6.18. Senses, materiality and space in museums

This paper analyses the process of writing, producing, and consolidating the digital dimension of the Sankofa Museum of Memory and History of Rocinha, developed through a partnership between residents of the favela and the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). Conceived as an open-air and itinerant museum, the Sankofa Museum materialises through guided tours led by local residents, temporary exhibitions, and artistic interventions across the territory, compensating for the absence of a physical building. The creation of its website arose from the need to expand the museum’s visibility and accessibility, stimulated by a public funding call and grounded in the concept of network capital (Freire-Medeiros; Lages, 2020) accumulated by the collective over years of activity. The co-creation process involved both in-person and virtual meetings, fieldwork throughout Rocinha, photographic and audio recordings, archival research, and interviews with residents. These practices produced a collective and affective form of authorship that transformed the website into a dynamic space for mediating and circulating social memory. The analysis draws upon the dialogue between the seven stages of digital storytelling (Lambert; Hessler, 2018) and the three levels of social impact defined by social memory technology (Worcman; Garde-Hansen, 2016), demonstrating how digital museological practice can strengthen community representation and agency. Grounded in the collective memory and everyday experiences of Rocinha’s residents, the Sankofa Museum reaffirms its role as a space that reflects on the past to construct the present and imagine future possibilities. The integration of collaborative practices, memory technologies, and digital narratives emerges not only as a strategy for cultural preservation and dissemination but also as an act of resistance that amplifies local voices within broader social and historical contexts.

The Iron Curtain was not just a geopolitical divide, but also a material and symbolic border shaping lives, landscapes, and collective memory across Europe. While iconic sites such as the Berlin Wall dominate public imagination, exhibitions and monuments along the Czech side of the southern border provide critical insights into how the Iron Curtain is remembered and curated. Comprised of barbed wire, guard towers, and other fortifications, these sites demonstrate how spaces of restriction can simultaneously embody oppression, resilience, and liberation, illustrating the contested meanings of borders and their legacies for democratic memory. This study examines how Czech border exhibitions mediate experiences of restriction and freedom, translating the historical and symbolic significance of the Iron Curtain into tangible encounters for contemporary audiences. Focusing on the materiality and spatial design of exhibitions, it analyses how preserved infrastructure, curated narratives and objects, and visitor pathways shape engagement and experience. The research situates these local histories within broader European memory narratives, highlighting how the Iron Curtain’s remnants evoke reflection on authoritarianism, civic responsibility, and democratic values. Methodologically, the paper draws on comparative exhibition analysis and field observation, attending to spatial choreography, narratives and object display, and interpretive atmospheres. It demonstrates how exhibitions construct temporal and affective configurations of border memory, from communist era surveillance and immobility to the symbolic opening of the border in 1989, while providing a framework for considering the ethical and civic dimensions of remembering oppression and liberation. By highlighting the curation of under-researched Czech border sites, the study contributes to interdisciplinary discussions of memory, borders, and democratic resilience, positioning peripheral border exhibitions as critical spaces for engaging with the past, shaping collective memory, and reflecting on the values underpinning democratic societies.

The paper responds to new ways of representing the past that involve other senses that the usual sight, above all the sound (sound studies, sound history). It explores sound memories of the Second World War in two major Central-European Museums of WWII, i.e., the Warsaw Rising Museum, Poland, and the National Memorial of the Second World War in Hrabyně, Czech Republic. WWII museums have recently introduced new digital and multimedia devices the role of which is to impact the senses and immerse bodily and emotionally the visitor in the exhibition. The paper argues that sounds used in WWII museums are important carriers of WWII memory. They create their own narrative of the Second World War that can be analyzed and compared to the narrative exhibited through visual elements. The study combines theoretical approaches of audionarratology and the analysis of the constituent sound components of the exhibitions perceived as sonic icons (K. Bijsterveld) and sound mnemotopoi (Bednarek, R. Tanczuk). The study profits from a comparative perspective of two neighbouring Central-European countries. It seeks to explore which sounds the museums use to represent WWII, what are the effects of this usage and how these sound narratives correspond to the specific national agendas as well as the international representation of WWII.

This paper examines how The Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan, constructs an affective and spatial environment that guides visitor responses to the Holocaust, transforming remembrance into a catalysis for civic and ethical reflection and action. Drawing on Michael Rothberg’s (2009) framework of multidirectional memory, the paper explores how the museum’s narrative design connects Holocaust remembrance to broader struggles for human rights, justice, and social justice, inviting visitors to see memory as an ongoing, relational process rather than a closed historical account. Assemblage theory (Deleuze and Guattari 1987) further informs our analysis by framing the museum as a dynamic constellation of material, emotional, and discursive forces—exhibits, testimonies, spatial design, and visitor participation—that collectively shape how memory and agency emerge in the space. Our study focuses on visitor responses to the prompt “What can I/we do?”, which visitors encounter after completing the museum’s core exhibition. Both authors are former employees of the museum, and the second author played a leading role in the redesign that introduced this participatory engagement space, opening in early 2024. The nearly five thousand visitor reflections were categorized under themes such as peace, education, respect, remembrance, and human rights. Among them, one striking response—“Be a kind Fortnite player”—epitomizes how visitors translate the museum’s moral imperatives into specific, everyday contexts. By analyzing this and dozens of other responses, this paper argues that the Holocaust Center’s environment functions as an assemblage that transforms affective responses into ethical orientations. Through Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory, the museum reactivates the past as a resource for imagining more compassionate and civically engaged futures, bridging the historical and the contemporary, the global and the personal.