Difficult heritage

"Difficult Histories: Looking Beneath the Surface" is a short essay included in the exhibition catalog Kodak Canada: The Early Years (1899-1939) that critiques the positivist perspective of Kodak Canada in that very exhibition. It discusses the blackface imagery found in the Kodak Canada corporate archives and highlights the issues facing young curators when confronted with recent difficult local histories.

Museumedu 6 on "Museums, education and ‘difficult’ heritage" is the sixth issue of the on-line,  open  access,  peer-reviewed  international  journal Museumedu,  published  by the University of Thessaly Museum Education and Research Laboratory in October 2018. Guest  editors  of  this  special  issue  are  Esther  Solomon  and  Eleni  Apostolidou,  both Assistant Professors at the University of Ioannina, Greece.The issue includes papers exclusively in English, accompanied by abstracts in Greek and English  and  an extensive  introduction  regarding  the  basic  aspects  of  the  relationship between  museums,  education  and  difficult  heritage,  as  these  are  reflected  in  Greek and international literature.

This issue (as well as the current introduction) of Museumedu explores difficult heritage issues from the perspective of museums and museum and history education. Ιt puts particular emphasis on issues of identity politics and cultural memory, while it presents a series of interesting case studies of academics, heritage  professionals  and  history  teachers  who  have  variably  tried  to  discuss  and
challenge ‘musealized’ difficult heritage in interesting and innovative ways, often using its educational potential.

Among  the  issues  discussed  in  the  volume,  historical  education  emerges  as  the  most critical. The contributors’ interest in public history and archaeology brings together the editors’ academic interests, that is, critical museology and history didactics, and render museums one of the most fruitful and promising fields for the development of historical thinking,  empathy,  and  the  endorsement  of  a  more  sensitive  attitude  towards  social ‘otherness’ (both in time and space) in a fragmented, unequal and, at the end of the day, ‘difficult’ society.

La ricerca indaga gli spazi culturali del ricordo, ovvero quei luoghi dove risiede la memoria collettiva legata ai drammi del Novecento in Europa, nel periodo che va dalla fine della Prima Guerra Mondiale ai conflitti nei Balcani. Questi luoghi della memoria, presenti sia nel contesto urbano della città sia nel territorio, possono essere considerati all’interno di un sistema museografico diffuso che non si ferma alla semplice commemorazione ma diventa un luogo attivo/performativo che ha come obiettivi la trasmissione del ricordo e la partecipazione delle comunità locali. I temi, tuttora oggetto di studio del gruppo di ricerca coordinato da Luca Basso Peressut e Gennaro Postiglione, sono stati analizzati all’interno delle attività di ricerca del PRIN 2008 “L’intervento nelle aree archeologiche per la musealizzazione e la comunicazione culturale” e successivamente confluiti nel progetto internazionale “REcall- European Conflict Archaeological Landscape Reappropriation” (www.recall-project.polimi.it) di cui il prof. Gennaro Postiglione è Project Leader e la PhD Candidate Michela Bassanelli è il Principal Investigator.

By now, in Rome, public buildings realized in the 1920-1940s, according to Italian heritage legislation, are becoming protected monuments and require conservation and restoration. The implementation of that, however, leads to a number of problems of very diverse nature; be both technical, social and cultural. This paper describes the basic features of protection and restoration of interwar heritage and analyses how they have been assessed and used both by the professional community and the general public.

The Lambing Flat riots were a series of violent riots led by European miners against Chinese miners from 1860 to 1861 on the Burrangong goldfields in NSW. They led to anti-Chinese immigration legislation in NSW and the White Australia policy enacted after Federation in 1901. During the riots, the European miners carried this banner, now owned and exhibited by the Lambing Flat Folk Museum in Young, NSW. Once able to proudly lay claim to “The Birth of White Australia”, this local museum and country town have struggled to understand themselves and their past as part of a modern multicultural nation. Increasing interactions with Chinese Australians who also want to be acknowledged as having a major role in the formation of the Australian nation complicate the banner's meaning for the museum and the town.

