#7 Thinking about history: a day in Røros.

There's a different kind of history in Europe. In North America, much of our material historical past exists below the surface: bones, arrow heads, fossils and the like. How North America sees its history is likely the subject for another blog but in the past year I've been thinking both formally and informally about how we tell and preserve history, how we make it accessible, how we present it, how we preserve it, and how we tell stories about it. I've been reading lots, traveling to a range of historic sites, looking at web resources, and generally just thinking about how history is (re)presented in different countries. Particularly compelling to me have been historical (re)presentations in Ireland and the American South but I've seen some interesting things in Norway as well. 

I will confess to being embarrassingly ignorant about Norwegian history but after a week here, I'm slowly piecing things together.

I mentioned in the last entry that the Art Nouveau museum in Ålesund offered an interesting take on the presentation of the great fire of 1904. In some was, they wanted you to disassociate from today by going into the time machine. But then, in the historical narration of historical accounts (diaries, letters, documents, etc), they had videos of contemporary faces making eye contract with you.

 In a young woman's account, for example, they showed a video of a woman from today in her twenties looking into the camera, meeting your eye, and holding it. A very simple thing yet very powerful. This historical eye contact made the past personal, lived, and undeniably real. 

Our travels in the past few months have brought us to countries from which some of our people emigrated. For me, it was Ireland and that kind of history becomes complexly and emotionally real (perhaps the subject of another blog). Yesterday we were in Røros where some of Dale's family came from and he would be the one to write about that.

Instead, here, I'm thinking about how local history can be presented in very logical yet innovative ways. The example I'm thinking about is the hotel we stayed in. Presumably many of its guests are tourists, why not embed history into the space?

Many large hotels have art or decorations themed around a locale but this hotel did something much different and much more powerful: it embedded the history of the building into its rebuild. A former textile mill, this building had the usual sorts of things one might expect in a repurposed building-- the exterior was the same, original beams and pillars etc were incorporated into the new, modern design.  

All lovely. What really stood out to me however were the ways in which they embedded the building's own history into the repurposed space.  On the floor outside of our rooms, for example, they had three plexiglass boxes built into the flooring: one filled with bobbins, another with cogs, and another filled with something else (not sure what they were).

 Sorry, btw, about the quality of pictures, I didn't notice how bad they were until we left. The other thing that I really liked was how they turned the historical artifacts and documents into aesthetic objects.  

In the hall, a document of some sort (the extent of my Norwegian is hello and thank you) is turned into an art object. In our room, a historic photograph is modified into a different kind of art object and takes up almost all of one large wall and a document of another kind is framed as an aesthetic object.  

Also brilliant is a guide to what you see out the window on the window bench.  Brilliant. Thoughtful. 

History becomes not just something housed in museums or printed words in books. History becomes part of the fabric of the every day.

As I said about Icelandair, using everyday things like paper cups, napkins or hotel art as the means to make your nation's or town's history available and accessible seems like such a logical thing to do. Why then don't more countries do this? Or, maybe my question is really this: why aren't we doing this in Canada?