Memory Boxing

Thinking in images, or with the aid of images, might sometimes be a useful help to approach and analyze theoretical matters. For me it comes naturally since I have been associating people, feelings, processes, music, etc, with images for as long as I can remember.
One such image, or model, was presented and discussed in a session during the ISCH conference in Istanbul, namely: The Memory Box.

I have had a least two serious memory boxes in my life; the first, a Hofnar cigar box in wood where I collected a treasure of immeasurable value (others would have called it old, broken jewelry that my mom gave me); the second, a tin box with an 18th century woman in a white and blue dress printed on the lid. In this latter box I collected things that were charged with special, and not necessarily material, value to me, through memories of persons, events and emotions. I keep it still on the shelf in my study.

The project presented is a collaboration between universities in Mainz and Turku (Åbo) initiated in 2011, and they use the Memory Box as a method for analyzing the transfer of media (art works etc) between cultures. Aleida Assmans book Cultural Memory and Western Civilization (2011) was referred to as a starting point for the project's use of the concept, and she was said to stress the origin of the word 'box' in Latin's 'arca', arc. A memory box, also when used in this metaphoric way, was described as a fragile container, equal to the human mind. We were given examples of memory boxes in the shape of artefacts, 'topoi' (a collection of stereotypes, used for example as a rhetorical tool) or persons, and an emphasis was put on the content in the box and the (eventual) opening of the box. The papers were very interesting and the project fascinating, and it generated a vivid discussion with objections as well as acclamations, and many questions.

For me, I found myself being most interested in what was left outside of the box (still in this metaphorical sense). Some things, actually most things, are always left outside of the memory production, either on purpose or because they are forgotten, and I believe much of interest can be discovered by turning the museum/memory spotlight in the other direction for a while. This process is referred to by Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett as 'the agency of display'; by pointing out things, by highlighting them and appoint them to be representatives of a certain narrative, we also point away from other things. I find this shadowland of forgotten or deliberately dismissed things tremendously fascinating!

And, for the same reasons I guess, I find the wrapping and the wrapper of this imagined memory box even more intriguing than the opening and the opener. Opening a memory box is a question of reception, emotion and associations, while wrapping it - deciding what should be in it, what not, and for what reasons - is in my understanding an act of power and control. This Power Of The Wrapper is executed by museum practitioners, researchers, authors, artists, policy makers and everyone creating narratives of the past - with or without an outspoken agenda. Continuing my reflexions on the memory box as a relevant tool for analyzing the production of memory and heritage, I come to think of a George Orwell quote: "Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past."

One crucial question demands an answer from me: As a researcher exploring heritage, heritagisation and museums, who am I: the Wrapper, the Opener, or even a kind of Memory Box?