Spectacularising Trauma: The experientialist visitor of Memory Museums

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.