Dissolving objects: Museums, atmosphere and the creation of presence

This article takes its point of departure in the current attention to the materiality of objects in museum display. Recent literature (Classen and Howes, 2006; Dudley, 2010, 2012; Pye, 2007) has stressed the need for museums to focus more explicitly on objects and their capacity to create experiences. While appreciating this approach the article argues that in order to understand the perspectives opened by such experiences, we need to go beyond a focus on objects as such. On basis of analyses of two ethnographic exhibitions it is argued that rather than the objects per se, what is at the root of museum experience is atmosphere – the in-betweenness of objects and subjects. Rather than making the absent (past or distant) present, atmosphere creates a presence as such, an affective space which disturbs our everyday concepts of the world. This perspective makes it possible to consider the museum not as a storehouse of the past, but as a bridgehead (Runia, 2006) to the future, allowing us for a short while to imagine futures that go beyond our present conception of the world.