Using a combination of object biography (Kopytoff 1986) and assemblage theory (Latour 2005) to trace the life story of the banner, this paper will explore the ways in which the Lambing Flat Folk Museum and the town of Young have dealt with their “difficult heritage” (Macdonald 2009). How do we understand and discuss the historical and contemporary exclusion of particular groups of people in a multicultural society when the primary mode of representation in museums and in commemorations is about inclusion?

l libro trae ispirazione da uno dei dibattiti più significativi degli ultimi anni, ovvero il ruolo della memoria in relazione al tema del Conflict Heritage. Le tracce dei conflitti bellici rappresentano un patrimonio difficile da gestire e a cui relazionarsi perchè legato a storie scomode, spesso traumatiche. Tuttavia riteniamo che esso rappresenti un tema centrale su cui riflettere, superando i contesti locali e lavorando alla costruzione di un’identità collettiva a scala europea. Il libro presenta una selezione critica di saggi raggruppati secondo tre tematiche principali, l’archeologia, l’arte e la museografia, offrendo diversi approcci e nuove prospettive sul tema del Conflict Heritage.

Con contributi tra gli altri di Sharon Macdonald, Ian Chambers, Marek Jasinsky, Luca Basso Peressut, Elisabetta Terragni.

This book takes inspiration from one of the most significant matter of debate of the recent years, that is to say the role of memory connected with Conflict Heritage. Linked as they are to unpleasant stories, they represent a patrimony that is difficult to manage. However, we believe they have the potential to resonate beyond their local contexts and work toward the construction of a collective identity on a European scale. This book presents a critical anthology of essays for the first time grouped in according to three main topics, archaeology, art and museography, and offers different approaches and new perspectives on the theme of Conflict Heritage.

With contributions, among others, by Sharon Macdonald, Ian Chambers, Marek Jasinsky, Luca Basso Peressut, Elisabetta Terragni.

This paper explores South Korean heritage practices aimed at erasing the colonial past from the national heritage landscape, in the course of a social movement to uncover the historical truth and create accurate representations of the past. I argue that in the 1990s, the state repudiated historic sites that were perceived as tainted by the colonial rule, because it believed them to materialize a distorted historical narrative. The state-led correction of this narrative aligned the heritage landscape with the rhetoric of colonial resistance and the representation of the nation-state as being perpetually characterized by independence and resistance. The Office of Cultural Properties, the governmental agency dealing with the management of national heritage, identified patrimonial sites that were allegedly tarnished by the colonial past and subverted their importance through various forms of erasure and forgetting. The paper investigates these practices, ranging from renaming sites and demoting the heritage status of monuments, to iconoclastic gestures such as celebrated demolitions of colonial architecture. The analysis of South Korea's treatment of its colonial heritage illustrates the silencing of difficult memories in the process of decolonization, and the central place heritage occupies not only in identity formation, but also in breaking with the past in the course of decolonization.

The Time Travel method gives space for reflection on contemporary issues, by using local heritage and history. This educational method started in the Kalmar region, Sweden in the mid 1980’s and is now used in more than 20 countries all over the world.

In February 2018 a group of 40 persons from eight countries met at a seminar in Kalmar to explore how the Time Travel method and Applied Heritage can meet today’s challenges: social cohesion, peace building, education, health and environment. It was inevitable to look back on the 35 years of existence, what has been achieved? But the main focus was to look ahead. How can the Time Travel method make a difference in the future, to be in the service of society and its development?

Hopefully these articles from the seminar will give inspiration to use local sites and stories for community building and learning, creating a cohesive society for the future

In the context of the recent rise of oral history in museums and exhibitions, the paper explores some interesting attempts to negotiate the representation of the so‐called “difficult” cultural heritage, i.e. objects and topics that may cause traumas, ideological conflicts and social ruptures.

