Constructing Meanings: The Museum as a Stage Set for the Presentation of Archeological Collections

Museums are real places that in a dematerializing world offer an encounter between visitors and tangible objects. With the shift of museum buildings away from recognizable types to heterogeneity and experimentation, as well as the greater emphasis placed on the visitor’s engagement with the museum, the issue of the role of museum architecture in relation to the collections it is designed to accommodate has become a key challenge. This paper argues that museum buildings as organized spaces can contribute to constructing meanings and become part of the distinctive experience of the collections each museum offers. It analyses three archeological museums with newly built or extended buildings, that experiment with novel ways of presenting their collections, and shows how the tension between visitors’ paths of movement and lines of sight can become the conceptual spine of the museum displays and stage the presentation of archeological objects. Three modalities of staging are identified, suggesting a critical shift: from emphasis on a theoretical concept, to attribution of symbolic meaning, and then to embodied, sensory and affective contextualization. This is argued to reflect the “experiential turn” in museums and the increasing understanding of meaning as being grounded in our bodily experience.