Fifteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The figure of the migrant is both a familiar presence and a politically contentious issue in present discourse and recent history. Representations of migrations, deportations and displacements abound in public and museum exhibits, in contexts ranging from heroic journeys to suffering and victimhood. In our paper we work with the notion of the mobile body and the way in which the battered suitcase symbolically represents displacement, loss, change and bodily decay. Suitcases are containers for and of memories, and their decay represents and displaces passing time and the fragility of bodies moving through space and history. Their very materiality conveys embodied experience and intangibility of memory, and the decay of their often organic form (leather, cardboard) mirrors the embodied experiences of their owners. We are particularly concerned with the narratives of involuntary or forced migration, and the identity markers that such suitcases carry in terms of labels – both real and symbolic - as documents representing the individual, collective and body politic within the recent political past. Smith (2006: 500) described museums as sites constructed to show “the cargo of the past on consignment into the future” and we argue that suitcases simultaneously hide and showcase the past, enabling its present-day remembering and memorialising. Drawing on fieldwork from museums and public spaces, we consider how suitcases themselves are consigned to the “attic of memory.” As museum displays or as piles of discarded remnants, offered as vestiges, as witnesses to human loss and suffering at death camps such as Auschwitz.