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Contribution short abstract:

Queer history is not necessarily preserved in museum collections or in the form of objects. Through displaying mundane fragments and applying creative means lost queer cultural heritage can be brought to life and the contemporary museum visitor invited to engage with the affective queer past.

Contribution long abstract:

Queer cultural heritage has been described as fragmented and affective. In this presentation I ask what queer cultural heritage is, and what strategies were applied to present and engage with queer history in a recent museum exhibition. According to gender studies scholar Ann Cvetkovich (2003) a queer archive is a “repository of feelings”. Since there often is a lack of objects representing queer, exhibitions may display objects as symbols for those feelings, and typically tend to involve a lot of text. Same can be of course said of many contemporary phenomena. With queer, however, there is a “queer desire for history” resulting from queer being stigmatised, vilified, and illegal throughout history, as well as the loss of queer elders during the AIDS pandemic in the 1980s. Cultural heritage can be considered an active process of expressing values and engaging with past. How can this be achieved in the absence of existing material: How might one exhibit queer pasts that no longer exist? In the exhibition “M/S Baltic Queers: Experiences of LGBTQAI+ Migration” at the Helsinki City Museum the issue of queer migration in the Baltic Sea region during 1950s–1990s was addressed. The exhibition comprised of related fragments, including travel documents, correspondence, and photographic material, as well as artworks created specifically for the exhibition. Through these affective fragments and creative means the exhibition managed to bring lost queer cultural heritage to life and invite the contemporary museum visitor to engage with the affective queer past.