How do museums contribute through the use of oral history to the
strengthening of ties between society and those groups which are normally excluded from official history and, therefore, from most museum narratives? How can museums make the most of their oral history archives in order to empower people’s sense of belonging to a place and a community, to repair traumatic memories and/ or to reconcile?

Στη μελέτη αυτή προσεγγίζεται ο πολυσχιδής ρόλος των μουσείων στις σύγχρονες κοινωνίες. Επίσης με την ευκαιρία του θέματος της παγκόσμιας ημέρας μουσείων του 2017 που διοργανώνει το ICOM θα δούμε πως τα μουσεία αντιμετωπίζουν αμφιλεγόμενα θέματα, δύσκολης πολιτιστικής κληρονομιάς. Στη μελέτη περίπτωσης παρουσιάζεται το Γερμανικό Ιστορικό Μουσείο και η έκθεση που διοργανώνει για την Γερμανική Αποικιοκρατία.

In the era of preservation of heritage towards the shape of a nation's identity, the concept of 'difficult heritage' emerges as a meaningful legacy of buildings or traces of the past that have remained from traumatic periods. In this paper, we examine the Italian architectural work of Fascism, Casa del Fascio in Como, by Giuseppe Terragni, since it has been considered as a traumatic experience, but also as a reference for contemporary architecture. Through this case study, we seek to explore how architecture can deal with a difficult past and convert it into a museum. In order to examine this conversion, historical, social and architectural contexts are analysed. In the end, although it can create social divisions, the recognition of this heritage, its re-definition and turning into a museum can produce new meanings that lead to the formation of a new cultural identity.

A historic building can be at risk as it is in an earthquake zone or in a war zone. However, the historic buildings my work focuses on are at risk because they are left unmaintained and their original architects, owners and/or users are not present to look after them. Further, they have been appropriated as building stock without consideration given to their religious, historical or architectural value. These buildings are of non-Muslim heritage, and Turkey has not been accommodative towards its non-Muslim history. The Armenian and Syriac genocides, forced population exchange and the expulsion of Rums, the anti-Jewish pogrom in Eastern Thrace in 1934, the vandalisation and unlawful possession of non-Muslim homes, shops and religious sites are all fresh in the memories of these communities. With this in mind, the Turkish state dealt with non-Muslim heritage through emergency measures not only in times of political conflicts but in a prolonged and permanent state of emergency, challenging the dichotomy of emergency and normalcy. Such heritage sites have been lawfully (such as Law 5366 Law on Renovating, Conserving and Actively Using Dilapidated Historical and Cultural Immovable Assets which resulted in the destruction of many historic houses built by non-Muslims), unlawfully and systematically (as will be exemplified in this chapter in detail) been dealt with throughout the history of the Turkish Republic. This continuous degradation of the non-Muslim built heritage constitutes a state of on-going emergency, positioning buildings within a state of risk and uncertainty. In this chapter, the concept of emergency will be examined through the related history of the non-Muslims in Turkey, underlining how the process resulted in this heritage spatially and materially embodying the concept of emergency.
This research draws on fieldwork conducted between 2015 and 2019 in eight regions of contemporary Turkey. The eight regions are Adana, Artvin, Bursa, Elazığ, Izmir, Kayseri, Niğde, and Tur Abdin, all which housed large concentrations of non-Muslim populations in the past.  This work documented the state of non-Muslim buildings which are stripped of their original community and left to the mercy of those living in their vicinity. It involved visiting sites, documenting and reporting on their current state, conducting detailed historical background research and preparing risk assessment and recommendation reports.  The findings -both in terms of the physical condition of the buildings, as well as the approach of current inhabitants- of this fieldwork reveal the way the Turkish state as well as the locals appropriate or reject these heritage sites. The devaluation of these sites is visible through the assessment of their extremely poor physical condition, which is continuously deteriorating due to deliberate damage and squalor. This chapter discusses the current state of non-Muslim heritage at risk across contemporary Turkey, demonstrating how it is entangled in diaspora discourses, traumascapes  and more generally geographies of power. It argues that as the Turkish state has utilised Muslim heritage to help make sense of dominant or authorised nationalistic cultural claims, subjecting it to politics of (dis)recognition, resulting in a substantial loss of these cultural assets. When heritage conservation is approached as the intangible process of negotiating cultural identities and meanings, the reason behind the destruction of such heritage becomes clear, as shall be explained below.

