Museums and Social Change

Challenging the Unhelpful Museum

Adele Chynoweth, Bernadette Lynch, Klaus Petersen, Sarah Smed, Adele Chynoweth, Bernadette Lynch, Klaus Petersen, Sarah Smed

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000057843
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Arte
• Subtopic: Museología

Museums and Social Change explores the ways museums can work in collaboration with marginalised groups to work for social change and, in so doing, rethink the museum.

Drawing on the first-hand experiences of museum practitioners and their partners around the world, the volume demonstrates the impact of a shared commitment to collaborative, reflective practice. Including analytical discussion from practitioners in their collegial work with women, the homeless, survivors of institutionalised child abuse and people with disabilities, the book draws attention to the significant contributions of small, specialist museums in bringing about social change. It is here, the book argues, that the new museum emerges: when museum practitioners see themselves as partners, working with others to lead social change, this is where museums can play a distinct and important role.

Emerging in response to ongoing calls for museums to be more inclusive and participate in meaningful engagement, Museums and Social Change will be essential reading for academics and students working in museum and gallery studies, librarianship, archives, heritage studies and arts management. It will also be of great interest to those working in history and cultural studies, as well as museum practitioners and social activists around the world.

Part I

Museums and co-creation

1

Behind barbed wire

Co-producing the Danish Welfare Museum

Sarah Smed

Everybody needs to feel valued and heard. That’s why it’s important to also include the people with stories of vulnerability. Everybody can contribute. And everybody can make a difference.

Mette Løjmann Hansen (2017), intern at the Danish Welfare Museum

On 16 April 2018 something astonishing and revealing happened at the Danish Welfare Museum. It would affect our way of co-producing welfare history. On this, the International World Voice Day, Mette, an intern at the museum, had arranged an event, where the often quiet or silenced voices of the welfare system could and would speak out. As an appreciated and brave liaison officer for the museum, Mette had invited six of her friends to share their stories and voices at a public event at the museum. Stories were shared which stemmed from difficult and powerful memories from children’s Homes, from homelessness, from substance abuse, from physical and mental illnesses and from mistrust and exclusion. Mette, herself formerly homeless and a drug abuser, not only planned the event in full detail. She also hosted it and created a powerful atmosphere of respect, inclusion and thought-provoking debates. Had it not been for Mette, the event would never have taken place. Had it not been for the unique historical setting of the Museum, the event might not have had a space for this respectful public forum. Had it not been for the participants sharing honest and moving insights, there would have been no debates. Through the combination of all these participants’ willingness and mutual interest and curiosity, something very valuable and unique took place in the historical setting of the preserved poor- and workhouse in Denmark.

Despite its small size, Denmark is quite well known worldwide, and we often see ourselves placed high in international rankings on, for example equality, reduction of poverty, happiness, digitalisation, social and economic security and the eradication of corruption. Our society is formed by the renowned Nordic welfare state model, and it has been an integral part of both Danish society and self-perception for many decades – a solid system of universal rights that secures freedom and excellent welfare for all Danish citizens, a system with strong and powerful roots in Danish history, and a system which has shaped Danish society in numerous ways. For many outsiders, Denmark must seem to be quite the El Dorado of nations, safe and idyllic for everyone. Yet, just a scratch on the surface of this picture postcard of Denmark reveals a much more complex Danish welfare history consisting of paradoxes, dilemmas and taboos. The Danish welfare history is complicated and filled with contrasts, and the experiences within the welfare system have been, and sometimes still are, anything but safe or idyllic. I work at the Danish Welfare Museum and we ask questions such as: Why has placement in care often been tantamount to exclusion from society and erasure from the historical records? What happens when we invite the people with untold stories to co-create both their personal but also an established social welfare history?

The Danish Welfare Museum preserves and works collaboratively to secure the heritage and memories of the institutionalised, the poor and the socially vulnerable, aiming for a Danish social history which not only sheds light on the stories from the welfare system that are not told, but also works within the field of social justice and museum activism. In unconventional partnerships, interdisciplinary research and targeted and relevant outreach programs, we co-produce and debate welfare history in close and respectful collaboration with the people whose stories have often not been told. We make sure this is done with challenging and nuancing contemporary knowledge and in associated discussions.

