(= contemporary museums, theme parks, urban zones, tourism attractions...)
(“my” schematic notes according to
Bella Dicks,
“Culture on Display. The Production of Contemporary Visitability”, Maidenhead, Open University Press, 2003,
pp. 7-13 – a very interesting book indeed!!)
12 key points:
1) visitability – production of spaces so they call the attention of visitors – tourism – quest for difference – proliferance of “visitable culture” since the 80’s
2) meaningfulness – quest for meaning – environments must communicate to us, “show their “human” faces” – bed-rock of tourism as a search for authenticity?
3) going global – “ethnographic theme parks” are spreading in Fiji, Hawaii, Indonesia, China, Taiwan, Japan, Malasya, etc. Who is displaying what? Inequalities of enhanced visitability.
4) technology – culture to be experienced rather then just gazed at. Simulation rather than representation. People search for authenticity, they get simulations – what is new, here?
5) interactivity – to make the visitors feel “included” – bridge between visitors and culture on display. Curiosity and informal learning. But the options are pre-programmed
6) vernacular realm – proliferation of displays of “ordinary people”. Gaze demanding access to every corner and secret.
7) hybrid forms – bringing different kinds of space together: hybrid museum/shopping center/leisure space. “Cultural quarters” – shopping, performance, exhibition. Display as environment and environment as display. Boundaries dissolving.
8) spend money/consumerism – in concentrated areas. To consume the particularity of place within the globalized networks of leisure-oriented industries. Globalization and the proliferation of cultural display as related to both multiculturalism and cultural particularism (two sides of the same coin).
9) world as replicas and models. Culture packaged into a diversity of forms of encapsulation, simulation, miniaturization. Reality is seen as it never could be seen in the life-world. Tourism and visit connected to an expectation of immediate, meaningful and vivid excperience.
10) techniques of interpretation – to construct meaningful and accessible environments for visitors. Symbols create contexts to frame places, times, narratives and themes. All this is included in highly visual, experience-centred kinds of knowledge/life.
11) legibility – places are nodes for the flow of intelligible (user-friendly) information, through guides, tours, signage, zoning, waymarking. Fundamental question of the author: “what does legibility illuminate and what does it obscure?” (p. 12)
12) opposing tendencies – to the cultural display. Postmodernist approache that differ from techniques of interpretation and theming, which tended to an explicit and finished account of reality. The role of the visitor in all these politics and poetics of cultural display.
Note: the scheme above is simply a fast and free quotation of a small part of the author’ book, that I am using in my courses on archaeology and heritage, and it does not intend to be my own, or to express all the main author’s ideas, although it follows her sentences closely. I very much recommend this book and, if possible, its translation to the Portuguese.
Source of the photo of the author:
http://www.cardiff.ac.uk/schoolsanddivisions/
academicschools/socsi/staff/acad/dicks.html
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