Despite an increased focus on heritage connected to violence within archaeological research projects, there has been no proper focus on the rediscovery of prehistoric massacres, from the perspective of difficult heritage. Most likely, the temporal distance involved has led to the assumption that such research is superfluous. The ongoing excavations of an Iron Age massacre in the ring fort of Sandby Borg, on Öland, Sweden, challenges the validity of such an a priori assumption. This paper focuses on Sandby Borg through interviews conducted with the local population who grew up near the ring fort. The interviews reveal how new narratives and relations to the past have been created through the discovery. The results call for us to move away from a linear and chronological understanding of difficult heritage, in which time is approached as gradually ‘purifying’ difficult heritage, towards understanding ‘dissonance’ as inherent in each site of heritage, which can be used as a resource.

We hereby invite you to attend the conference "Sandby borg: New perspectives for Iron Age archaeology in the Baltic region" that takes place in Kalmar, Sweden on May 8–10th 2019. To sign up for the conference, use the following link: https://www.nortic.se/dagny/event/21350?campaignCode=sandbyborgconf For details of the various conference packages offered, click "more info".

In this article I examine the experiences of Finnish people visiting the Norvajärvi German cemetery, located 18 kilometers north of Rovaniemi town center. In the Second World War (WWII), Finland cooperated with Germany allowing German troops to operate against the Soviet Union out of Finnish territory from 1941. As a result of warfare in Northern Finland's frontiers, about 15 000 German soldiers died between 1941 and 1945. Towards the end of WWII, Finland turned against Germany and the so-called Lapland War began between the former brothers-in-arms in 1944 resulting in a relatively low loss of life, but large-scale devastation of northern Finland when German troops resorted to 'burning down Lapland'. These events have left traumatic memories for Lapland residents. The Norvajärvi cemetery was founded in 1963 and is the only official commemoration site and monument of the WWII German presence in Finnish Lapland. The main research material of this article comes from online media in which visitors, whom I term 'cemetery tourists', introduce and reflect on their experiences of visiting the cemetery, as well as interviews with local agents who take part in conserving the WWII heritage. In addition I have interviewed some of the Rovaniemi-based guides who take tourists to see the site. I ask what motivations drive people to visit the site and how they describe the experience. How do the visitors see and relate to Lapland's German past and its 'dark' heritage? I analyze the blog materials and images as well as my own experiences of visiting the cemetery using a phenomenological framework and paying attention to sensual experiences and reflections. It seems that the cemetery tourists who visit Norvajärvi German cemetery are well aware of the difficult history and the dark heritage of the Lapland War. The visit to the site deepens the visitor's understanding of WWII and results in reflections over the consequences and irrationality of war.

In this article, we present a Latin American perspective on four heritage concepts: shared culture, di icult heritage, contested heritage, and gendered heritage. We present the case of El Ángel de la Independencia, an iconic landmark in Mexico City, which was gra itied as part of public protests against femicide and feminicide in August 2019.
The protests were triggered by the ineffective actions of local and federal authorities to address the rising rate of murder and abuse of women in Mexico City and across the nation. The protestors harnessed the monument’s social value and employed a new layer of significance, transforming the meaning of El Ángel. The graffiti was proactively defended by a community of heritage professionals and restorers, united under the name Restauradoras con Glitter, raising questions about cleaning, gendered heritage and contested meanings.
In this exercise of a double-way academic dialogue between Australia and Mexico, we find that the social use of a national heritage icon does not undermine the status of the monument; instead, it speaks loudly of a shared social problem in the present, as part of a shared culture that is difficult and distressing and needs to be addressed urgently by society.

