Museums as Affective and Dialogical Archives in Practice

This seminar explores how museums can serve as affective and dialogical archives by integrating multiple and sometimes conflicting memories into their curatorial practices. Taking RAZREZ (The Mine)—a recent addition to the permanent exhibition Encounters at the Estonian National Museum—as a case study, the session examines how curating stories from the post-industrial region of Ida-Virumaa opens space for negotiating complex identities, emotions, and  memories. Developed through fieldwork and collaboration, RAZREZ engages with the metaphor of a “mine” both literally, as an open-cast mining landscape, and symbolically, as a site of social and cultural division. Through this example, participants will discuss how research-based curatorial practices can reimagine the museum as a space for memory pluralism, affective engagement, and creative re-interpretation of the past.