Can the Screen Speak?: Museum of Material Memory and the Politics of Display

Abstract

What if a museum is not built out of cement and stone, but codes on a virtual space? In what ways do virtual platforms operationalise the concept of a museum? The paper explores these questions based on the empirical case study of Museum of Material Memory (MMM) and how it operates on Instagram. To this end, the objectives of this paper are twin fold. Firstly, it investigates the characteristics that make MMM a museum as distinct from a social media blog or a website. And secondly, it explores the politics of curation in relation to conventional physical museums in conjunction with issues thrown up by Instagram as a medium of display. The paper argues that MMM’s virtual mode of operation challenges the methods of heritage conservation envisaged by museums by demonstrating how tangible heritage can be museumised through virtual means. In doing so, MMM lays emphasis not only on the object per se, but also on the relationship that the object may have with its setting and the people around it. Such a model of display democratises expertise by obfuscating the difference between producers and consumers of heritage.