Descendants of the modernist museum: tracing the musealisation of Swedish national parks

Abstract

Swedish national parks face a shift, transforming them from spaces where tourism is a sub-interest into spaces where tourism is a primary focus. Through the establishment of new instructive installations, the intention is to make these parks Europe’s most popular nature-based tourism destinations. Such installations construct the non-human world, often depicted as nature, and contribute to shaping human understandings of nature. In this article, I seek to trace, make visible, and problematize how knowledge of nature is put to work and how power operates through these installations, but also how the non-human world is produced visually, and how all of this produces specific ways of seeing it. This is enabled by a discourse analysis with visual ethnographic influences, in which I focus on representations with an emphasis on design, content, and posed rationality. The analysis is designed in a reflexive-explorative manner, where the empirical context leads the analytical direction while the research process and its steps are presented systematically. Through this analysis, I argue that the national parks are transformed into museological organisations similar to the modernist museum, centred around educating visitors by displaying ‘real nature,’ and that this has implications for how the non-human world is understood. The most prominent of these is that a distance is promoted between the tourists and the non-human world.