Ingrid Martins Holmberg

Motion and flow in heritage institutions. Two cases of challenges from within

Through two case studies, one in Australia and one in Sweden, this paper looks at how seemingly stable heritage institutions such as museums, archives and government repositories can be reformed through engagement with subaltern subjects. Highlighting institutional permeability rather than conservative resistance, we follow the movement of this “motion and flow” and how it in turn affects ideas of what constitutes both “heritage experts” and broader notions of “heritage”. Although these examples vary in scale, they nevertheless share the contemporary myths and misunderstandings around what happens when heritage institutions meet with subaltern peoples and the challenges they offer from within for the inner workings of the institution. In one case a radical inclusion has been achieved while the other has begun what is likely to be a long-term, complex, cultural conversation. Taken together, these institutional achievements may offer an alternative to recent critiques of official heritage institutions as merely inheritors of a nineteenth-century legacy.

Ephemeral Urban Topographies Of Swedish Roma: On dwelling at the mobile–immobile nexus

ABSTRACT Although celebrating five hundred years in Sweden in 2012, only little attention has been given to the Romas long-term presence in the Swedish landscape, and even lesser to their historical presence in urban contexts. Bearing in mind the Romas twentieth-century European history and knowing of their contemporary situation, this knowledge gap is no surprise. This paper will present a study that has assembled various traces of Roma dwelling in a Swedish urban setting from the late nineteenth century until the 1950s. The study enables a pinning down of the mobile–immobile nexus around which the Swedish Roma everyday cultural practices of dwelling evolved during the particular period before citizenship and subsequent settlement: regulation, seasonality, income opportunities and material devices. Hereby it hopes to contribute to an understanding of Roma urban dwelling as moored in history by corporeality and materiality, and as related both with locality and with ‘elsewhere’. The following questions are posed: Which were these urban places of dwelling and what characteristics do they have; what kinds of social connections and interactions were established at these places (co-habitation); in what sense can these places reveal a differentiated Roma history of dwelling? Besides uncovering a particular ephemeral ‘multi-sitedness’, the study also reveals Roma urban dwelling as related to broader spectrum of tenure than hitherto recognized.