Sada aastat armastust: ühest mälestuste kogumise võistlusest Harjumaa Muuseumis
100 years of love: About a memoir competition at the Harju County Museum

Summary/Abstract: The Harju County Museum held a memoir collecting competition from February 14 to September 1, 2019, with the goal to collect love-themed memories throughout the ages. The organizing team wanted to highlight the themes pertaining to love, which previously had often been only briefly mentioned. The museum’s competition was directly inspired by the Estonian Literary Museum’s 2015–2017 life stories competition, “Estonia 100: My Life and Love”. After analysing these collected memories, it was clear that the participants were writing about the subject of love rather cautiously. The ambition of the Harju County Museum’s competition was to amass written memories of experiences concerning love – a subject of study not often found in museums’ archives.The organizers started outlining the competition by specifying its target group. Who is a typical contestant and what would they write about love? The team was aware that it would be much easier for the participants to share their memories of the things widely accepted in society. Although the intention was to give the writers as much freedom as possible in sharing their memories, the team felt that the participants should also be encouraged to write about more unsettling or delicate experiences related to love (e.g. complications, taboos). To break the silence surrounding the taboo themes, it was specifically stated that stories of more negative experiences were also welcome. The central message of the petition was: everyone is welcome to share their stories, and the aim is not to collect just ‘proper’ love experience memories.The competition was advertised on social media, in libraries, press and public spaces. Furthermore, the organizers targeted some of the advertisements to underrepresented groups in the museum’s collections: the Estonian-Russian community and the LGBT+ people (two interviews were conducted with the latter). All in all, the museum received 16 diverse stories and one object. Remembrance of the Soviet period remained dominant in the memoirs, although both earlier and more recent times were also recalled. Memories of finding oneself, first loves and relationships, dating, courting, marrying, having children and raising them were some of the more carefree subjects written about; however, some memoirs touched on more painful experiences: a broken heart, a violent partner, a toxic relationship, grief, difficult decisions, escaping home, yearning and remorse.

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