Västerbottens Museum

Prioritet: Minoritet

Västerbottens Museum is a regional museum for the Västerbotten County in the north of Sweden. It is located in the city of Umeå, and one of Sweden’s most visited county museums.

The purpose of Prioritet: Minoritet was to let the exhibition function partly as a method room for expanding the museum’s collection with missing stories and artifacts from the five national minorities of Sweden, and partly a place for deepened knowledge about the cultures and languages of the Jews and Yiddish, the Roma and Romani Chib, the Sami and the Sami languages, the Swedish Finns and Finnish, as well as the Tornedalians and Meänkieli.

The visual concept was based on these gaps that the museum wished to fill. The voids was visualized in the room with elements like empty shelves, podiums and the missing parts of the letters in the logotype. The exhibition space was then continuosly filled with objects and stories during the exhibition as soon as they were donated to the museum by individuals and organisations.

Portfolio photos by Petter Engman/Västerbottens Museum