Text and object: the bus shelter that became cultural heritage

Abstract

In order to meet the increasing critique of official heritage as elitist and hegemonic, several attempts have been made to become more inclusive, participatory and democratic. The Norwegian Directorate for Cultural Heritage undertook an interesting and surprising move when they decided to grant 12 ‘everyday’ sites Special Protection Orders as a contribution to the Norwegian 2009 Cultural Year. An assumption is that such an approach could represent a particular challenge for heritage experts by broadening the perspective on what to include and exclude in their appraisals. This article examines how one of the chosen sites, an unusual bus shelter, was constructed as official heritage, by critically examining the narratives the heritage authorities produced to sustain their listing of this object. A central argument is that the Norwegian heritage authorities contributed to construct the bus shelter as ostensibly harmless by creating it as a symbol of a rather vague local past, while the object from the outset represents a potentially dangerous and ambiguous object containing lots of complex history. It discusses how the textual construction of the bus shelter’s relation to its locality, a small mining community, tends to bolster and reinforce the impression of a masculinist society and a dominant company, and thereby forecloses alternative visions, in contrast with the initial intentions of the everyday perspective on heritage.

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