The Shape of Memory, 2003–2010

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the interactions between the key players who shaped the institutional form, exhibition narrative and pedagogical goals of the Red Terror Martyrs Memorial Museum (RTMMM). The process included strongly debated differences of opinion. Tracing these debates demonstrates that “memory from the margins” does not take shape as a singular construct in opposition to unified hegemonic memory. Both forms of memory are replete with internal differences. The second part of this chapter provides an introduction to RTMMM’s exhibition, illustrating how these differences remain legible in the Museum’s final structure and exhibition, contributing to tensions between the overarching historical narrative, the precise objects and forms displayed in the exhibition, and the character of lessons that might learned through a visit. In this way, the RTMMM, like other memorial museums, displays memory’s disjunctions between a reference to the past, a present construction of community, and a call to ethics. However, tensions between memory’s composite parts are not a distraction from, but rather constitutive of, the power of a memorial museum experience.