Irmak Mertens: Exploring Illusions in the Museological Chronotope

Semiosalong is the afterhours Tartu semiotic salon, active since 2011

"Between the Self and the Other: Exploring Illusions in the Museological Chronotope"

Museums are limited physical or digital spaces where one or multiple cultures, a society’s technological and scientific perspectives, natural phenomena, or the tangible products of these aforementioned categories are preserved, interpreted, and represented according to a theme, a type of artefact, an event, a period, a person, or a viewpoint. Starting from the 19th century, museological practices have attained a didactic status with the shift from private collections to public, institutionalized and educational museums. As an outcome of this authoritative image, most museums ironically claim to present objective knowledge, while serving as grounds where individual and biased reflections accrue. Namely, even though what museums present to the visitors are heavily influenced by beliefs, personal views, as well as politics, they are perceived to be neutral grounds with the sole aim to teach the public a specialized topic, where subjectivity is replaced by objective approaches. Nevertheless, museums function as modelling systems that translate a slice of the universe through a museological chronotope (Mertens and Decroupet 2024), which operates as the accumulation of the translational layers of “Other(s)-in-space” (l’Autre dans l’espace) and the “Other(s)-in-time” (l’Autre dans le temps) (for the terms cf. Patou-Mathis 2011). These layers require the mediation of a translator: a role that can be taken by the curator, artefact, architect, or visitor. Thus, the presence of translation in the museum – or the very existence of the museum as translation – inevitably calls for subjectivity, hence the Self. In that sense, the Self stands as the filter between the immutable facts and the illusionary constructions in the museum space. The realization of the Self comes through the recognition of the Other that brings forth a dialogue, which Lotman regarded as “the elementary mechanism of translation” (Torop 2005: 164). In that case, it is implausible to examine museums without reflecting upon subjectivity, translation and illusion. In addition, due to the aforementioned prejudices and biases that shape the exhibitions in museums, the Self prevails the Other (i.e., target cultures decide what gets to be selected and represented from the source culture), creating an asymmetry in the dialogue. This asymmetry is the originating point of the illusionary nature of museums. Therefore, this presentation will delve into the interconnectedness of the concepts of “illusion” and “Self vs. Other” within the context of museums and museum translation. Attempting to answer the question “If signs in the museum space are created and interpreted by subjectivity, which generates illusions, how can we trace the marks of the Self and the Other in such a power asymmetry?”, it will discuss the significance of translation in relation to museums and demonstrate examples from selected case studies. The discussion will be based upon topics such as architecture, colonialism, cultural translation, curatorship, inclusion, fictionality and voice.

References:
Mertens, I., & Decroupet, S. (2024). Conceptualizing Museum Translation: Cultural Translation, Interlingual Processes and other Perspectives. Babel, 70(6).
Patou-Mathis, M. (2011). Le Sauvage et le Préhistorique, miroir de l’homme occidental: De la malédiction de Cham à l’identité nationale [The Savage and the Prehistoric: Mirrors of the Western Man]. Paris: Odile Jacob.
Torop, P. (2005). Semiosphere and/as the research object of semiotics of culture. Σημειωτκή-Sign Systems Studies, 33(1), 159-173.