Everyday Histories

In recent years, there has been a growing interest in colonial history, living cultural heritage, and memory work. The present is defined by how we remember and tell our collective stories. To understand how our past shapes social life and cultural encounters today, we must establish dialogue across former power structures. Qualitative research into oral histories and vernacular archives provides new insights into how locally rooted everyday stories intertwine with broader historical events. By focusing on locally anchored stories and archives from settlements in Greenland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands, this project weaves together everyday narratives and archives into a polyvocal mapping made available through exhibitions, workshops, and a digital platform, ensuring that voices often excluded is given space and time to enrich historical awareness.

Through anthropological fieldwork in Greenlandic, Icelandic, and Faroese settlements, combined with exhibitions and a digital platform, the project asks:

What roles do oral histories and vernacular archives play in understanding history and memory work; What is the relationship between materiality, affect, and narrative? and how can these histories and archives be collected, documented, and communicated in new ways?

In collaboration with Aarhus University, Moesgaard Museum, the Greenland National Museum and Archives, the National Museum of Iceland, the National Museum of the Faroe Islands, the National Museum of Denmark, and the Royal Library, this project contributes to:

• A new understanding of how local oral histories and vernacular archives are used in everyday storytelling.
• New methods for collecting and digitising oral histories and vernacular archives.
• Exhibitions, podcasts, and a digital platform.

This project consolidates systematic research methods with innovative collaborations, at a time when there is an increased need for locally rooted narratives, considering recent challenges to dominant colonial historical perspectives.

Through our interdisciplinary collaboration, we provide local and regional knowledge-sharing among local archives and national museums in the three countries, based in existing expertise, through workshops, seminars, and scientific publications, with the aim of developing new theories at the intersection of memory work, materiality, affect, and narrative theory. We facilitate preservation and digitisation of site-specific stories and archival material on a digital platform, as well as the establishment of a protocol for collecting and archiving oral histories and vernacular archives. Finally, we communicate living cultural heritage to a broad audience through experimental approaches to co-creation, workshops, and exhibitions.

Central to this research project are exhibitions, here understood as a unique space for knowledge sharing and dissemination. In the project, exhibitions are conceptualised as collaborative analytical catalysts, from the collection phase, through processing, and later in the final communication phase. By integrating and facilitating locally anchored workshops and exhibitions, which are then developed into national exhibitions and ultimately a joint exhibition and website, they are a key part of the research methodology and data collection.

Christian Vium

Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark

Christian Vium (b. 1980) is Associate Professor in Anthropology at Aarhus University and honorary curator at Moesgaard Museum (DK). Working on long-term projects anchored in participatory methods and in-depth collaboration, he investigates the intersection between art, documentary, and the social sciences. In addition to film and photography, he works increasingly with large-scale immersive installations integrating photography, films, sound, and archive material. His work has been exhibited in 40+ exhibitions.

Vium is Principal Investigator on the research projects ‘Revisioning the African City from the Periphery’ (Independent Research Foundation Denmark, 2024-2028) and ‘Everyday Stories’ (Velux Foundation, 2024-2027). He is finalizing his 20-year research project on irregular migration from Africa to Europe, ‘Departed’, on a Monograph Fellowship from the Carlsberg Foundation. His tripartite monograph ‘Revisited’, will be published in 2025 by SPECTOR books, Leipzig. In 2023-24, he was Associated Research Fellow at the Film Studies Center, Harvard University (US) and part of the CPH:LAB incubator for experimentation and collaboration in creative, cross-disciplinary partnerships across film, the creative arts, science, technology and social entrepreneurship. Christian Vium is a FOAM Talent 2015, Lensculture Emerging Talent 2015 Grant Winner, and is on the Critical Mass 2015 list. In 2016, he received the Prix HSBC pour la Photographie. He is the recipient of the 2024 Reminders Photography Stronghold Grant, was nominated for the 2024 Leica Oscar Barnack Award, and shortlisted for the BMW ART MAKERS grant 2024.

