ABSTRACT
The curators at the folk museum have reconstructed something that resembles a realistic lived-environment. The only living human occupation of the nursery at the museum involves museumgoers. The nursery at the Norsk Folkemuseum is probably the only concrete manifestation of an Ibsenien nursery outside of the imagination of readers and theatergoers. Sandberg uses Ibsen’s empty chair to exemplify an unoccupied but highly productive space created by the “placeholder techniques of spatial effigy” found in modern spectator culture, including wax, folk, open-air and natural history museums. The empty nursery at the Norsk Folkemuseum is a kind of “effigy” or “trace space,” evoking both “missing persons” and concrete historical spaces. The transparent barrier between spectatorial and display spaces also breaks the “promise of unlimited access” found in other spaces in the folk museum, while the nursery room remains “visually available” to visitors. “A Doll House—1879” allows museumgoers to walk into a home, a staging inspired by a realist work of literature.
