“Placing” Europe in the Museum Books “Placing” Europe in the Museum People(s), places, identities edited by Christopher Whitehead, Rhiannon Mason, Susannah Eckersley and Katherine Lloyd Books 4 — mela project: “placing” europe in the museum mela books 08 – rf01 museums & identity in history and contemporaneity Published by Politecnico di Milano © March 2013, The Authors This work is provided on line as open access document under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported. The work is protected by copyright and/or other applicable law. Any use of the work other than as authorized under this license or copyright law is prohibited. For additional information http://creativecom- mons.org/. isbn 978-88-95194-35-6 This Book ensued from the Research Project MeLa - European Museums in an Age of Mi- gration funded within the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (SSH-2010- 5.2.2) under Grant Agreement n° 266757. Project Officer: Louisa Anastopoulou mela consortium Politecnico di Milano (Coordinator), Italy – Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design, Denmark – Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche ITIA, Italy – University of Glasgow, United Kingdom – Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona, Spain – Muséum National d’Histoire Naturelle, France – The Royal College of Art, United Kingdom – Newcastle University, United Kingdom – Università degli Studi di Napoli “L’ Orientale,” Italy. www.mela-project.eu graphic design Zetalab — Milano layout Cristina F. Colombo legal notice The views expressed here are the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the European Commission. mela project: “placing” europe in the museum — 5 Table of contents 7 Acknowledgements 09 Introduction 15 “Placing” Europe in the Museum: people(s), places, identities 17 Museums as Validity Claims: Trans-national Memory and the European Public Sphere Michal Luczewski, Tomasz Maślanka 35 Europe’s History Museums: Houses of Doom? Central Europe museums and the van- ishing dream of a unified European memory Christine Cadot 45 Contested Borders: Representing boundaries within Moldovan museums Roxana Adina Huma 61 The Challenge of “Displaying Europe”: Experiences of the Museum Europäischer Kul- turen: Staatliche Museen zu Berlin Elisabeth Tietmeyer 75 “Today as yesterday, endlessly rocking, ever bringing the same human passions, the same joys and sorrow”: Displaying “others” in Berlin Barış Ülker 87 My Tyneside: Stories of Belonging: Developing a new permanent migration gallery at Discovery Museum in Newcastle upon Tyne Kylea Little 95 “Placing” the City within its Museum: The relationship between heritage, people, and territory in the Italian tradition of civic museums Francesca Lanz 6 — mela project: “placing” europe in the museum 113 Tales of Migration and Mobility: Storytelling through design Michelle Moore 129 Targeting the “I” in “Identity”: A Paradigmatic Shift in Curating? Sonja Kmec 141 Index of Authors 147 Illustration Credits mela project: “placing” europe in the museum — 7 Acknowledgments This book represents the proceedings of the conference“Placing” Europe in the Museum: people(s), places, identities held at Newcastle University in September 2012. The conference was organised in the context of Re- search Field 01 “Museums & Identity in History and Contemporane- ity” led by Professor Chris Whitehead at Newcastle University within the European project MeLa-European Museums in an age of migrations. MeLa is a four-year interdisciplinary research project funded in 2011 by the European Commission under the Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities Programme (Seventh Framework Programme). Adopting the notion of “migration” as a paradigm of the contemporary global and multicultural world, MeLa reflects on the role of museums and heritage in the twenty-first century. The main objective of the MeLa project is to define innovative museum practices that reflect the challenges of the con- temporary processes of globalisation, mobility and migration. As people, objects, knowledge and information move at increasingly high rates, a sharper awareness of an inclusive European identity is needed to facili- tate mutual understanding and social cohesion. MeLa aims at empower- ing museums spaces, practices and policies with the task of building this identity. MeLa involves nine European partners—universities, museums, research institutes and a company—who will lead six Research Fields (RFs) with a collaborative approach. The purpose of this book is to report on the themes debated at the conference. Introduction 10 — mela project: “placing” europe in the museum mela project: “placing” europe in the museum — 11 Introduction The imperatives surrounding the museum representation of place have shifted from the late eighteenth century to today. This is in part because the political significance of place itself has changed and continues to change at all scales, from local, civic, regional to national and suprana- tional. At the same time, recognition of changes in population flows, migration patterns and demographic movement now underscore both cultural and political practice, be it in the accommodation of “diversity” in cultural and social policy, scholarly explorations of hybridity or in state immigration controls. These issues, taken historically, have particular sig- nificance for contemporary understandings of the role of place in indi- vidual, collective and state notions of society in the EU, in member states and in other European countries. How do European museums present societies as bound to, or enabled by, place and places? Or as having roots in places and/or taking routes from, to and through places? What car- tographical groupings, borders, knowledges (e.g. archaeological, ethno- graphic etc.) and traversals order and organise populations into societies in the museum? What is the metaphorical “place” of place in European museums now, what does this say about identities? To invert these questions, we might ask what happens or what can hap- pen, when the “peoples” and “places” implicated in, and at least to some extent constructed in, museum representation shift, change, multiply, fragment and/or move? What happens when the museum desire for fix- ity is disrupted by new sensibilities towards population flows, multiple heritages and the shifting territories of geopolitical places? Should mu- seums’ representational practices change? If so how? What are the new dimensions of identity construction and production in museums whose physical place is fixed, but whose audiences, with their changing heritages previous page — and cultures, are not? Last but not least, what are the implications of such Destination X, Museum questions and issues for practice (curatorial, political, architectural etc.) of World Cultures, and for visitors and visiting? Gothenburg. 12 — mela project: “placing” europe in the museum This short volume comprises a number of situated reflections on these questions and themes and represents the proceedings of the international conference “Placing” Europe in the Museum: people(s), places, identities, held at Newcastle University in September 2012. This was the first in a series of events intended to complement and inform research within the MeLa consortium (http://www.mela-project.eu/). The papers published here represent a range of perspectives, practices and places. Extending and enriching Habermasian ideas of the communicative action in the public sphere, Luczewski and Maslanka contrast sites of memory (such as museums and heritage sites) in Germany and Poland. The authors attend to the complexities of representing national identity positions and alterity while remembering difficult histories pertaining to the effects and experiences of Nazism and Communism. Luczewski and Maslanka’s paper is in dialogue with Cadot’s essay on the place of mu- seums within the grand narration of the history of the European Union, and in particular the disruptive significance of Central and Eastern Eu- ropean countries as “ghosts” within the narrative of freedom and progress. Meanwhile, Adina Huma’s exploration of an Eastern European state cur- rently outwith the European Union—Moldova—illustrates the complex role of museums in positioning borders and recasting the geographical spaces for nationing and nationalism. Tietmeyer gives a curator’s account of the tensions which arise when seeking to represent European culture through stories of cultural en- counter, which force questions around the maintenance of entrenched identities and the assimilation of others. In a related account of similar tensions Ülker explores the play of tolerance and intolerance in politi- cal discourse and museum representations of immigrant communities in Germany, such as the Turkish guestworker labour force and their de- scendants. The paper draws on and contributes to a significant debate on notions of tolerance led by scholars like Wendy Brown and Slavoj Žižek, and problematises tolerance as an ideal and as a practise which perpetu- ates power relationships between the majority community and its others. Little reflects here on the development of a new permanent gallery—The Making of Modern Tyneside—at Newcastle upon Tyne’s Discovery Mu- seum, situated in the North East of England. Tyneside is a place with a significant population of migrants and descendants of migrants, but this is not well known or represented. Moreover, according to one survey negative feelings towards Black and Minority Ethnic (BME) groups are reportedly higher