Jeanette Lykkegård

Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark

Jeanette Lykkegård (b. 1981) holds a PhD in anthropology from Aarhus University. She has explored existential questions about meaningfulness and belonging, and how the experience of time, including past, present and future imaginings may play into this. She is particularly interested in those parts of human life which may be explored in the in-between-ness of our existence. The in-between of humans and other beings, living or dead, and in between humans and their surrounding milieu; the landscape, sounds, animals, and materials more broadly. Her research interests have been highly inspired by her PhD fieldwork among the Chukchi in Northern Kamchatka, and their animist way of experiencing life.

Lykkegård is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the research project ‘Everyday Histories’ at the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University. During her PhD work, she was affiliated with EPICENTER – Centre for cultural epidemics (Aarhus University) and the research project ‘Death, Materiality and the Origin of Time’ (Aarhus University). During her PhD, she was a visiting scholar at Scot Polar Institute, Cambridge University. Since then, she has been a postdoc in the project ‘Materialities of Home’ (Velux Foundation, 2020-24). Lykkegård experiments with a combination of text, photography, sound, video and other materials in her research methods as well as dissemination. She has had an ongoing collaboration with Moesgaard Museum since 2011 and has contributed with her work to various research-based exhibitions and events there. Most recently (2023-2024) her work with Ukrainian refugees in Denmark, has been exhibited at Museum Sønderjylland, Sønderborg slot.

Peter Kærgaard Andersen

Postdoctoral Fellow
Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark

Peter Kærgaard Andersen (b. 1988) is an interdisciplinary researcher whose work blends artistic practice, participatory and socially engaged methodologies with thinking across post- and environmental humanities. Often drawing on situated and concrete encounters with communities, landscapes and archives, his research relates aesthetic and poetic experimentation to topics such as place, belonging, memory, time, technology and mobility. Using a range of new media apparatuses, including filmmaking, textiles, and photography, his work merges human and more-than-human perspectives. 

Andersen is a Postdoctoral Fellow in the research project ‘Everyday Histories’ at the Department of Anthropology, Aarhus University. He holds a PhD in Digital Humanities from the University of Genova (2022). Recently, he has been an artist-in-residence in the EU S+T+ARTS initiative, MUSAE (2023-2024), where he explored collaborations between art, science, and technology within the food sector. He has also lately served as a fellow in project ARTéCHO (2023-2024) and as an artist-in-residence at Art Center Rønnebæksholm as part of the ‘Communities in the Garden’ project. Andersen’s work has been widely exhibited and screened at numerous cultural and research institutions.

Kirsten Hastrup

Professor Emeritus
Department of Anthropology
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark

Mette Sandbye

Professor
Department of Arts and Cultural Studies
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark

Kirsten Thisted

Associate Professor
Department of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies
University of Copenhagen
Copenhagen, Denmark

Marianne Holm Pedersen

Senior Researcher
Royal Danish Library
Copenhagen, Denmark

Anne Mette Randrup Jørgensen

Director
Danish Arctic Institute
Copenhagen, Denmark

Helga Vollertsen

Curator of Ethnology
National Museum of Iceland
Reykjavik, Iceland

Jóna Símonía Bjarnadóttir

Director
Byggðasafn Vestfjarða
Ísafjörður, Iceland

Kristina Djurhuus Christiansen

Curator
Faroe Islands National Museum
Tórshavn, Faroe Islands

Kári Jespersen

Director
Tvøroyrar bygda- og sjóvinnusavn
Tvøroyri, Faroe Islands

Siri Andreasen

Director
Tvøroyrar skjalasavn
Tvøroyri, Faroe Islands

Carina Jerimiassen

Clerk
Uummaannaaq Museum
Uummaannaaq, Greenland

Christian Vium

Associate Professor
Department of Anthropology
Aarhus University
Aarhus, Denmark

cvium@cas.au.dk
+45 2980 2639