The Labubuification of Trauma: How Fenix Turns Migration into Affective Design

article

DATE

03 Mar 2026

AUTHOR

Alexander Burenkov

The Labubuification of Trauma: How Fenix Turns Migration into Affective Design

AUTHOR

Alexander Burenkov

"The museum’s entertaining “architecture of affects” and its flat, conflict-free, commodified, and maximally user-friendly exhibitions are not isolated curatorial or architectural missteps. They are symptoms of a broader institutional transformation that can be described as the labubuification of the museum—a process through which complex, traumatic, and politically charged realities are translated into a regime of managed emotions, visual legibility, and consumable experience."

In May 2025, the Fenix Museum opened in Rotterdam—an international museum of art and migration, housed in a restored early twentieth-century industrial warehouse on the Katendrecht Peninsula. The idea of rebirth, encapsulated in the image of a phoenix rising from the ashes, became central to the museum’s identity, promising not only the revitalisation of an abandoned port area but also the symbolic resurrection of a city imagined as rising from its ruins. Yet this very metaphor, which underpins the creation of a new icon on Rotterdam’s skyline, is profoundly ambiguous and deeply problematic.

The phoenix, as invoked here, proposes rebirth without remainder: a purification that depends on the erasure of history rather than its reckoning. Within the framework of a museum ostensibly devoted to migration, this metaphor marks a decisive curatorial pivot—away from the violence, exploitation, and colonial political economies that historically generated migration flows (not least those from Europe to the so-called New World, departing from ports such as Rotterdam), and toward an abstracted, depoliticised narrative of “human movement,” renewal, and affirmative transformation. History is no longer a site of struggle or contestation; it is rendered fluid, smoothed into continuity, symbolically liquefied and melted down.

More troubling still is the exhibition’s wholesale devaluation of migration as a political and material condition. The museum’s director and curatorial team repeatedly advance the claim that “we are all migrants” in one way or another—a gesture of false equivalence that collapses structural asymmetries into a vacuous universalism. Under this logic, the experiences of displaced, racialised, and precarious populations are rhetorically aligned with those of white, economically secure Europeans who traverse continents for professional mobility. The result is a permanent exhibition that aspires to neutrality yet achieves only an anaemic consensus, its narrative conspicuously absent despite five years of research. Migration is thus reframed not as conflict, not as a terrain of struggle shaped by global inequality, border regimes, and historical violence, but as an ontological condition—an almost existential metaphor for movement itself. In evacuating migration of its antagonisms, the museum forfeits its critical responsibility, substituting political analysis with a consolatory humanism that ultimately serves to stabilise, rather than interrogate, the structures that make migration a matter of life and death for some, and lifestyle choice for others.

The visual centrepiece of the building, designed by the Chinese architectural firm MAD Architects, is a spectacular double-helix staircase known as the Tornado, intended to symbolise migration routes and movement through space and time. This comically absurd structure—reminiscent of water-park toboggans or the participatory slides of Carsten Höller (one of which famously occupies the LUMA Foundation in Arles)—quickly became the museum’s defining image. As it turns out, it is also its primary content. The extravagant architectural gesture appears to serve a singular purpose: to distract attention from the exhibition programme and to soften any remaining sharp edges. The rounded, frictionless forms of the central staircase function less as a spatial metaphor than as an instrument of affective pacification, privileging spectacle and architectural experience over critical engagement. In their ceaseless curves and continuous flow, they mirror the logic of global circulation itself—movement abstracted from friction, stripped of labor, conflict, or structural resistance.

Despite the acute political urgency of migration in the Netherlands today, Fenix opened with a series of large-scale yet strikingly toothless and conceptually opaque exhibitions, effectively transforming migration into a bland, consumable spectacle. Most surprisingly, two of the three flagship projects rely heavily on recognisable precedents rather than advancing any distinct curatorial proposition. The welcoming interactive sound installation—a labyrinth composed of two thousand suitcases containing recorded migrant testimonies—offers a theatrical soundwalk saturated with infographics and emotional cues. Yet the gesture is immediately legible as a reference to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum’s permanent collection, which preserves thousands of suitcases confiscated from those deported to the camp, many bearing their owners’ names, birth dates, and addresses. In Auschwitz, these objects function as material evidence of individual lives and deaths, anchoring the museum’s memorial and pedagogical mission. At Fenix, by contrast, the suitcase is aestheticised and abstracted, repurposed as a scenographic device within an immersive experience that risks evacuating historical specificity in favour of affect.

A similar logic governs The Family of Migrants, a deeply derivative exhibition explicitly modelled on Edward Steichen’s canonical The Family of Man (1955). Bringing together nearly two hundred photographs from fifty-five countries, the exhibition assembles a predictable humanist montage. The original Family of Man—conceived a decade after World War II, amid the Cold War and the looming threat of nuclear annihilation—advanced an almost utopian thesis: that humanity constituted a single family despite differences of culture, language, and politics. Since the 1970s, however, this naïve humanism—its erasure of class, racial, and political antagonisms, its Western liberal worldview masquerading as universality, and its depoliticisation of violence and inequality—has been subject to sustained critique. Roland Barthes’s famous charge that The Family of Man transforms history into “the natural order of things” remains particularly incisive. While Steichen’s exhibition was undeniably influential—pioneering emotional montage as an alternative to neutral museum display and laying the groundwork for contemporary immersive exhibition design—its limitations are by now well rehearsed. In an era defined by war, forced migration, and digitally fragmented publics, the question of whether a universal humanist language is still possible, or whether it inevitably excludes, is more pressing than ever. Fenix raises this question only to leave it unresolved, offering no convincing curatorial answer.

