The article describes different enunciatory strategies through which contemporary memory museums aim to involve visitors and construct the act of visiting as a particular form of experience marked by strong emotional involvement. This new museographic trend appears to be characterized by a highly interactive, testimonial and iconic turn that transforms new museums in performative spaces. Thus, museums and sites devoted to traumatic memories often seek to re-enact the past trauma becoming places of vicarious witness and secondary trauma. Spectacularisation of trauma designed to evoke empathy with the victims, often turns out to be a tool to simulate forms of embodied identification that leaves visitors with a kind of “hunger for history”, creating a feeling it would be more desirable to have less experience and more understanding.

Spectacularising Trauma: The experientialist visitor of Memory Museums

VIOLI, MARIA PATRIZIA
2014

Abstract

The article describes different enunciatory strategies through which contemporary memory museums aim to involve visitors and construct the act of visiting as a particular form of experience marked by strong emotional involvement. This new museographic trend appears to be characterized by a highly interactive, testimonial and iconic turn that transforms new museums in performative spaces. Thus, museums and sites devoted to traumatic memories often seek to re-enact the past trauma becoming places of vicarious witness and secondary trauma. Spectacularisation of trauma designed to evoke empathy with the victims, often turns out to be a tool to simulate forms of embodied identification that leaves visitors with a kind of “hunger for history”, creating a feeling it would be more desirable to have less experience and more understanding.
2014
VS
Violi, Patrizia
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11585/520836
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