« C’est nous qui punissons ». Quels enjeux d’un discours muséal sur les prisons ?

“We’re the ones who punish.” What challenges of a museum discourse on prisons?. As part of the international and travelling exhibition Prison, co-produced by the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Museum in Geneva, the musée des Confluences in Lyon and the Deutsches Hygiene-Museum in Dresden, museum institutions are developing a discourse on prison practices in the contemporary Western world for a wide audience. For these institutions, the aim is to manage the knowledge and sensitivities of the audiences to whom they are addressed, through the creation of an exhibition, according to a narrative framework woven by a diversity of mediations and texts. By positioning ourselves in the first axis of the congress, we articulate a semiotic perspective to a perspective of conversation and discourse analysis, in order to study the socio-pragmatic issues of such a discourse in museum. We focus on the interpretation of a sentence that is almost used as a pediment in this exhibition Prison: "We’re the ones who punish.". We focus in particular on the forms of engagement established through this statement, both for institutions and for audiences.