The debate around Fascist Monuments in Italy posed questions on  whether the country had yet come to term with its Fascist past. This talk will look specifically at how this is reflected in the iconography of Mussolini and the heritage sites that were once his properties. It will be examined to what extent the shift in both the perception and fortune of Mussolini’s material legacies mirrors the renegotiation of the Fascist past, and what is the role of the Cult of the Duce in contemporary Italy. Case studies of Mussolini’s own properties and his iconography will be analysed together with the future project of the Documentation Centre on Totalitarian Italy in Predappio. The presentation also questions whether public perception of these sites has changed over time and considers how their recent transformation into heritage sites or exhibitions signifies a shift from the post-war interpretation.

Revolutions have powerful e ects on the way the past is presented and perceived. In former communist states of Eastern Europe, following the revolutions establishing the regimes, a further sudden inversion has been regularly experienced in the aftermath of the fall of the Eastern Bloc. In this paper, I will comparatively discuss these changes through the lens of Albania. The discussion will highlight how the  rst communist revolution of the 1940s changed the way the Albanian state looked at its heritage and how this perspective was again completely transformed in the aftermath of the 1991. In both cases the perception of the periods immediately preceding the revolutionary events were those mostly a ected. In particular, as regards the second revolution, in Albania, as in many other cases, after a long silence, the perspective adopted by the main stakeholders in the new democratic order was to characterise the heritage of communism in terms of trauma and terror. While these aspects undoubtedly encapsulate key features, there is more to processes of memory and heritage making related to this period. Private memories can sometimes produce rather di erent narratives of the same recent past, creating a clash with the representation put forward by the state.

A diverse and changing array of digital media have been used to present heritage online. While websites have been created for online heritage outreach for nearly two decades, increasingly social media is employed to complement and in some cases replace the use of websites. These same social media are used by stakeholders as a form of participatory culture, to create communities and to discuss heritage independently of narratives offered by official institutions such as museums, memorials, and universities. With difficult or " dark " heritage—places of memory centring on deaths, disasters, and atrocities—these online representations and conversations can be deeply contested. Examining the websites and social media of difficult heritage, with an emphasis on the TransAtlantic Slave Trade provides insights into the efficacy of online resources provided by official institutions, as well as the unofficial, participatory communities of stakeholders who use social media to " remember together " (Simon 2012).

REcall is a research project founded by EC Culture 2007-13 Programme (n. 2012 - 0927 / 001 - 001 CU7 COOP7) focused on the possible roles Museography can play when dealing with Difficult Heritage such as the ones coming from conflicts
and wars. REcall wishes to envision new ways to the handling of Painful Places & Stories going beyond any traditional approach: there is the need to shift from the ‘simply’ commemoration attitude to a more active involvement and participation of people in/with Places & Stories, through design strategies of
‘reappropriation’ (www.recall-project.polimi.it).

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the changes traced in secondary education students’ approach to and understanding of the Holocaust, following two visits to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland in 2013 and 2014. The study is based on students’ participation in these pilot programmes, which were organized by the Jewish Museum in Athens and were run under the auspices of the Greek Ministry of Education. Prior to their visit, the students were taught the historical context of the period in their classroom and visited the Jewish Museum. By taking into consideration ongoing debates on history education, the effectiveness of this programme is evaluated in relation to both the changing attitudes and understanding of the Holocaust by the students and its impact on their lives two years later. Specifically, it is argued that the visit to the Holocaust Memorial in Auschwitz-Birkenau constitutes an experiential approach to the concept of the Holocaust that not only raised the students’ awareness of the genocide of the Jewish population, but also allowed them to change many aspects of their personal understanding of and collective action about this issue. Taking into consideration the data analysis, I suggest that the inclusion of a visit to a site of memory, such as Auschwitz/Birkenau, in the educational process triggers the students’ “empathy of care” (Barton & Levstik 2004), by interpreting the legacy of a painful/difficult past in the present: an “empathy of care” that is not solely targeted towards the establishment of “citizenship”, but also towards the formation of historically aware citizens.

