In a modest micro-museum we assemble and describe objects, practices, and all forms of materialisations that are engaged in individual or group-specific processes of longing. This can be highly subjective items and ritualised practices, or widely distributed objects and formalised routines. In our museum of longing, we take into account the agency of the object and of the network, but we keep the possibility of agency not least through our careful curation.
Svetlana Boym explores the longing and artistic practice of immigrants. She finds that second generation migrants universalise longing, while first generation migrants carry more particular and ambiguous longings. What would their museums of longings look like, how would they differ? Svetlana Boym writes that virtual reality was originally thought of as the space of imagination that could not be mimicked by technology. We will be searching for this kind of non-mimicable virtual reality in our museum of longing among the curated objects, considering the threshold between technologies and trajectories of longing.
- Boym, S. (2017) The Off-Modern (Sections: Nostalgic Technologies; Immigrant Art; The Off-Modern Museum). New York: Bloomsbury.
- Boym, S.(2001) The Future of Nostalgia (Introduction, Ch. 4, Ch.5). New York: Basic Books.
- Pamuk, O. A modest manifesto for museums. Website of the Museum of Innocence: https://en.masumiyetmuzesi.org/page/a-modest-manifesto-for-museums, accessed 23.10.2020.