The early modern and renaissance cabinets of curiosities in rich homes across Europe gave life to modern institutional museums. Today, fascinated by the poetics of the ordinary and equipped with a memory studies lens, we observe our own familiar bookshelves and cupboards – these new cabinets of curiosities – filled with cheap souvenirs, postcards and family photographs; we bring the museum circle back home. This proposal aims to outline and illustrate the phenomenon of creating a dedicated home space for memory making and examine how the normative discourses about curating such spaces manifest themselves in routine private memory-making practices.
I propose to conceptualize sets of memory objects displayed and archived at homes of ordinary people as home museums. The inherent, but often inadvertent intention of curating a home museum implies preservation and potential sharing of memories about selected life events. An average home museum holds a photo album, a scrapbook, grandmother's sewing machine, a train ticket from a memorable trip, a sea shell, travel journals, several postcards, a 3rd grade math notebook, a teddy bear, etc. Although the owners of such collections often do not consider them as museums, their functions speak for themselves: preserving, exhibiting, voicing and celebrating (hi)stories. Home museums create, organize and illustrate narratives of one's personal or family story. They can be curated by one person or collectively.
Objects of memory are put on shelves, often placed in front of the books, they are stored in (shoe)boxes, pinned to cork boards, framed and hung on walls, filed and archived in albums, etc. Normative discourses on memory making have been for centuries inconspicuously present in a variety of forms: home-making recommendations, ethical homilies, political doctrines, traditions, "common sense", films, novels, songs etc. Although most XX century sources are mute about overt memory making, they allow to learn about it implicitly. However, since the early 2000s more media address the issues of memory making explicitly. While scholars reflect upon the "affective turn" and "memory boom", the mass market responds with numerous books, magazine articles and blogs, which offer practical advice on how to select objects for "memory boxes", organize digital and printed photographs, curate souvenir shelves and display cases, and keep the family archive in order.
Familiar practices start to be interpreted differently. The process of assembling a photo album would not have been seen as active memory making by those who performed it some 50 years ago – they were "merely" putting the photographs into a book form. Now, they may be consciously creating a memory object, even though they doubt the necessity for the existence of memory-making manuals and ridicule the self-evident advice that they provide. It always takes an effort of observation for a home museum to emerge conceptually, though less an effort to be assembled. The more media products cover memory making explicitly, the less inadvertent the routines become.
