Papers by Torgeir Rinke Bangstad
Journal of Contemporary Archaeology, 2022
In the course of modern museum history, a variety of toxic chemicals have been used to prevent th... more In the course of modern museum history, a variety of toxic chemicals have been used to prevent the deterioration of collected objects. The residues of pesticides and preservatives now persist together with the objects they were intended to protect. These chemical conservation technologies are intimately bound up with the unpredictable material agencies that are characteristic of the legacy of Anthropocene residues on a planetary scale. However, chemicals also form part of local, domestic, everyday worlds where they were used to maintain order, prevent loss and ensure material coherence. In this article I investigate Norwegian open-air museums as sites where new chemical products with pesticidal and protective properties were domesticated and placed on trial in the battle against "museum pests" and the decay of wooden buildings. By exploring carbon-based chemicals derived from the waste products of coke production, I reflect on the material convergence of waste and heritage in preserved buildings and how in the early and mid-twentieth century museum conservation came to rely on these unpredictable and highly persistent chemical agents.
Ethnologia Scandinavica, 2024
This article presents a historical overview of the role that chemical conservation methods played... more This article presents a historical overview of the role that chemical conservation methods played in Norwegian open-air museums as their building collections expanded during the first decades of the 20th century. The argument is that persistent hazardous residues are part of the heritage of the conservation discipline itself as it transitioned from a crafts-based to a chemically-driven conservation regime. The use of toxic preservatives and pesticides in building conservation is considered here as a specific method of caring for objects by detaching them from environmental degradation, which in turn shifts conservation from a traditional crafts context to a modern scientific chemical practice. We employ the term "toxic heritage" to refer to the material and cultural practices that became intimately connected with modern industrial chemicals in attempts to secure and enhance the longevity of these collections. The relationship between conservation and chemical agents is discussed in relation to the similarities between museum institutions and scientific laboratories, focusing on the manipulations that objects undergo in both settings.
Museums and social issues: A Journal of Reflective Discourse, 2022
This article explores what repair might mean in the context of enduring toxic legacies of past mu... more This article explores what repair might mean in the context of enduring toxic legacies of past museum practice. For centuries, museums have applied a wide range of pesticidal and preservative chemicals on objects to prevent insect infestation and material decay. This paper theorizes such chemicals as a significant museum technology which aided the perpetuation of museum objects, and both responded to and facilitated further growth of colonial collections in European museums. The case study examines both past practices of pesticide treatment in ethnographic museums and their effects on the repatriation of Sámi cultural artefacts today.
Heritage is often seen as a symptom of a temporally disjointed and all-pervasive present which sh... more Heritage is often seen as a symptom of a temporally disjointed and all-pervasive present which shapes the pasts it requires to make up for the failures of linear, modern and progressive history. As a consequence, the pasts in heritage are often regarded as the result of unidirectional processes of attributing value to largely compliant materials. This article explores the constitutive role of materials in different stages of heritage-making and stress the specific material memory of buildings as central in the negotiation of temporalities in conservation practice. The notion of material memory allows for a closer consideration of both the unsolicited material effects of past events that is part of the historical fabric of buildings, as well as their ongoing transformation exceeding any one unitary and neatly contained historical present.
Heritage Ecologies, Jun 21, 2021
This chapter discusses the interstices between a consciously designed heritage space and spontane... more This chapter discusses the interstices between a consciously designed heritage space and spontaneous memory ecology. The German term Industrienatur, which forms the backbone of the case study, recognizes the specific ecological conditions in post-industrial, anthropogenic settings and identifies some key characteristics of environments that are formed by humans and yet continue to transform beyond human control. Industrial decline engenders a range of long-term political affects that spread far and wide, and in the ambiguous memory terrain, the ecological focus may be seen as politically dubious and shallow – a greenwashed industrial heritage which engenders forgetfulness. The value and challenge of recent work in the tradition of media ecology in relation to heritage and cultural memory, is that it conceives of media in the broadest possible sense as relays that engender connections, contract forces and channels energies. Categorized as mural vegetation, wall-rue commonly occurs in heritage contexts, both on fairly recent brick wall buildings and on old chalky, stone walls.
