Institutionalizing Contested Contemporary: The Swedish Museum of Movements

Museums traditionally are serving for the societies as regulators of what to remember and what to forget. In recent decades a transition from collections and objects to the memories and narratives in the museum world became more and more apparent and the focus has shifted to multiple representations, empowerment of communities, and appeal to the audience's empathy and emotional engagement. In the 21^st century, the advocacy of human rights within the museum sector becomes particularly visible, as many museums turn their attention to the problems of colonial history, mass atrocities, and political activism; which, in turn, engenders tensions and contestations in political discourse.

My research focuses on the museum project in the Southern Swedish city of Malmö. The Museum of Movements was initially introduced in 2016 as a National Museum for Democracy and Migration. The project aimed to address a broad specter of subjects, including migration, human rights, popular movements, and civil society-based activism. Conceived in the midst of the so-called "refugee crisis" and in the atmosphere of rising polarization within Swedish society, the Museum of Movements was opened as a small project space in 2019-2020, with the promise to become a full-scale institution in five to six years.

However, despite the abundant program of events, emerging collaborations with civil society, and diverse communities, the project was cut off funding in Autumn 2020. The window of opportunity for the productive dialogue about contemporary "difficult issues" has closed.  In this paper, I will employ the concepts of agonistic memory (Bull & Hansen, 2016) and memory-activism nexus (Rigney, 2018) to investigate the contexts and the reasonings behind this museum (un)making process.

References: Bull, A. C., & Hansen, H. L. (2016). On agonistic memory. Memory Studies, 9(4), 390–404. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698015615935

Rigney, A. (2018). Remembering Hope: Transnational activism beyond the traumatic. Memory Studies, 11(3), 368–380. https://doi.org/10.1177/1750698018771869