Affective Collecting: Ethics, Emotions, and Collecting the Holocaust

Before curation, there is collection. Before visitors engage with objects in an exhibition, collection managers engage with the objects and, in some cases, also the donors. It makes sense that especially when difficult pasts are involved, collection managers have affective encounters with the materiality before visitors do. So why has the affective turn focused mainly on engaging visitors’ emotions? In this reflection, I work backward from the ethics of curating Holocaust materiality—particularly the ethics of visitors’ affective engagement with this materiality—to focus on the ethics of collecting Holocaust materiality, with a focus on the affective engagement of the individuals collecting this material.