The museum’s core exhibition, All Directions: Art That Moves You, brings together more than 150 artworks and historical objects, including works by Francis Alÿs, Cornelia Parker, and Do Ho Suh. True to its title, the exhibition moves in every conceivable direction. Its artistic and documentary materials are radically heterogeneous, yet insufficiently articulated through any coherent curatorial logic. With clear visual and thematic echoes of the 2024 Venice Biennale’s main exhibition, Foreigners Everywhere, Fenix’s curatorial strategy feels uncannily as if Adriano Pedrosa’s project had been reassembled not by a human curator, but by a ChatGPT. Canonical works by Allan Sekula are juxtaposed with projects by young, newly naturalised Dutch artists of Caribbean and African descent, such as Raquel van Haver, producing a sensation of compulsive inclusion and curatorial guilt rather than argument or articulation. There is no discernible thesis—only accumulation. At Fenix, almost any project addressing migration, or produced by artists marked as migrants, appears admissible, provided it can be indexed under keywords such as “intimacy,” “home,” or even “love,” forming the basis of what is described here as a “flat hierarchy.” The unexpected appearance of Robert Indiana’s LOVE sculpture within the exhibition reads as an inadvertent curatorial confession: regardless of the structural violence, precarity, and political abandonment faced by refugees, it is ultimately love—rather than humanitarian infrastructure, political struggle, or material redistribution—that is offered as redemption. Migration, in this framing, may be challenging, but it is ultimately rendered palatable, even enjoyable—if occasionally disorienting.

The museum’s entertaining “architecture of affects” and its flat, conflict-free, commodified, and maximally user-friendly exhibitions are not isolated curatorial or architectural missteps. They are symptoms of a broader institutional transformation that can be described as the labubuification of the museum—a process through which complex, traumatic, and politically charged realities are translated into a regime of managed emotions, visual legibility, and consumable experience. As with the globally popular Labubu figurine, ambiguity, historical density, and conflict are abandoned in favour of immediate affective gratification. Trauma is reduced to a three-step formula: learned, felt, satisfied. Fenix’s architecture does not operate as a space for reflection, but as a scripted scenario of experience. Visitors are invited to feel—to be surprised, moved, reassured—yet are asked neither for intellectual effort nor for ethical positioning. Migration ceases to function as a political process and instead becomes an emotional atmosphere. In this sense, Fenix operates as a post-narrative museum. Stories of displacement and refuge are no longer unfolded temporally or situated within specific structures of power, violence, and economic extraction. They are presented instead as universal, abstract human conditions: suffering, hope, journey, home. This reduction renders the narrative globally palatable while simultaneously stripping it of historical urgency and political consequence.

The museum’s strategy of depoliticising Fenix bears an uncanny resemblance to the theme-park aesthetics of the immersive museums developed by the Japanese collective teamLab. These environments champion “aesthetic escapism”: the systematic refusal of conflict and the construction of frictionless spaces that neutralise the critical force of art. Despite their radically different subject matter and visual languages, the Fenix Museum in Rotterdam and teamLab’s digital spectacles enact two variations of the same institutional gesture—the translation of complex, antagonistic realities into curated experiences that are legible, affectively pleasing, and politically safe. Where teamLab invokes nature, Buddhist and Shinto cosmology, and boundless continuity, Fenix mobilises migration. Yet in both cases, narrative humanisation functions as a softening mechanism, demonstrating how readily critical potential can be surrendered and converted into a form of emotional management. Conflict is not denied outright; it is absorbed, aestheticised, and rendered harmless through immersion.

Fenix explicitly appeals to empathy, and it is precisely here that a fundamental contradiction emerges. Empathy, when severed from political analysis, operates not as a pathway to understanding but as a technology of depoliticisation. Visitors are encouraged to feel, to contemplate the abstract figure of “the human,” but not to interrogate the structures of power, governance, and inequality that render migration a site of violence rather than merely a condition of movement. At feel good museum model of Fenix, it is embedded within an affective economy designed to absorb conflict, buffer the viewer from implication, and neutralise antagonism. The result is an experience that is emotionally engaging yet structurally inert—one that manages feeling while foreclosing political thought.

