new insights into processes of meaning making in museums.

Paper long abstract:

The former mikveh of Feuchtwangen is covered by the building of an historic forge in the garden of the Franconian Museum in Feuchtwangen. Eye-catching for the public however are engraved stones slabs from Feuchtwangen historic buildings which have been incorporated in the museum´s walls. Currently both the Feuchtwangen mikveh and a relief depicting Jerusalem on the exterior wall of the museum have attracted increased public interest. How shall these monuments be publicly discussed and exhibited in the future?

This paper investigates the particular role and uncertain futures (historic) building elements can have in museum collections and exhibitions, based on the example of the Franconian Museum in Feuchtwangen. How has the museum treated and classified these objects? What layers of meaning have been ascribed to them during their history?

In its analysis this paper transfers Gennep´s and Turner's concept of liminality to museum objects and their biographies. By conceptualizing them as objects in a liminal state, the paper highlights and explains the special role building elements can take in museum collections and exhibitions.

The liminal state of the objects discussed here is produced through certain practices, as this paper argues: The building elements, which have been (temporarily) immobile during their object biography, are once again put (on display) as immobile building elements in the current museum presentation, now in a new local and conceptual context. Being presented without protection by display cases and identification by object labels, the building elements are placed in a liminal state in relation to the museum collection and exhibition.

This paper discusses the effects and consequences of the liminal state of the objects on their perception and interpretation. It examines the ways (respectively rituals) for a possible change of state of these objects, as well as its consequences. Finally, the paper discusses potential future roles of these objects.

Paper short abstract:

By tracing the history and evolution of a museum dedicated to the composer Leopold Mozart, one aim of the paper is to discuss possible changes in the importance of all kinds of objects - and their fate. At the same time, it wants to point at the difficulties of such a research process.

Paper long abstract:

The paper attempts to sketch the history and evolution of a museum dedicated to Leopold Mozart (1719-1787) which is situated in the birthplace of that composer in Augsburg. During the roughly eight decades of its existence, not only the size, scope, and design of the permanent presentations varied, but also the affiliation of the museum to various municipal institutions. The paper tries to answer the following questions: What has been documented? To which extent is it possible to “reconstruct” past presentations? Which objects (original - period - pieces and replicas) have been on display? Which “props” have been used (display cases, museum banners, technical equipment, elements of exhibition design)? What happened to the objects on display and the “props” in the course of the years?

By posing these questions, the paper tries to outline the changing importance of objects which, of course, can be related to questions of scope, aesthetics, and didactics - from memorial space to a house museum equipped with period furniture and other goods, and, ultimately, to a museum that tries to illustrate the life and work of Leopold Mozart through different media, with an emphasis on his compositions. Yet, the information available is by no means sufficient to allow for a complete reconstruction of the various presentations. In fact, the case study wants to shed light on the challenges one may face during such research-processes in smaller museums without an archive or storeroom. In the end, researching past museum presentations is an exploration of the uncertain.

Paper short abstract:

While a consistent body of scholarship has analysed the ways in which socialism has been and is (re)presented in exhibitions, museums and memorials, the post-socialist biographies of the objects that populated the socialist propaganda exhibitions constituted a less explored field.

Paper long abstract:

The purpose of this presentation is to explore the complicated universe of material culture and museum practices circumscribed to objects symbolically disqualified after the collapse of the socialist system in Romania in the 90s and abandoned for a long period of time in an improvised ad-hoc warehouse in a museum in Bucharest (in conditions unsuitable for their optimal conservation but sufficient for maintaining a liminal horizon of in-betweenness). The National Museum of the Romanian Peasant in Bucharest was established in 1990 by restructuring and reorganizing the defunct Romanian Communist Party Museum, itself established through the dislocating of the Museum of Ethnography and National Art (dating from the interwar period). The permanent exhibition of the Romanian Communist Party Museum was violently dismantled at the beginning of 1990 and some of the objects that resisted this cleaning action were subjected to a decontamination and exorcism ritual led by a group from anti-communist intellectuals and artists and a few orthodox priests. One of these objects, a bust of Lenin fished out of a warehouse (closed during the period of anti-Soviet reorientation of the socialist system) was recycled (painted red) in an art installation, The Plague, intended to denounce the effects of the forced collectivization on the peasant universe. Another bust of Lenin is recently proposed by a team of researchers to be part of a European exhibition about garbage and this becomes an ethnographically documented micro-event dedicated to the multiple (mis)understandings that these objects incorporate and release periodically.