There are thought-provoking and ironic paradoxes concerning both the heritage site of the Museum and the method of working. One of the most central is an inclusive museum within an historic poor- and workhouse completely preserved with segregating barbed wire and tall brick walls. Another paradox bound to raise a few readers’ eyebrows is that this Museum, which deals with, and preserves, the history of one of the strongest brands of Danish national identity, was established on a local initiative almost by chance. The local Svendborg Museum took on the role of securing the heritage site. Four decades on, the Welfare Museum is still financed as part of a local city museum, without any allocated state funding even though we work nationally. The Museum has therefore led a marginalised cultural life which has consequently created space for a slow evolution to a collaborative development. From a critical standpoint, one might argue that the economic marginalisation of the Museum reflects a disturbing disregard of this history on a national level. The Museum’s profile has grown from the ground up and in close collaboration with the marginalised citizens of the welfare state. This profile has not been formulated and decided in a board room by members of staff in the absence of lived experiences in children’s Homes, shelters for the homeless or life on the streets but, instead, stems from different areas of collaboration with experts on alternative ways of living and with in-depth knowledge of life on the edge of society.

What happened when we invited a multifaceted community whose personal stories are also part of the Museum’s subject matter: the institutional welfare system? What is the potential? What are the dilemmas? And what happens when the work of the museum becomes political at a point in Danish history when the welfare state itself is debated, and when concepts like ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving poor’, which stem from the late nineteenth century, are once again part of public debate? What happens when a museum takes a stance?

Writing this chapter is also a record of the living history of the Museum itself. Today the Museum is prominent on both the local and the national ‘museum radar’ after years of obscurity. We hope that this means that the Museum will be able to continue its work with co-producing, preserving and debating Danish welfare history with a continued focus on the intersection of social-justice-based welfare and public history. Some may view this emphasis as an unhelpful museum strategy because it disrupts the national pride in the welfare state model, but it is an approach which, I believe, is most helpful in supporting social change, in creating an insightful historical consciousness as well as in debating, remembering and sharing both the light and dark stories of the welfare state.

From poorhouse to museum

In the idyllic and historic borough of Svendborg on the island Funen, lies the best preserved and only listed poor- and workhouse in the Nordic countries, showcasing a far from beautiful side of pre- and early Danish welfare history. It was one of many, but is today the last site preserved in its entirety. Behind the closed main gate, brick walls and iron windows, men and women, old and young, well and sick, deserving and undeserving for more than a century would spend days, months or even years living and working. Some voluntarily. Most involuntarily. Some with the hope and desire to leave. Others without any hope at all. In 1974 the institution was shut down after being run as a shelter with fewer restrictions from 1961, and from one day to the next it was turned into a museum. It was not local pride and cooperation with the city council that prompted the Museum to save the buildings from demolition. There was no political strategy to debate welfare history from a local perspective. Instead, practical considerations prevailed. The local city museum needed extra space for new exhibitions, stores for museum objects and offices for staff.

From 1974 to the millennium, the Museum lived a rather quiet existence nationally, but locally ‘the Poorhouse’, as it was unofficially named by locals, became a central part of the city’s cultural life. For many local citizens born and raised in Svendborg, the institution, while functioning, had been part of their past – but almost always from a distance. With the Museum taking over ‘the Poorhouse’, the site featured various exhibitions about the history of Svendborg and partly about the history of the institution itself. However, during the last two decades, the perspective has indeed changed for this small Museum in Svendborg making an activist turn in its strategic work. A radical way of doing museum work has evolved where we are collecting, creating and debating ‘the outskirts of Danish social history’: the often forgotten or hidden histories of institutionalised lives from cradle to grave.

Figure 1.1Thought-provoking view from the inside of the historical setting of the workhouse.

