Conference Program - Texts and Things

Thursday 16 February

09:00-10:00 Registration

10:00 Welcome “Beware, you are part of a laboratory experiment!”

10.15 Plenary session 1: ”Grossraum” as texts and things

Ketil Gjølme Andersen: The politics of space. Approaching National Socialism through OT’s large-scale construction projects.

Henrik Treimo: Bringing the Atlantic Wall into the Museum space. Reflections on the relationship between exhibition making and academic research.

Hans Otto Frøland: The political economy of forced labor in Norway 1940-45. What did the Todt project tell us?

Brita Brenna: Exhibition making as historical resarch and outreach. 

12:00 Lunch

13.00 Plenary session 2: Exhibition making and our access to history

Serge von Arx: Engaging with materiality, text and space: Scenography as research

Nikolai Ssorin-Chaikov: Texts as objects, objects as texts: ethnographic conceptualism.

14.00 Plenary session 2: continues

Rob van der Laarse: Musalisation of the Holocaust and other genocides. 

Christine Glauning: The Nazi Forced Labour Documentation Centre in Berlin-Schöneweide

15.00 Break

15.15 Plenary session 2: continues

Ken Arnold: Thinking Things Through - Knowledge and museum understanding.

15.45 Panel discussion

Potential and challenges regarding exhibition making as research. Moderator: Peter Bjerregaard

16:30 – 18:00 Dinner

18:00 Grossraum - Official exhibition opening

19:00 SENT – public event at the museum

20:00 Public lecture

Gilly Carr: Legacies of forced labour: taboo heritage and archaeology in the Channel Islands

21.00 Public lecture

Serge von Arx: The senses spaces memories - and vice versa (On the responsibility of the artist)

Friday 17 February

10.00 Ulrich Herbert: The Nazi forced labor program and the role of the OT

10.30 Åshild Andrea Brekke: Trust, risk and the art of shifting paradigms –some perspectives on participatory practices and drivers for change in Norwegian museums

11.10 Parallel sessions

1. Todt in comparative perspective

Gunnar Hatlehol: OT and forced labor: The workers of Einsatzgruppe Wiking
Torgeir Sæveraas: OT and the building of Festung Norwegen
Mari Olafson Lundemo: The relationship between Einsatzgruppe Wiking and Einsatz Finnland 

2. The Thing’s method

Henrik Treimo: Introduction to the method and the project Olsen's Telescope

Tone Cecilie Simensen Karlgård: Congo Gaze - People, Encounters and Artifacts
Reidun Johannessen og Gro Røde: Things Talk! Old Things + New people= New Stories?

12:30 Lunch

13.30 Parallel sessions continue

1. Economy and Ideology

Simon Gogl: OT and the use of German private building firms: private enterprise in ideological context
Marianne Neerland Soleim: The use of Soviet POWs in forced labor in Norway and the tension between economic and ideological factors
Mats Ingulstad: Einsatzgruppe Wiking and the Norwegian construction industry

2. The Thing’s method

Geoffrey Gowlland: Trapped 
Ellen Lange: Skeletons in the closet 

15:30 Closing remarks

Ketil Gjølme Andersen: (TBA)