Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Science and technology studies (STS) are a source of valuable enquiries about the role of technology both as a product and agent of knowledge. Revising the museum, as a privileged socio-technical object, has proved its crucial participation within the most controversial issues of the public agenda. Particularly, a museum of memory appears to be a vital place for production of knowledge. It assembles certain expertise, practices, materialities, and subjects sharing a common factor, including the recognition of susceptibility, diversity, and even contradiction of community memory narratives. This research takes place in Museum Casa de la Memoria of the city of Medellin and uses a shared lens between STS and memory studies to account for the narrative and museographic strategies displayed in its permanent room. From the notions of laboratory as a place of knowledge and the process of creation of witnesses, the paper describes how the museum works with the epistemologies and procedures of a laboratory, highlighting how its exhibition, the museographic script and the objects of the collection “translate” the world to produce a testimony that is not only rational but transcends. This act moves towards the search for empathy, emotional commitment, and in a wider sense, serves as a strategy of reparation and reconciliation of the broader social and cultural dynamics of the city.