Contribution short abstract:

The EURO2024 was a significant moment for Romanian immigrants in Germany. Through affective practices and collective memory one mundane object acquired by German Football Museum in Dortmund could help explaining how the Romanian minority is perceived in Germany and how curatorial agendas evolve.

Contribution long abstract:

Museums are par excellence spaces that are attentively designed depending on curatorial agendas. Allowing emotional encounters is not a trivial matter, since curators need to have the knowledge to conceive them (Varutti, 2021). There is valuable research investigating emotions in museums’ contexts (Smith et al., 2018; Price et al., 2021), but this field is still far from being thoroughly analysed in the scientific literature. This paper aims to investigate how German Football Museum in Dortmund seeks to create emotional encounters and the ways in which football evokes emotions and collective memory of the Romanian immigrants in Germany. The starting point is the letter left by the Romanian men’s national football team in the locker room of the Allianz Arena after their last match at EURO 2024 that was acquired by the museum immediately after the end of the tournament. Using affordances theory, I will explore what museum space and its material objects are affording to visitors (Bareither et al., 2021), trying to comprehend the curatorial agenda that guided the acquisition process of the letter and its impact on the Romanian minority within Germany. The attribution of value to football artefacts is a complex interplay of factors including, amongst others, emotional effect (Greenblatt, 2004). Through in-depth interviews with curators from the German Football Museum in Dortmund and Romanian immigrants and content analysis I intend to bring to the fore the narratives that became salient after the 2024 European Football Championship in regard to how the Romanian minority is perceived in Germany.