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the act of explaining the past
the memorial museum The memorial museum can be seen as the convergence of the memorial - that visually communicates mourning and loss - and the museum - that construes history as scientific rather than commemorative, using explanatory textual strategy. A memorial museum is a specific kind of museum dedicated to a historic event commemorating mass suffering and giving information about it. The definition that best encompasses all museum of human suffering seems to be that of museums of memory, as it contains two spheres of meaning: the Memento and the Warning. The Memento is not sufficient to provoke an effect of memorial on its own. It has to encompass an exhortation, a raccomendation: the Warning, the link between the past and the future, a severe admonition, sometimes a worried admonishment against a potential danger, a serious loss of memory and values, which requires to raise the degree of alarm and threat, fearing the worst, a reversal of meaning, the end of history (Padiglione, 2008). This new typology of museums is different from the war museums set up at the end of the World War 1 to celebrate the power of a country, in terms of content, values and exhibits (Basso Peressut). The current tendency, however, seems to testify the will to develop exhibitions connected to painful and uncomfortable themes and to plan evocative thoughtful spaces, also within war museums.
Other architectures of memory, such as cemeteries, are updating their formats, including “visitor’s centres”, that is, museum/ documentation centres which aim at interpreting history (Pozzi). To fulfill this task the memorial museums adopt new exposition and communication strategies different from the narratives coming from the traditional museum. Besides the deep transformation involving the place of memory, we can see an increasing use of multimedia technologies which enable to establish virtual spaces of memory, or, as Eleonora Lupo defines them in her essay, ‘mnemotopes’, that is digital spaces, ‘intangible geographies’ which connect data, contents, documents and memories. The importance of spatial effects in the museum experience is a topic routinely neglected within museum studies, probably because the traditional institution has always been more interested on the decontextualization of artifacts rather than on the institution itself. Furthermore, the objectfocused walk-through exhibition has remained the mainstay of the museum paradigm. “However, such accounts are at odds with visitors’ experiences, where the encounter with the physical dimensions of any site, and with other people, is not just physically unavoidable but wholly integral”1 Memorial museums operate in two spatial registers: they are concrete objects in space intended to
1.Paul Williams, “Memorial Museum.A Global Rush to Commemorate Atrocities”, 2007: 77