11.17. Heritage narratives: between private and the national [ES/EN]

Recent scholarship in migration studies has noted a “narrative turn,” characterized by increased attention to narratives of immigration and immigrants, the processes through which specific narratives become dominant, and how they shape politics and policymaking (Dennison, 2021; Garcés-Mascareñas & Pastore, 2025). Understanding narratives as selective depictions of reality, scholars have emphasized their influence on policy, behavior, and individual identities (Dennison, 2021; Garcés-Mascareñas & Pastore, 2025; Waters & Kasinitz, 2013). Adding a focus on how stories about immigration can influence the identity of a context of reception itself, this paper explores how immigration is represented in New York City museums. New York offers an interesting case because it is one of the most diverse cities in the world: nearly 40% of its residents are foreign-born, with about 150 countries of origin and over 700 languages represented (New York City Comptroller, 2017; Perlin et al., 2021). Most notably, New York has a long and continuous history of absorbing immigrants; immigration thus constitutes a sort of “palimpsest” in the city (Waters & Kasinitz, 2013). In turn, narratives of migration are essential to New York’s identity. Focusing on museums – institutions that have been traditionally conceived as legitimate arbiters of that which is significant (Jenkins, 2012) – I explore how migration narratives are weaved into the city’s identity. I draw on field visits to a range of museums (including those focusing on local history, art, and specific neighborhoods or topics), and employ discourse and visual analysis, to analyze how the artifacts and displays construct particular narratives immigration and of New York. Preliminary findings suggest that, while specific waves of migration and immigrant experiences are a salient topic across a range of exhibits, there are few cases that address migration as a phenomenon itself, its drivers, or remaining challenges to inclusion.

This paper examines how the Spanish government’s commemoration programme "España en Libertad" articulates the first state led narrative of democratic memory, fifty years after Franco’s death. Framed as a national celebration of “freedom,” it integrates exhibitions, performances, conferences, and public initiatives aligning Spain with broader European and transnational memory frameworks in dialogue with post dictatorial and transitional justice contexts across Latin America and Southeast Asia. Drawing on perpetrator studies and critical museology, this research asks: How do state memory policies translate political violence and institutional responsibility into aesthetic and spatial narratives within such a complex memorial landscape as Spain’s? And how do curatorial practices within this official programme contribute to the legitimation—or displacement—of impunity and accountability? Methodologically, the study analyses official documents —particularly those issued by SEMD—together with selected exhibitions. It combines a genealogical reading of institutional discourse with an aesthetic–spatial approach to curatorial mediation. The focus on exhibitions is justified by their role as intersections between artistic production, institutional narrative, and public pedagogy, revealing how visual and spatial languages turn state discourse into affective experience. The paper compares key exhibitions—such as Inquietud. Libertad y democracia and Eroding Franco—to identify curatorial patterns and media strategies, analysing how these narratives, in a context still marked by disputes over democratic memory, articulate the victim–perpetrator–justice relationship. Findings reveal a persistent incapacity within Spanish memory politics to fully confront the legacies of state and far right violence rooted in late Francoism and the Transition. Despite new legislation and alignment with European memorial standards, Spain remains shaped by the absence of trials and public accountability. As such, it stands as a counter paradigmatic case within European memory politics and a critical point of comparison within global memory debates, where EEL translates unresolved violence into aesthetic consensus, reproducing the structures of impunity it seeks to overcome.

Amid ongoing tensions over representations of the 1992-96 war, the History Museum of Bosnia and Hercegovina has been placed in a paradoxical position: a national institution tasked with preserving collective memory yet denied state funding due to the country’s fragmented and dysfunctional politics. This paper explores how the History Museum negotiates inherited trauma and memory transmission in this context. It asks: how can curatorial practices mediate between individual experience and collective narrative in a society marked by contested histories? Focusing on the permanent exhibition Sarajevo Memories - the story of children killed during the siege and their bereaved parents – this paper examines how grief and intergenerational trauma are mediated through visual artefacts and archival materials. Drawing on Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, it asks how remembrance operates when the generational link that normally sustains it is disrupted, and how curatorial strategies respond to this absence to create new modes of collective mourning. Tracing the intersection of familial mourning and institutional memory, it demonstrates how postmemory can inform curatorial practice, guiding the mediation of individual memories into collective narratives that assemble and maintain, rather than subsume, individual voices.

The museum in conflict. Disputes and tensions over the administration of the past at the Museum of Memory of Colombia In 2011, Colombian institutions decided to create a Museum of Memory with the task of systematizing, exhibiting, and producing a public narrative of the armed conflict. However, this task has been hampered by multiple political, social, and administrative tensions that have made the Museum of Memory of Colombia one of the most controversial projects in the Colombian memorial field. Its design and implementation have highlighted the latent conflict surrounding the administration of the past. This work focuses on these tensions, emphasizing the conflictive nature of the museum and the implications that these disputes have to produce public memory in Colombia. The objective, then, is both to reveal that these tensions expose the limits and challenges of memory policies and to show that museum devices function as zones of negotiation between social demands, state logic, and political pressures. This is based on the premise that the museum is not merely a container of narratives but an active agent in the production of meanings about the past. The theoretical-methodological approach is based on a perspective that combines and intertwines history, memory studies, and museology for the reflection and analysis of the museum as a field of disputes where different actors negotiate the legitimacy of their narratives and the selected ways of making the violent past visible. As a result of examining the controversies surrounding the museum, broader debates are exposed that can also be traced in other spaces in Latin America. This shows how the ‘museum in conflict’ is not only a diagnosis of the Colombian case, but also a critical category for thinking about the contradictions inherent in the museumization and institutionalization of memory.