Introduction

Abstract

Over the last decades, in response to feminist, postmodern and postcolonial critiques of the modern museum, objects, collections and processes of museaIization have been radically re-signified and re-posited in the cultural arena. The new museums emerging from this shift have redefined their functions in and for communities not simply by changing their narratives but by renegotiating the processes of narration and the museal codes of communication with the public. They define themselves now not as disciplinary spaces of academic history but as places of memory, exemplifying the postmodern shift from authoritative master discourses to the horizontal, practice-related notions of memory, place, and community. The key feature of these new museums is that they deploy strategies of applied theatrics to invite emotional responses from visitors: to make them empathize and identify with individual sufferers and victims, or with their own contemporaries inhabiting alternative modernities in distant places. This dossier seeks to probe these new museographic and curatorial discourses, focusing in particular on the memory museum as an emergent global form of (counter)monumentality. Drawing on different geographical and historical contexts, it argues that the new museums’ apparently global aesthetics implies a danger of surrendering the very specificity of historical experiences the memorial ‘site’ offers its visitors.

La narrativa hipermedia en el museo.

“…Con la llegada del siglo XXI, se multiplicó la bibliografía anunciando un nuevo museo (Marstine, 2006;Starn, 2005;Andermann y Simine, 2012). Hasta un museo inaugurado en Nueva York en 2007 se llama New Museum.…”

Experiencia y materialidad en lugares de memoria colectiva en Chile

“…La enunciación/interpretación de "imágenes de sentido" favorece la construcción de imaginarios y de referentes histórico-culturales, la apropiación o creación de símbolos, relatos, valores, creencias y, al mismo tiempo, la formación de subjetividades e identidades sociales (Maceira, 2009). De este modo, estos lugares ocupan el rol de facilitadores de una experiencia del recuerdo proveyendo de un contexto que invita a respuestas emocionales de quienes los visitan y procurando procesos de empatía e identificación con las personas y acontecimientos del pasado, desde el punto de vista sugerido por sus promotores (Andermann & Arnold-de Simine, 2012).…”

“…Esta interacción tendría la capacidad de moldear -hasta cierto punto-los procesos de subjetivación y política de quien transita por los espacios (Andermann & Arnold-de Simine, 2012). Es a partir de la articulación de posiciones de sujeto, entramados relacionales presentes en el cuerpo social, y la interacción con los objetos, espacios y significaciones, como se constituye la acción de recordar.…”

Object relations in the museum: a psychosocial perspective

“…Museum objects have been described as functioning as symbols of identity, relationship and social group; also of nature, society and the divine (Worts 1990;Pearce 1995). In processes of symbolisation, museum visitors bring to bear personal frames of reference that include emotions, memories, background and previous knowledge (Silverman 2010;Andermann and Arnold-de Simine 2012). The subjective response to museum objects and the material qualities and cultural significance of the objects are intertwined.…”