Potential for (Non-)Reflection of Surrounding Space: Socialist Monuments and Their Contemporary Museum Use Potential for (Non-)Reflection of Surrounding Space: Socialist Monuments and Their Contemporary Museum Use
Abstract
Using specific examples from the Czech museum environment of recent years, the paper develops a thesis that the architecture of some museum buildings does not need to be just a neutral cover to the historical expositions within but may also become an independent exhibit in itself. The paper offers an analysis of three specific buildings fundamentally connected with the period of the state socialist regime due to the time of their origin or their secondary use.
The buildings include the National Memorial at Vítkov, Prague; the National World War II Memorial (aka Ostrava Operation Memorial) in Hrabyně; and the alleged Klement Gottwald's birth house in Dědice, the Czech Republic. Considerations of their use for museum purposes after 1989 - resulting in extensive reconstruction works in two cases - were accompanied by not so conceptual efforts to weaken and cover up traces of their once "socialist" past.
In opposition to this approach, the paper emphasises the possibility of using a similar layer of meaning productively, drawing it into the concept of an exhibition in which the central artifact presented would be the building itself. The visitor could be guided to awareness and understanding of more general contexts and phenomena through a specific "story of the house," a reflection of its functional and symbolic changes, architectural forms, or artistic ornamentation.
The musealisation of former (not only socialist) monuments offers a space for deeper self-reflection and reflection on the phenomena of historical memory and public presentation of history, which naturally condition both lay and expert thinking about the past. The professional grasp of these buildings as exhibits - whilst considering all the meanings and controversies they have taken on over the time of their existence - is one of the possible paths to less traditional ways of exhibiting contemporary history preferring a plurality of critically viewed images to generalised master narratives.