Paper short abstract:

Focusing on two local institutions in Czech Silesia, this ethnographic study explores a tension between the hegemonic narrative of essentialized Czechness and the grass-root Hlučín Museum's historical accounts of Silesian ‘Germanness’ and Silesian cultural hybridity and fluidity.

Paper long abstract:

There is a general agreement and widespread acceptance by the Czech majority population that the Czech Republic is a country of one language, one culture, one ethnicity, and one history. However, this hegemonic national narrative is being openly and systematically challenged by various social actors, who are employing diverse counter-narratives. In what follows, I present a fine-grained ethnographic study of a memory war between the hegemonic narrative of essentialized Czechness on one hand and vernacular counter-narratives of Silesian cultural hybridity and fluidity on the other, that are currently happening in the border region of Czech Silesia over its collective identity and cultural heritage. The first narrative is presented through my encounters with the work and views of academics at the provincial Silesian University in Opava. The bottom-up counter-narrative, depicted through my experience with the Hlučín Museum, represents its demotic counterpart. In particular, I explain how the hegemonic narrative, together with ‘methodological nationalism’ of Opavian academics leads to an overt promotion of homogenous Czech national identity and simultaneously also to a strong neglect of any traces of the pre-war German heritage. In the second case concerning the grass-root Hlučín Museum, I observed how local mnemonic actors, the Hlučíns, incorporate alternative historical accounts relating to Silesian ‘Germanness’ and to Silesian experiences of the Second World War into their museum exhibitions, treating it as Silesian ‘difficult heritage’.

Paper short abstract:

This paper uses Swedish and Swedish American archives to explore the relationship between cultural heritage archives and object collections. How might (in)significant objects and stories change how we research everyday life if material culture and paper archival are accessed together?

Paper long abstract:

In the fall of 2022, while researching at the Swedish Emigrant Institute, the nurse’s cap I found tucked into a box of letters, menus, and photos was relocated to the textile collection in the museum magazine. A later visit to the textile magazine, 15 minutes away by bus, revealed a sheaf of notes next to a collection of dresses that did not exist in the corresponding archival collection. In many institutions, items and documents like these have been sorted into specific categories for preservation, organization, and storage purposes. My research explores Swedish-American women's experience of migration and re-migration through the affective stories of household objects and clothing, topics long counted as insignificant in many of the collections I work in. Though collections are increasingly featured in exhibits in exhibits, the separation of objects and archives has often rendered them difficult to find and access together.

Approaching “insignificant stuff” through researching gender and women's history and folklore at the archival and museum divide, I explore the meaning of continuing boundaries between archives and material object collections in Swedish and Swedish American Archives. What types of materials move or get stuck between archives, museums, and libraries? What does it mean to study everyday life when linked object collections and paper archives are often stored separately? How do materials gain or lose significance through regular reordering in everyday practice? What significance may be found in reuniting objects and archives in everyday archival and curatorial practice in the face of financial or spatial uncertainty?

Paper short abstract:

Times of great uncertainty reshape the meaning-making process in museums. Using ethnographic research methods inside museums from Bucharest to understand the political framework of this process could bring to the fore the toolkits through which this process takes place.

Paper long abstract:

Meaning-making is a fluid process influenced by social and cultural factors. In times of great doubt, how the ones we live right now are, encountering a global energetic crisis and the echoes of the COVID-19 pandemic, museums could not remain unruffled. This paper aims to investigate how public and private museums from Bucharest, Romania, deal with resource scarcity. Furthermore, it seeks to investigate which are the ideologies that decide which material objects are worth being exposed and which should be desacralised and rendered as insignificant. I will use participant observation inside the museums, discourse analysis, and qualitative research to take a gander at the political framework that creates meaning inside the museums. Furthermore, I will integrate it into a larger regional tradition, considering the social history of these institutions in the late capitalism of Eastern Europe. Analysing how actors (curators, ethnographers, and public authorities) are in charge of building a specific visitor experience is crucial in understanding if the public function of the museum changed during these times of uncertainty.