Museumify

It ended with the Chinese Communists, as inheritors of China’s history, “museumifying” the past that their own sense of Chineseness would not comfortably let them denounce in total.

“The trick is not to museumify the landscape, but use it as a positive asset for education and leisure,” he says.[…]But companies such as Carnon Holdings and Geevor Tin Mines do not want to museumify tin mining. They want the industry to continue into the next century.

As our Trip Advisor recommender writes, the memorial in Kilgali “manages to evoke the horror of the genocide while still building hope and commitment, rather than anger and retribution, for the future.” Hope for whom? Is she so sure that anger and retribution can’t be carried out while still pausing for silence in the presence of the museumified dead? Being museumified, the victims don’t have a word, do they?

Near Nanjing in the city of Yangzhou is an extreme version of a museumified site, namely, Yangzhou’s Tianning Temple, otherwise known as the Yangzhou Buddhist Culture Museum (Yangzhou Fojiao Wenhua Bowuguan 扬州佛教文化博物馆).

As the lived memories of the socialist factories dissipate, a cinema that museumifies their ruins and ruination finds a lasting home in the art museum, mediating testimonies from the past into the future.