Paper Short Abstract:

This paper explores themes of ghosts and grief as they emerge in museum documentation at the University of Aberdeen. The central argument is that museum documentation, though written, provides a powerful tool for the unwriting of the museum, troubling notions of privilege, hegemony and permanence.

Paper Abstract:

This paper seeks to add to the growing literatures in museum taphonomy and hauntology, drawing on the twin themes of ghosts and grief. Previously, I have argued that museums are both haunted and hauntological, and that to understand them as such offers a vision for a museum that is ethically engaged. Here, I contend that that most “written” part of a museum – it’s documentation – provides a powerful tool for it’s unwriting. The fragility and partiality of museum documentation demonstrates that the museum is, ultimately, a space of loss and impermanence.

The paper utilizes the documentary archive at the University of Aberdeen to explore the haunted, bereaved nature of museums. Between the fragments the archives hold, it considers what documentary ruins remain of the lost Archaeological Museum at King’s College, the never built Anatomical Museum of William Charlmers, and a collection of blank accession books, purchased in the 2010s, indicative, perhaps, of a “formal nostalgia” for an analogue utopia.

A key consequence of this hauntological nature is the implicit emergence of grief as central to museum operations. Once again drawing from the University of Aberdeen’s documentation, the paper identifies grief in both specific moments and in modes of operation. Museum documentation, as a temporal rupture between the has been and the not yet, is the most overt evidence of the nature of museums as material and political exercises in grief – tangible expressions of desolation at mortality and impermanence.