engleski

A Box, a Suitcase, a Museum. Photographic Records of Croatian Immigrants to the United States

The collections, exhibitions, and the corresponding catalogs of the former Emigration Museums from Zagreb and Split are an archive removed from a stable geographic, institutional, social, or political context. The museum’s collection, and the exhibition formats that temporarily archived the source materials associated with emigration, mediated knowledge by using photographs as crucial evidence. Textual documentation has a shaky, but nevertheless unbreakable relationship with photography. Over the years, the archive has been reorganized and its holdings subjected to a kind of negotiation to which new modes of structuring and, finally, understanding are subjected. Among the studied sources, answers to the question about encounters between two different cultures have offered a range of visual confirmations about what can potentially be adopted as general knowledge. Particular stories that arrive via contemporary channels may not provide a particularly serious challenge to the existing frames but will allow for a change in the viewers’ way of seeing. The discussed fragments form a representational frame within which the social environment changes the context of the archive, museum, and exhibition. This representational frame is thus opened to the practices of the ephemeral and the everyday, in which, with the help of photography, it is possible to recognize numerous previously untold emigrant narratives.

archive ; photography ; Emigration Museum ; Zagreb ; Split ; United States of America ; cultural encounter+

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