Clarifying Our Ways (Asynchronous Session)
Holder of Battered Memories - Suitcase as a Metaphor for the (Lost) Mobile Body: A Study of the Way the Absent Body is Represented in Museums View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Elizabeth Carnegie, Jerzy Kociatkiewicz
The figure of the migrant is both a familiar presence and a politically contentious issue in present discourse and recent history. Representations of migrations, deportations and displacements abound in public and museum exhibits, in contexts ranging from heroic journeys to suffering and victimhood. In our paper we work with the notion of the mobile body and the way in which the battered suitcase symbolically represents displacement, loss, change and bodily decay. Suitcases are containers for and of memories, and their decay represents and displaces passing time and the fragility of bodies moving through space and history. Their very materiality conveys embodied experience and intangibility of memory, and the decay of their often organic form (leather, cardboard) mirrors the embodied experiences of their owners. We are particularly concerned with the narratives of involuntary or forced migration, and the identity markers that such suitcases carry in terms of labels – both real and symbolic - as documents representing the individual, collective and body politic within the recent political past. Smith (2006: 500) described museums as sites constructed to show “the cargo of the past on consignment into the future” and we argue that suitcases simultaneously hide and showcase the past, enabling its present-day remembering and memorialising. Drawing on fieldwork from museums and public spaces, we consider how suitcases themselves are consigned to the "attic of memory." As museum displays or as piles of discarded remnants, offered as vestiges, as witnesses to human loss and suffering at death camps such as Auschwitz.
Mapping Sound-Based Multimodal Museum Practices: A Five-use Framework View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Alcina Cortez
Sound has been increasingly used in museums as a material with which to build exhibitions as part of a multimodal ensembles. This has given way to what I called sound-based multimodal museum practices. The ways in which sound materials have been deployed in these practices are diverse and lack categorisation and examination. They have long been driven by a complex interplay of circumstances. These circumstances include the underlying epistemological order and its conceptual constructs, the wider social and cultural orders in which these are enmeshed, existing, and emerging technological devices and situational and specific museum practices and their management options.This study proposes a typology of five constructs describing how sound materials have been used in museum by curators through time and to map exhibition practices. In greater detail, I argue that such practices tend to cluster into five categories: sound as a lecturing mode, sound as an artefact, sound as 'ambiance'/soundtrack, sound as art, and sound as a mode for crowd-curation. My work draws on two types of data: fruitful insights gathered from the academic literature covering such practices and on my own observations stemming from my visits to a set of sixty-nine permanent and temporary museum exhibitions worldwide.
Between Traditional Narrative and Its Contemporary Construction: The Meaning-making Discourse at a National Key Art Museum in China View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sifan Liu
At a critical juncture in its economic reform, China has ushered in a new era of cultural transition while Chinese art museums embrace a nascent curatorial mechanism for knowledge (re)production. This paper examines the case study of Zhejiang Art Museum (Hangzhou) in a Chinese key national art museum context, which demonstrates the interplay of poetics and politics in its exhibiting display, adopting a methodological approach based on fieldwork, semi-structured interviews with museum curators and directors, and participant observation. In this paper, I argue that the museum rationalises the "modernity" of Chinese national art by employing a pedagogical aesthetic approach in a neonationalist narrative, while promoting contemporary Chinese art by employing a story-telling approach based on Chinese myths and legends narrative texts, illustrating two trajectories of the museum's art production. This research contributes significantly to the field of Chinese public art museum studies. It paints a complex picture of how collection and exhibition policies, as well as the initiative of local art ecosystem, influence the museum's cultural production and knowledge rhetoric in contemporary China.
Featured The New Normal of Museum Communication in the Age of COVID View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Cecilia Lazzeretti, Gianfranco Pastore
As part of an ongoing research on museum discourse in South-Tyrol, the present study explores the discursive strategies adopted by cultural institutions to deal with the pandemic, control uncertainty, and construct a ‘new normalcy’ scenario. Focusing on communications conveyed by museum websites and social media, the analysis explores the strategies employed by museums to engage with the audiences and remain present in the memory of visitors, even when physical access to venues is not possible. The study is qualitative in focus and relies on a combined methodology: after gathering background data through semi-structured interviews (Spradley, 1979) carried out with key informants working inside museums, representative samples of communication materials are collected and analysed drawing on techniques of discourse analysis applied to museums (see Purser, 2000, Ravelli, 2007, and Bondi, 2009). Preliminary results tend to highlight four main themes: 1) acknowledgement of the crisis and its consequences on the museum's activities; 2) information on new regulations and measures in force to access the museum; 3) engagement of the public in the initiatives promoted by the museum; 4) maintenance of a close relationship with the museum community. Within this context, the degree of explicitness with which the Covid situation is addressed by the museum can vary significantly, so as the attitude of communication, ranging from overall positive to neutral. The study is expected to develop guidelines for museum communication and foster discursive practices aimed at inclusivity and visitor-centred engagement among museum professionals of South Tyrol.
