EXHIBITING EUROPE: Politics of Display: Migration, Mobilities, and the Borders of ‘Europe’

Sted: Institutt for moderne fremmedspråk, NTNU

Kerstin Poehls, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt-Universität
kerstin.poehls@culture.hu-berlin.de

Delprosjekt under Exhibiting Europe, NTNU
Finansiert av NFR

Europeanization as a circular process is ‘both cause and effect of itself’ (Borneman and Fowler 1997: 488). Museums all over Europe are part of this circularity, and consequently their exhibition practices become “European” – be it through exhibition topics or through emerging European networks of museums. European integration as an ongoing social process brings up the question not only of the political, judicial or economic borders of Europe, but also of its more abstract and conceptual cultural and social borders: who is not merely in, but also of Europe? (Hall 2003) Fragile concepts of ‘European identity’ at the heart of the question about Europe’s and the EU’s borders are brought into sharp focus in the debates about migration. After all, Europeanization as a social process historically has been, and still is, driven and challenged by people leaving and entering Europe. Thus, this part-project focuses on how European identities are displayed in museums such as MuCEM (Marseille), MEK (Berlin), migration museums and others as well as in temporary exhibitions in addressing the fields of migration, mobilities and symbolic borders of Europe.

Firstly, museums will be examined with regard to how they address immigration into Europe and mobilities inside Europe, as it is here where debates on the nature of ‘Europe’ and European identity repeatedly ignite. In debates on immigration, diverging (often implicit) identity concepts, an understanding of integration as assimilation as well as questions of ethnic, cultural or religious diversity or cohesion are at stake. For migrant and other transnational communities, the transgression of political borders affects their every-day life and defines their legal status. While migrants are an indispensable workforce in many sectors of the European economy, their loyalty to proclaimed ‘European values’ derived from e.g. Christianity, the Enlightenment, and democracy is doubted openly and in subtle ways. How are these ongoing debates dealt with and represented in the museal space?
In order to highlight the fact that transnational mobility is not a recent but rather a constant phenomenon that left its marks on European societies through history, museal interpretations of emigration from Europe will, secondly, be in focus. What links, if any, are made between today’s EU and the Europe of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries characterized by emigration to the ‘New World’, by colonialism as well as the Commonwealth and other political, economic and social links transgressing the borders of the European nation states? The project will analyse in how far Europe’s history outside its own geographical borders is treated here as a component in the memory politics (Kaschuba 2007) and construction process of a European identity.

Thirdly, the part-project will scrutinize how and which European borders are tacitly or explicitly drawn in museal space: who is ‘in but not of Europe’? The project will investigate, for example, representations of the metaphor of the ‘Fortress Europe’ (Hagen 2003, Leontidou 2004) as a secluded space vs. de-facto regional cohesion and cooperation transcending EU borders (i.e. in the Mediterrenean). Where are, according to the dramaturgy of display, Europe’s and the EU’s religious and socio-cultural borders situated?

The project adapts well-established anthropological research methods such as qualitative interviews (among curators and board members) and participant observation. By simultaneously analysing the semantics, aesthetics and key topics of the exhibitions, this part-project will not least contribute to an interdisciplinary debate about the link between elites’ ideas about Europe and the feedback of discourses on migration as a European phenomenon into the milieu of those who steer the Europe and the EU displayed in museums.