The museum is the place where history, a story, is recorded.
But what is history?
Is it a chronology?
Is it a set of events?
Is it a people?
A heritage?
Newspapers?
Books?
History is not a universal truth, history is a subjective interpretation of a current or old event. In other words, history is a sort of individual truth in which everyone has their own ideas. We cannot rewrite history, but it is easy for us to select, shorten, retain or throw elements into the background of contexts, to be influenced or appealed to.
Constructing commemorative objects in public spaces, museums, monuments in memory of the dead, statues, street/place names have become the ways to create both temporal and permanent markers of the ideology of a nation. These markers make up a chronology, a study of time, the memory that each society wishes to safeguard and exploit to the benefit of its interests.
George Orwell wrote in his novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Is that not the idea that seizes certain historical museums? Through the historical forms of imagery and writing, this project is an invitation to the appropriation of the concept of history in a civil society whose identity base is destroyed.
