Här och där på Stadsmuseet: grubblande guide till ett utställt Göteborg

• This is an analysis of museum techniques for representing spatial contexts and relations. The empirical example are six permanent, historical exhibitions – covering prehistory, the Vikings, The Middle ages, 17th century, 18th century, and 19th century – at the City Museum in Gothenburg, Sweden. The discussion is focused on the concepts “here” and “there”. “Here” – in the empirical example Gothenburg and its “predecessors” – refers to a delimitated, integrated totality that is the object of an exhibition. Numberless things is possible to say about the “real” version of this entity – so many people have lived here, so much has happened – and the construction of “here” is therefore the result from a narrow selection from all this. A number of questions are guiding the analysis. In the spatial dimension: how and where are the boarders around “here” drawn? What belongs to “here” and what does not? What are the principals for these demarcations? What is presented as characteristic for “here”? Of importance is the way “here” is populated in the exhibitions. How are the inhabitants depicted, what do they represent in terms of class, gender, occupational group and ethnicity and how are the relations and proportions between these categories presented? “There” – the second important concept in the study – is everything that is not here. “There” can be locally situated – e.g. the countryside surrounding a town like Gothenburg – or globally; as structures like colonialism or international political relations. What in the inexhaustible amount of potential there is represented and how it is related to “here”? The final ambition of the discussion is to say something about the complex of ideas that structures this representation of “here”, “there” and the relation between “here“ and “there”, and also to suggests some factors – of political, economic, cultural and social nature – that might influence and frame this complex. Even if the representational strategies in the different exhibitions are not exactly similar, the following could be said: Gothenburg City Museum puts relatively firm borders around its “here” (the prehistory exhibition is an exception from this and to some extent also the Viking exhibition) which makes it something rather exclusive and solitaire. No comparisons to other cities and town are made and few references are made to structural processes that have influenced also other town and cities. The boarders are also drawn in a way that tends to exclude manual labour and the working classes: the surrounding countryside, from which Gothenburg was highly depending, is hardly mentioned at all, and the presence of the suburbs, that mainly hosted the working classes, is discrete. This harmonises with the social principle of populating Gothenburg: people and groups living a life of wealth and social stability are overrepresented. So is also men – the life of women living in the city during the centuries is absent to a degree that must be called, to put it mildly, surprising. The overall image of Gothenburg is one of wealth, stability and progress. Class differences, class antagonism and poverty are played down. So are the recessions and setbacks of various kinds that are an important theme in the history of Gothenburg. The most important role of “there”, Gothenburg’s outside is twofold (the Middle age exhibition sometimes contradicts this general observation). It can be the domain, as in the Viking exhibition, where people from “here” develop their more positive and energetic potentials. Second, the outside delivers fine things to Gothenburg: fine and progressive ideas, fine and beautiful objects. Sometimes Gothenburg is depicted as a sort of Swedish transit port in this traffic: fine things reaches Gothenburg first and are then distributed to the rest of Sweden. Ideas that today are not considered as good and progressive – e.g. those who could legitimise racism and social injustice – are not on display. However, on this field one can find an interesting struggle between text panels and show cases. The latter often, especially in the 18th century exhibition, has a more critical tone and balances the positive and the negative aspects of the relation between “here” and “there”. In the show cases affluence and beauty dominates. An answer to the question why this positive image of Gothenburg dominates requires further research. An assumption, however, is that this has a connection to the relation between the museum and local political power and the city branding ambitions of the latter

Ämnesord

HUMANIORA  -- Historia och arkeologi (hsv//swe)

HUMANITIES  -- History and Archaeology (hsv//eng)

Nyckelord

Museer

rum

identitet

stadshistoria

Publikations- och innehållstyp

vet (ämneskategori)

bok (ämneskategori)