Photo: Jon Bjarni Hjartarsson, Danish Welfare Museum.

Today the Danish Welfare Museum, placed in the authentic setting of the ‘the Poorhouse’, exists to explore the tensions within our welfare history, taking on the national task of securing and debating this part of Danish welfare history as the only specialist museum of its kind in Denmark. On one hand, the historical setting of the institution depicts the very harsh conditions and stigmatising elements of pre- and early welfare assistance where recipients would lose their personal freedom and civil rights to live behind barred windows. On the other hand, the Museum has developed a safe and supporting framework, inviting the so-called ‘socially vulnerable’ to be co-creators, using the collections, source material and historical setting as a means to create social change – co-creational and participatory initiatives which continuously and respectfully challenge all partners.

The Panel of Experience

In 2016 I took part in and presented at the Federation of International Human Rights Museums (FIHRM) conference in Milan. Listening to the opening talk from the ever-inspirational President of FIHRM, Dr David Fleming, I especially took note when he stated that we should always keep in mind that museums are part of real time and real life. This simple but also enormously important statement resonated in my head and I silently added to myself ‘and we have to make a real difference to real people’. The statement emphasised to me the importance of having real relevance for the communities that we wish to co-produce contemporary welfare history with. If we are not relevant to them, why would they even want to cooperate with us?

Since 2015 we have actively sought a new kind of partnership. Initially, the aim was to broaden the Museum’s area of work, to create visibility, to network and to secure our relevance. That is why we co-produced an exhibition with the Danish street paper Hus Forbi collecting objects and testimonies with the homeless street paper vendors (Danmarks Forsorgsmuseum 2016). This is why we, with social workers, created the award-winning exhibition Poverty across Time to provide insight and inspire debate about the strengths and weaknesses in the welfare system past and present. This is why we developed the international EU-funded summer camp Beat Poverty, hosted at the Museum with almost 50 teenage Europeans, of whom many came from marginalised backgrounds, and the most fun, absorbing and exhausting museum work that I have ever done.

These new kinds of partnerships and collaborations marked an intensified focus on the fact that we wanted to extend our relevance as a museum even further, and that such initiatives and ambitions are highly dependent on time, flexibility and support from both staff and collaborators. New questions were raised, both big and small. Can the homeless vendor bring his dog (his treasured friend and companion) to the museum for the opening of the exhibition? (And yes – of course, he can!) Should we facilitate debates on political issues when the tone of a debate unexpectedly becomes provocative or even contains personal attacks? (Yes, we should!) Or how do we ethically engage vulnerable citizens in sharing personal stories? (By continuously debating the very reasons for doing it with the citizens.) Questions, processes and issues which have demanded huge amounts of on-the-spot flexibility and which, thankfully, are achievable in a relatively small museum like ours. But which have also made the path clear in how we continuously should and must strive to become an increasingly more and more useful museum for these alternative partnerships and collaborations. What has also become gradually more evident over the last five years, in pursuing both value and usefulness, is that the museum initiatives that are useful for the citizens we collaborate with, are also the initiatives which create public attention. In other words: The more useful the museum strives to be, the more visible our work also seems to become. Usefulness is many things at the Museum as there are many citizens and partnerships that we collaborate with. The important, but not always easy, issue is to listen and pay attention to what being useful means in the specific collaboration. Once a museum begins to not only focus on teaching, explaining and talking but begins to also listen and learn, then a reflective and valuable space for creating useful initiatives and real social change will appear.

As a response to the questions above and many other questions even more ethically challenging, we decided to establish a ‘Panel of Experience’, not an Advisory Board, but instead a panel put together by people with special personal knowledge of the welfare system. The first panel, established in May 2017, consists of people who have spent part, or all, of their childhood in institutions. The reasons for participation in the panel are very varied. Steff said, ‘I represent my 24 friends from my children’s Home and we have a message about also remembering the more positive stories from children’s Homes. The museum forgot about these stories to begin with’. Vibeke stated:

I had a terrible childh...