TRAUM - Transforming Author Museums, 2017

Pictures of two author museums in South Africa.

The project involves an analysis of two South African historic homes that have been turned into museums for authors. The two South African museums are the Sol Plaatje museum in Kimberley and the Olive Schreiner House in Cradock. The main aim of the project is to examine current practices of author museums from contemporary and historical perspectives, with the aim of developing new interpretations of author museums as spaces of knowledge transfer and cultural production. The project aims to investigate how and why (certain) writers and literature have been turned into cultural heritage, helped by the display of auratic places such as their homes in combination with the aestheticization of personal 'relics' within specific cultural-political contexts.