Museums to Workers: Negotiating Industrial Heritage From Below

The paper highlights intersections, tensions, and overlaps between global processes such as de-industrialization, change of the attitude towards collective and manual work, the transition from industrial manufacture to digital technologies, museumization of industrial past (particularly present in Europe and often negotiated as a hallmark of European identity) on the one hand, and personal and generational perceptions of local labor histories and negotiations of one’s position within these histories, on the other. It focuses on activites of Society of Friends of the IMV (Industry of Motor Wehicles), a socialist car factory in Novo Mesto (Slovenia). The Society's membership consists of former factory workers, today pensioneers, who invested enormous efforts to present the factory history as local cultural heritage, and to include this heritage into broader/national and institutionalized framework of heritage discourses. With support of local institutions and individuals, Society organized an exibition of IMV's products and displayed history of local car industry in form of museum narrative, which does not only give legitimacy to the former socialist industry, but also to the socialist past as essential part of biographies of the society's members involved in creating of the exhibition. The paper will pay particular attention to the affect that emerges in the encounter between society's members and museumized narrative of their past, as well as in the ways in which that narrative accommodates former workers' affects.