Exposer la prison « au-delà des murs »

Within the framework of the international and travelling exhibition Prison, co-produced by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum (Geneva), the Musée des Confluences (Lyon), and the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum (Dresden), a discourse on prison practices in contemporary Western space is conceived and presented to a large audience. For these institutions, it is a question of managing the knowledge and sensitivities of the audiences they address, through an exhibition itinerary constituted according to a narrative weaved by a diversity of mediations and texts. By showing the complementarities between several perspectives within the linguistic sciences, we articulate a semiotic perspective to those of conversation and of discourse analysis in order to study the socio-pragmatic issues related to this museum discourse, by focusing on the interpretation of a sentence which holds the role of a catchphrase in the exhibition: “We’re the ones who punish”. We will focus on the enunciative and socio-political forms of engagement established through such a sentence, both for the institutions and for the public. In an empirical approach to the interactive experience of the museum, the present case study thus has for theoretical horizon a semiotic reflection on the role of the museums of society as a ground for the critical translation of experiences and for fundamentally diverse points of view on the prison environment.