By Saskia Schindler

Imagine entering a room with a big cross in its center. The cross is not out of wood, it is an over-sized cross shaped out of a wall like a passage to the other side of the wall. Perhaps it symbolizes a transit zone between two worlds. The wall is painted with crosses, either they are falling or ascending. Imagine bells starting to ring and the light brightening when you are getting closer to the hallway. When you are in front of the cross you are surrounded by light and the sound of ringing bells. Perhaps you start to feel blessed and stocked in the moment.

This installation is included in the exhibition Magt og Mennesker (People and Power) at Roskilde Museum. You will find it in the first room about the middle ages in Roskilde and Denmark including the history of Christianity. We see on the two walls, which meet to form the ‘cross-hallway’, explanations about the connection and entanglement of the church and the king in Denmark. It wants to give us historical information. It says that the church needed kings to guarantee peace and financial support. However, the king did not have total power; he was dependent on the church which needed to issue the blessing for his legitimization.

What feelings does the installation produce and what is intended to be transported towards the audience? The reading of the installation is linked to an understanding of historicity, what normality is supposed to be and social affiliation. It is connected to the present.

I, as a person born and almost entirely grown up in Germany, do understand the installation with my specific background, but in a broader sense I am wondering, if it only draws a picture about past relationships or doesn’t it rather show us something about contemporary convictions?

Encountering such a representation of Christian belief cannot be interpreted without acknowledging contemporary circumstances. Even though the museum wants us to learn something about the relationship between the king and the church in the past, how it is installed reflects a lot about current social structures. It includes a double sense about how Christianity as such is still a present institution. We should negotiate the influence of the church into societies and how Christian beliefs are still set as a social norm. In the case of Denmark, the distinctive feature of Folkekirken needs to be considered.

Being forced to endure the presence of bell-ringing, lights and crosses is a reflection on European religious self-perception. Instead of feeling blessed you also could feel annoyed, distracted or embattled. However, the decision to represent an cross, a symbol which is obviously connected to a specific religious belief tells something about the imagined normality, which we can find in almost all of Europe. It is more ‘normal’ to be surrounded by Christian symbols than by symbols of other religions. Even if Roskilde has a Muslim history, the information about the Islamic community in Roskilde is rather small and concentrated in one little vitrine. What would it tell us if we would find a minaret in the middle of a room and the Adhān would start every time someone was approaching it? Perhaps a more diverse and complete picture about Roskilde/Denmark, as we find mosques in Denmark as well as in Roskilde. But we don’t find an over-sized installation of a Muslim symbol in the middle of an exhibition about town history. How Muslim and Christian history is presented mirrors a specific historicity and a precise understanding of current society and imagined norms.