Understanding traces from the past: An interdisciplinary researcher group visiting a Viking museum

In May 2017, a group of interdisciplinary researchers (a semiotician, two archaeologists, a psychoanalyst, and several cultural psychologists) visited the Viking museum in Aalborg. (The cultural psychologists were interested in abductive reasoning.) The museum has a big outdoor part with Viking graveyards and traces of settlement. The researchers split up in two groups; one started their visit indoors, the other outdoors. Each group started their visit by exploring the site on their own and then discussing their experiences. Afterwards they would go to the other (indoor or outdoor) site and start from the beginning (i.e. alone). The museum was closed for other visitors. A team of video researchers followed both groups outside (with two 360 cameras) and inside (with a 3D camera and a 4G Panasonic) to try and cover as much as possible about their wondering about the site and their discussing together about what they had encountered.A multimodal analysis will show what kind of noticings and imaginations the two different sites (a museum with exhibits and the graveyard with visible remnants of past life) afforded. In other words, there are several institutionalities at play: The educational backgrounds of the participants and the museum as a specific site (Heath and vom Lehn 2004). While indoors objects instigated discussions about them as objects and about the past on a general level, standing on the actual site of practice outdoors seemed to make the participants get closer to the past, ‘go back in time’ to momentarily inhabit the place through past bodies and their perception: They abducted to past agency, past practical reasoning for being there. Heath & vom Lehn (2004). Configuring Reception: (Dis-)Regarding the ‘Spectator’ in Museums and Galleries. Theory, Culture & Society 21(6): 43–65.