As part of the Horizon2020 European MSCA funded project, SPEME Questioning Traumatic Heritage: Spaces of Memory in Europe, Argentina, Colombia, students of the Master’s programs of Heritage and Memory Studies, Museum Studies, Cultural Studies and History at the University of Amsterdam present a research and multimedia installation which includes two-part podcasts illuminating traumatic heritages and competing narratives in the Netherlands.

Objects & Stories is a research exhibition that combines tangible objects of trauma with personal stories and oral histories from witnesses and subsequent generations to shed light on the complexities of trauma, (post)-remembering, and heritage narratives in the present. Recounted through the lens of object biographies, these personal stories encompass several cases of traumatic pasts connected to the Netherlands such as the Second World War, the Srebrenica genocide, and the colonial heritage to re-imagine that constitutes ‘ traumatic heritages’ and ‘victim-perpetrator dualities’. Through a multimedia approach, viewers are invited to reflect upon how competing narratives of the past are negotiated and reconfigured in archives, cultural practices, and public spaces. Why and how do we remember traumatic histories? Who remembers and who forgets, and how are memories narrated, silenced, or forgotten?