La storia del Palazzo della Farnesina, dal 1959 sede del Ministero degli Affari Esteri e della Cooperazione Internazionale, è esemplare della riqualificazione del più importante cantiere dell’era fascista a Roma nel segno dell’arte contemporanea. Concepito inizialmente come Casa littoria, nel secondo dopoguerra l’edificio fu sottoposto a un radicale processo di riconversione, grazie a un’accorta regia progettuale e all’intervento degli artisti, chiamati, attraverso bandi pubblici, a ridefinire volto e funzioni dei nuovi uffici della diplomazia italiana.
Il volume ripercorre le tappe di questa lunga storia: dai concorsi di primo e secondo grado alla posa della prima pietra, dall’abbandono del cantiere dopo la caduta del regime alla ripresa dei lavori e all’inaugurazione della sede nel 1959, dalla decorazione e l’arredo degli uffici all’acquisto e alla realizzazione delle opere d’arte per gli ambienti di più alta rappresentanza, fino all’istituzione, nel 1999, della Collezione Farnesina Arte Contemporanea, considerata nel 2017 «una delle migliori collezioni al mondo nel settore delle istituzioni pubbliche» (Mecenati del XXI Secolo – Corporate and Institutional Art Awards).

This chapter examines the reception of Fascist monuments in contemporary Italy as an expression of how the country has dealt with its troubled dictatorial past. The variety of cultural heritage left by the regime is a distinctive feature of any Italian city and is today both a symbolic and a physical witness of the invasiveness of the totalitarian regime. Taking the period from the 2010, with increasing public debate about how to deal with divisive and conflicting remains, this chapter looks at two emblematic case-studies that can aid our understanding of Fascist monument culture in contemporary Italy. The first considers a monument erected in 2012 as a memorial to the infamous murderer Rodolfo Graziani, the Fascist Marshall known as ‘the butcher’ for his efficacy in the conquest of Ethiopia.  Built in Graziani’s resting place of Affile, the monument, which in 2017 was suggested to be demolished by orders of the national courts, shows how part of society still views Fascism as ‘positive’. The second examines how the city of Bolzano has dealt with a Fascist frieze on the Palace of Financial Offices representing Mussolini on horseback, and how the monument has been ‘disempowered’ through the addition in 2017 of an installation by the artists Arnold Holzknecht and Michele Bernardi. These two monuments, conceived in different times and for different purposes, illustrate the variety of political reasons that can inform monument building. The differing responses to these monuments reflect similar attitudes seen trans-nationally, at a time when the legacies of difficult pasts are being re-negotiated, and new values are inscribed, or previous values removed from them.

Purpose. The aim of this article is to present how different attractions, after having been certified as 'The Best Tourism Product' by the Polish Tourist Organization, become , to some extent, accepted as heritage. In other words, the paper examines how the system of certification supports the process of heritage commodification. Method. Qualitative research. Multimodal analysis was applied to investigate verbal and visual sources: descriptions, photographs and other graphic elements of the catalogues published by the Polish Tourist Organization, as well as websites presenting in detail tourism products which have received awards. Findings. Analysis of the gathered research material reveals the methods of (re) interpreting heritage in tourism promotion. Research and conclusions limitations. The research is a typical case study, which sheds light on cultural phenomenon, but cannot provide any general theory on heritage interpretation. We have limited the focus of the study to the Polish context. Furthermore, the heritage commodification is a very dynamic process, therefore it needs further exploration which would take new tourism products appearing in the region into consideration. Practical implications. The analysis provides potential avenues of enquiry adopting the perspective that heritage must be investigated in a performative context. It opens a discussion on how the Polish heritage is shaped and which stakeholders participate in this process. The awareness of the fact that discourse authorized by institutions shapes a preferred interpretation in which the values considered important for a given section of society are displayed, may be helpful for the different stakeholders who participate in the process of heritage commodification. Originality. The article adopts the concept of dissonance in heritage interpretation to the Polish context. The case study highlights the thesis that practice definitely overtakes theory when we weigh up the issues concerning the creation of heritage. Type of paper. The paper is based on the empirical research

