Remember us To Life – Vulnerable Memories in a Prospective Monument, Memorial and Museum
The aim of my research is to investigate three commemorative projects that are currently under development in Sweden: A Holocaust museum, a monument over Swedish colonialization and a memorial for the victims of a murderer with racist motifs. I suggest that these three projects can be read as an engagement with an unhealed wound. This enables an investigation of how vulnerability is connected to questions of commemoration, cultural heritage and public space.
The three projects are very different in terms of scale, temporality and commissioner but can be understood in a common framework of how a society deals with the memory of vulnerable lives in public commemorations. Central aspects are that I follow the processes of development rather than, in retrospect, assess their result and that the proposed project consists of an empirical part and a critical evaluation of the three projects and the chosen theoretical frame.
The project addresses how contemporary discussions of public commemoration can be understood in relation to notions of vulnerability and grievability, the role of the commissioner, how future practices of commemoration can be sensible to a variety of aesthetic expressions, voices and experiences and how these commemorative projects can be considered as a form of ethical response to the past, theoretically as well as in relation to the current demands of the protests Black Lives Matter and in how cultural heritage is defined.