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Lookup NU author(s): Dr Ingrid A. MedbyORCiD
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC 4.0).
© The Author(s) 2020. Ever since its disappearance in the mid-19th-century, the fate of the ‘Franklin expedition’ has attracted interest and intrigue. The story has been told and re-told but remained one of ‘mystery’ into the early 21st-century. When the expedition’s two ships were finally located, the narrative shifted with the reappearance of long-absent objects and materials – in turn, posing challenges for museum curators seeking to re-present the story. In this article, we conduct a side-by-side examination of two sites: the 1845 Franklin expedition in the Northwest Passage and the 2017 Death in the Ice exhibition at the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, UK. We juxtapose these to consider the forces unleashed by the ships’ absence and their presence-ing first in Victorian times and then in the UK museum space today. By analysing the sites through the concept of ‘absent presence’, the agency of both the material and the immaterial is powerfully highlighted. Via an emphasis on the relation of the absent presence to the sensing bodies of others, we consider the concept as simultaneous and co-constitutive. That is, absence and presence ought to be understood not as objective states, but as becoming-absent and becoming-present: processes that are dependent on curated and embodied sensibilities.
Author(s): Medby IA, Dittmer J
Publication type: Article
Publication status: Published
Journal: Environment and Planning D: Society and Space
Year: 2021
Volume: 39
Issue: 1
Pages: 176-193
Print publication date: 01/02/2021
Online publication date: 09/09/2020
Acceptance date: 02/04/2018
Date deposited: 11/08/2021
ISSN (print): 0263-7758
ISSN (electronic): 1472-3433
Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
URL: https://doi.org/10.1177/0263775820953859
DOI: 10.1177/0263775820953859
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