Luigi Micheletti Award

In a ceremony held in the Municipal Council of Timisoara (Romania), the LUIGI MICHELETTI AWARD 2023 was presented to FLUGT, the Denmark Museum of Refugee.

The museum is in the restored hospital of a Second World War refugee camp, with an elegant new space, an exterior structure in iron with a wood interior, which blends quite naturally and very harmoniously. The exhibitions have been designed by Tinker Imagineers, who were also responsible for the nearby museum, Tirpitz. The indoor part includes a traditional exhibition with historic photographs, an astonishing model made by refugees just after the end of the war, and a cinema where historic documentary films are shown. Contemporary stories of refugees from Germany, Hungary, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Syria turn statistics into people and convey the universal experiences, thoughts and emotions associated with the plight of being a human being on the run. The rest of the visit takes the form of a journey, from the lost home (a Hungarian room in 1956 with the shadow of a tank on the window) to the arrival in a safe place, and the new home. The outdoor area, in combination with an audio tour, is authentic because of the landscape, the buildings and the atmosphere of the forest.

The judges said: "This is the first museum in Europe at least, to be dedicated to refugees. To approach such a task is difficult and risky, for cultural and political reasons, and our Danish colleagues have had the courage to couple refugee-heritage with refugee-today – their perspective is not limited to the past. But to put this in another way, they focus on present times because they start from history, from heritage. Escaping from war is a contemporary reality. The museum places itself on a national level: it is a museum on the history of refugees in the history of Denmark connected to the whole world. A worthy winner".