Who benefits from such a bland institutional format? The Fenix Museum was initiated and financed by the private philanthropic foundation Droom en Daad, established by the Van der Vorm family, owners of the shipping conglomerate HAL Investments. The foundation has become a central investor in Rotterdam’s cultural infrastructure—from the Depot Boijmans to Fenix—positioning itself as the engine of the city’s “new cultural renaissance.” When a museum devoted to migration is produced by capital historically entangled with global logistics, port economies, and transnational flows of goods and labour, it inevitably operates within a tightly bounded framework of permissible discourse. Having become a catalyst for the urban transformation of Katendrecht, the museum nevertheless appears curiously detached from the everyday realities of migrant communities themselves. Whether migrants living in Rotterdam are meaningfully involved in shaping the museum’s programmes remains an open question. Likewise unresolved is whether the city’s structural migration issues have been addressed at all, or whether public attention and resources have been overwhelmingly channelled into the production of a new architectural landmark.

The labubuification of Fenix is further evident in its treatment of the visitor, who is no longer positioned as a witness or participant in a complex historical narrative, but as a user navigating an affective interface. The exhibition does not ask visitors to take a stance; it offers identification without responsibility. Empathy does not lead to understanding, but functions as a mechanism of moral reassurance. Mirroring the blind-box logic of collectible character culture, the museum experience is fragmented and serialised. Individual stories and visual moments exist as autonomous emotional units, detachable from one another and from any structural analysis. Migration is thus transformed into a sequence of digestible affects. What is missing is a direct, sharply political narrative capable of engaging with contemporary anti-immigration debates in Europe and with concrete instances of institutional violence against migrants—precisely the kind of confrontation that might have generated a genuinely urgent public discourse within Dutch society. Instead, Fenix privileges “universal human stories” and emotional resonance over political struggle. Migration does not disrupt the museum’s space, does not fracture its smooth surfaces, and does not challenge the visitor’s comfort. On the contrary, suffering is seamlessly absorbed into architectural spectacle, where pain becomes a visual resource and solidarity an experience without consequence.

Labubu, as a character, is devoid of narrative and therefore perfectly suited for projection. The Fenix Museum operates as the institutional analogue of this gesture: it offers an empty form in which the complex realities of migration are replaced by the visitor’s personal emotions. Politics dissolves into affect; history collapses into design. Insufficiently intense and excessively aestheticised to articulate the realities of contemporary migration crises, Fenix’s artistic programme should not be understood merely as simplification or populism. It represents a full-fledged labubuification of the museum and of migration discourse itself. By transforming the institution into a machine for managing affect, the curatorial framework replaces ethics with atmosphere and critical knowledge with empathetic consumption. In this mode, the museum ceases to function as a site of memory and conflict and becomes instead a zone of safe participation—one in which trauma can be experienced without risk.

While the Fenix appears hesitant to critically engage with the realities of contemporary Dutch migration policy, offering little space for those who confront its bureaucratic violence, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam presented last fall a striking counterexample. Marking the 50th anniversary of its Document Nederland programme, the museum invited Iranian-Dutch artist, filmmaker, and photographer Tina Farifteh to explore the subject of asylum. In her deeply affecting project, Farifteh centres the exhibition on a man identified only as B., who, after more than four months in detention at Schiphol Airport and subsequent placement in the Ter Apel reception centre, remains suspended within the asylum process. The work poses a fundamental question: how has a system designed to protect the vulnerable become an apparatus capable of producing harm — an architecture of hostility within the Dutch asylum regime? Farifteh’s most powerful gesture lies in restoring voice. Through a piercing video essay, B. is not merely represented but heard. His portrait, concealed behind frosted glass to preserve anonymity, becomes a quietly poetic device: the glass will be removed only when he feels sufficiently safe to reveal himself. The project extends further into the material conditions of detention, with images of surveillance cameras, cell doors, observation rooms, and perimeter fences — visual fragments that render visible the otherwise opaque mechanisms of state control. In contrast to institutional narratives that aestheticise migration while muting lived experience, Farifteh’s exhibition insists on the presence, vulnerability, and subjectivity of those most often denied visibility and speech.

At the end of the day, the Fenix museum may be worth visiting, but primarily for a selfie—not in front of the toy-like Tornado staircase, but against the historic New York Hotel across the river, from which countless migrants departed in search of lives far beyond the stagnation of an ageing Europe. There is no architecture of affect here, no curated spectacle to soothe the viewer. Walking its halls, one feels the weight of real journeys, the friction of displacement, the sharp edges of history—none of which the Fenix Museum’s polished, risk-free environment could ever reproduce.

BIOGRAPHY

Alexander Burenkov is an independent curator, cultural producer and writer based in Paris. His work extends beyond traditional curatorial roles and includes organizing exhibitions in unconventional spaces, often emphasizing multidisciplinarity, interest in environmental thinking and post-digital sensibilities, encompassing projects such as Yūgen App (launched at Porto design biennale in 2021), a show in a functioning gym or online exhibition on cloud services and alternative modes of education, ecocriticism and speculative ecofeminist aesthetics. His recent projects include Don't Take It Too Seriously at Temnikova&Kasela gallery (Tallinn, 2025), Ceremony, the main project of the 10th edition of Asia Now art fair (together with Nicolas Bourriaud, Monnaie de Paris, 2024), In the Dust of This Planet (2022) at ART4 Museum; Raw and Cooked (2021), together with Pierre-Christian Brochet at Russian Ethnographic museum, St Petersburg; Re-enchanted (2021) at Voskhod gallery, Basel, and many others.

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