Fault lines of participation: An ethnography translated into an exhibition on family and kinship

摘要

Since the 'new museology' (Vergo 1989), curating exhibitions has become acontested task. Participatory methods in education and curating have been usedand debated as one of the tools to bring museums and visitors into contact in anew way. On the basis of an exhibition on family and kinship, based onpraxeologic approaches in curating as well as in displaying the content, thisarticle discusses critically the limits of such methods: they show up not simply inthe museum in the form of a changeable ideology, but rather implicitly in allactions that unfold with the concrete use of an exhibition. Against the assumptionof improving exhibiting with participatory methods, we think the ideal of participationto be in the same way marked with fault lines as traditional 'politics of display'(MacDonald 1989).