Published version available at http://ojs.novus.no/index.php/TFK/article/view/1733This essay expl... more Published version available at http://ojs.novus.no/index.php/TFK/article/view/1733This essay explores the entangled material and biological afterlife of coal and steel industries in the German Ruhr region. The industrial nature, Industrienatur, of the heritage site Kokerei Hansa in Dortmund serves as starting point for a broader reflection on both the nature of memory and the memory of nature. Drawing on new materialist theory and media ecology, the ambition of this paper is to contribute to a versatile notion of memory processes which are wildly distributed across a variety of forms and media from buildings, landscapes, man-made substrates to ruderal plant species. Adopting an ecological approach, this essay explores the volatile relations between plants, buildings and anthropogenic substrates as an important, but ultimately ephemeral form of memory which recollects past practices of the former coke plant. Industrienatur draws attention to the composite character of sites which are...
Rethinking Historical Time
Heritage Ecologies, Jun 21, 2021
The study of heritage concerns fundamental questions about the human condition in the contemporar... more The study of heritage concerns fundamental questions about the human condition in the contemporary world. The right to control define and actively engage with one’s own heritage is increasingly framed as a fundamental human rights issue, as visible in twentieth-century articulations of an ever wider, political commitment to preserve the world’s cultural and natural diversity to make it accessible for present and future generations. The boundaries enforced through such toxic practices reflect that heritage is host to a wider non-human constituency, a “heritage biota” – “communities of organisms living on and in built heritage” that also partake in its transformation. An ecological understanding of heritage builds on the recognition that a heritage object often exceeds its historically specific figuration and is subject both to “creaturely” material change and dynamic practices of valuation. The chapter also presents an overview on the key concepts discussed in this book.
Tidsskrift for kulturforskning, 2017
Much recent theorizing in philosophy of history has revolved around the idea of enduring, persist... more Much recent theorizing in philosophy of history has revolved around the idea of enduring, persistent pasts as opposed to the proto-modern sense of time which presupposes a neat break between the absent past and the present. This article draws on examples from memory studies, archaeology, art history, law and theory of history to explain the idea of the persistence of the past, and to suggest that it constitutes a way to offset the distanced relation to the past as an idea(l) in historic research. It also aims to investigate what precisely is meant by «presentism» and «presence-paradigm», and to examine how these perspectives differ with regard to how the past is understood. It is claimed that one important difference can be found in the weight accorded to the agentive dimension of the past in the present. Presence theorists argue that we can literally be moved by the past in ways we are not able to predict or veto, while presentism implies an omnipresent present which fabricates the pasts which are needed or desired. The relation to the past in the age of presentism is shaped by a sense of crisis and a lack of confidence in the future which, it is argued, spawned our current obsession with memory and heritage. Presence theorists, in contrast, argue that to be moved by the past involves a more direct, experiential relation which is not necessarily filtered through present needs or intentions.
Norsk museumstidsskrift, Nov 20, 2017
Postdoktor i samtidsarkeologi ved Institutt for arkeologi, historie, religionsvitenskap og teolog... more Postdoktor i samtidsarkeologi ved Institutt for arkeologi, historie, religionsvitenskap og teologi ved UiT-Norges Arktiske Universitet. (f. 1982) Deltar i det tverrfaglige forskningsprosjektet «Object Matters: Archaeology and Heritage in the 21st Century», hvor han forsker på et gjenreisningshus fra Olderfjord i Finnmark som skal gjenoppføres på Norsk Folkemuseum.
Materialities, Aesthetics and the Archaeology of the Recent Past, 2012
Published in Paris, ICOFOM, 2019 ISBN: 978-92-9012-461-0 (paper version) ISBN: 978-92-9012-462-7 ... more Published in Paris, ICOFOM, 2019 ISBN: 978-92-9012-461-0 (paper version) ISBN: 978-92-9012-462-7 (electronic version) 1. Ibid., 140.
Culture Unbound: Journal of Current Cultural Research, 2011
In this article, the recent proliferation of cultural heritage routes and networks will be analyz... more In this article, the recent proliferation of cultural heritage routes and networks will be analyzed as an attempt to animate and revitalize idle artefacts and landscapes. With a specific focus on the sedentary, immobile sites of former industrial production, it will be claimed that the route is an appropriate and understandable way of dealing with industrial sites that have lost their stable place in a sequence of productions. If the operational production site is understood as a place of where, above all, function and efficiency guide the systematic interaction between labour, raw material and technology, then the absence of this order is what makes an abandoned factory seem so isolated and out of place. It becomes disconnected from the web of production of which it was part and from which it gained its meaning and stability. In this regard, it makes sense to think of industrial heritage routes as an effort to bring the isolated site back into place. Following Barbara Kirshenblatt ...
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Papers by Torgeir Rinke Bangstad