Periodic Reporting for period 4 - GMM (Globalized Memorial Museums.Exhibiting Atrocities in the Era of Claims for Moral Universals)
Período documentado: 2024-03-01 hasta 2024-08-31
GMM examined 50 memorial museums dealing with
- the WWII period in the US, Israel, Europe, China, and Japan;
- recent genocides in Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia.
GMM’s global typology of memorial museums critically analyzed the concept of ‘universalization of the Holocaust’ and the notion that memorial museums constitute a globalized space of communication and negotiation. We found evidence of references to the Holocaust (museums) in all countries researched – albeit these references have often been appropriated for nationalist purposes and, thus, weaponized in strong contrast to the Holocaust museums they depict as role models. Against the backdrop of the current resurgence of nationalism and authoritarianism, the European Union’s identity crisis and the rise of non-democratic powers like Russia and China, GMM served the urgent need to scrutinize the benefits and risks involved in the ostensible ‘globalization of memory’.
Despite the pandemic, the GMM team visited and documented all 50 museums covered in the project, not only those devoted to the Holocaust, World War II and the genocides in Rwanda and Bosnia, but also other museums important for the contextualization of the museum landscape: the 9/11 Memorial Museum, the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo, the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia or the former clandestine detention center ESMA in Buenos Aires. For the forensic part of our project, we conducted participatory observation of forensic excavations in Treblinka, Poland, and of the archaeological search for the mass grave of 200 Jews murdered in 1945 in the Austrian town of Rechnitz.
We presented our results in 178 public lectures and published one monograph, two special issues (a third one is in review), an edited volume, 35 peer-reviewed journal articles and book chapters. One focus of our publications was on theoretical innovations such as the various forms and modalities of displaying violence specific to analyzed each museums and the media through which it is articulated (photographs, historical footage, presence of human remains on display), supplemented by a critical analysis of the violence of display, and of memorial museums as carriers of structural violence. Our articles offer a comparative perspective on the musealization in different countries, for example in Central and South Eastern Europe or in Japan and Germany. Other articles compare museum transformations within the same country over time, as we did for China, Japan, Poland, Bosnia or Croatia.
The head of the project is advising several Austrian ministries in matters of memory politics and musealization and gives lectures in schools. Teaching at universities, videos for social media, TV and radio reports disseminate the project research to a wider audience.
The dossier starts with questions regarding the history and role of the museum in the respective society, and its material structure. It also comprises all our innovative methodological knowledge: a novel categorization of museum objects, of photographs on display, and of voids/gaps in museums – informed by extensive readings and analysis of materials collected at the 50 museums. Based on in-depth analysis of human remains on display in museums and material practices around them, the project captures the specificity of things suspended between human remains and material objects, such as prosthesis, framed in the project as ‘atopic objects’. The investigation of museal strategies of exhibiting human remains, itself beyond the state of the art due to its comparative scale and scope, expanded beyond museums traditionally analyzed in this context (for instance, Rwanda) to include museums in China and Japan, where such investigation has not yet been performed. It is a groundbreaking contribution not only to the field of museum studies but also material culture studies and dead body studies.
Another categorization developed in the project pertains to missing, silenced or excluded topics, whose absence needs to be addressed with sensitivity to political, religious, and cultural realities foundational for each museum. We distinguished between politics of marginalization, othering, silencing, taboos, conspiracies of silence/noise, epistemic violence and absenting.
Our comparative results show that most museums today include individual proponents’ private photographs, biographies, biographical objects or testimonies – a trend that can be observed almost everywhere and is “downloaded” and appropriated for the respective national purposes in various ways.