Twelfth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Based on seven months fieldwork at two art institutions in Nottingham (UK), this paper analyses audience engagement in discursive public programmes. With discursive public programme this study refers to the events that art institutions do such as talks, conferences, or symposiums, which use language as their main form of expression. Therefore, increasing understanding of discursive public programmes as instances for audience participation and involvement. Since the 1990s different curatorial literatures have theorised discursive practices as the way to transform passive users of the institution into active participants (Hoffmann, 2014; Ribalta, 2010). These writings have stated that it is through processes of learning and exchange of ideas that ‘audiences become participants, collaborators even, in the development of what constitutes the institution. (…) and the institution can become a mutual learning system’ (Farquharson, 2013: 57). In addition, through these events curators have aimed to guarantee plural programmes that would recognize the multiplicity of society (Kolk, and Flückige, 2013; Esche, 2004; Jameson, 1991). ‘A permissive and imaginative space for expressing individual and collective desires’ (Esche, 2004). However, this curatorial literature has been primarily written by the curators themselves, without including the perspective of those ‘active participants’, and thus making impossible the analysis of such involvement. Accordingly, based on my fieldwork, this work analyses actively plural discursive practices at two art institutions in order to reconsider and reassess ways to create participatory spaces for discussion.