This book studies how people negotiate difficult heritage within their everyday lives, focusing on memory, belonging, and identity. The starting point for the examination is that temporalities lie at the core of understanding this negotiation and that the connection between temporalities and difficult heritage remains poorly understood and theorized in previous research. In order to fully explore the temporalities of difficult heritage, the book investigates places in which the incident of violence originated within different time periods. It examines one example of modern violence (Mostar in Bosnia and Herzegovina), one example of where the associated incident occurred during medieval times (the Gazimestan monument in Kosovo), and one example of prehistoric violence (Sandby borg in Sweden). The book presents new theoretical perspectives andprovides suggestions for developing sites of difficult heritage, and will thus be relevant for academic researchers, students, and heritage professionals.

La Convention du patrimoine mondial de
l’Unesco, qui constitue aujourd’hui le système
de conservation du patrimoine le plus influent
au niveau international, accorde une place
croissante aux aspects immatériels. À côté
des sites associés à des idées, des événements
(tragiques) et des personnages célèbres,
la nouvelle catégorie des paysages culturels
permet d’inclure des sites spirituels importants
pour les peuples indigènes. En outre,
la réévaluation des critères d’authenticité
a entraîné la réhabilitation des projets de
reconstruction. De la même manière, les biens
en série, qui sont de plus en plus populaires,
reposent eux aussi sur des « idées » et non
sur la matérialité de chaque site. Cependant,
cette réorientation n’est que partielle :
l’impulsion continue de venir des États-nations,
toujours aussi avides d’inscrire des sites
sur la liste du patrimoine mondial.

This paper analyses the case of Bolzano as a border city situated between Italy and Austria that had to deal with the unresolved issue of "difficult history" and "difficult heritage" after World War II. A particular emphasis is placed on the fascist Victory Monument as a symbol of the antagonism between the Italian and German-speaking population of the city, and the exhibition "BZ '18-'45: One Monument, One City, Two Dictatorships" as an example of dealing with "difficult heritage".

Old Master paintings in the Sinebrychoff Art Museum that came from Russia to Finland as a consequence of the Russian Revolutions are the subject of Kersti Tainio's research undertaken during her recent internship at the Finnish National Gallery.

This paper addresses the feeling of being at home in time and in place through fieldwork carried out in Mostar, Bosnia and Herzegovina from 2015–2016. Such feelings are needed after a war resulting in geographical displacement as occurred during the breakup of Yugoslavia. This paper argues for the need to see beyond only spatial factors for the ‘making of home’, and therefore considers temporal factors through the role of the heritage in forming narratives, which combine temporal and spatial relations. Alternative narratives to those of ethnic separation are taken into consideration, and it is argued that a sole focus on division may further enforce it rather than lead to its reduction. A sense of disassociation to the current city of Mostar and its narratives has led to the construction of narratives of home within a different time-period (pre-war Mostar). In turn, this may cause nostalgia, passivity, and an ‘othering’ of the newcomers to Mostar. However, there are also cases of employing such a narrative actively in order to envision an alternative future beyond ethnic separation. So far, the institutions working with the heritage of Mostar have not addressed these issues, thus possible ways forward are suggested.