2020 | Building Peace through Heritage
discipline ), indeed in an epic of archaeology ( 2004 , p . 59 ). This is a type of voluntary defence or intellectual snobery on the part of the experts in the discipline , which certainly does not favour any type of cultural mediation towards non-archaeological visitors or anyway of users who are not necessarily specialised .
A solution to this impasse could have been suggested by Jean Davallon , according to whom the specific prerogative of the archaeolgical exhibition , whether in situ ( Davallon , J . and Carrier , C ., 1989 ) or not , is that of mȇler intimement les objets et le savoir ( blending intimately the objects and the knowledge ) ( Davallon , J ., 1999 , p . 109 ), with precise reference to the so called three forms of museology ( referred to by Davallon as : muséologie d ’ objet , muséologie d ’ idée o de savoir e muséologie de point de vue , Ibidem , p . 113 and , for an exhaustive discussion of the three forms in question , see chapter : Le musée estil vraiment un média ?, pp . 227-253 ), exhibitions which are placed à l ’ articulation de l ’ exposition d ’ art et de l ’ exposition documentaire , avec toutes les variantes possibles allant de l ’ une à l ’ autre , between an art exhibition and a documentary exhibition with all the possible variants which go from one to the other , ( Ibidem , p . 109 ).
A specific mode of operation corresponds to each of these three forms . The first establishes the relationship with the visitor and the meeting with the museum object . The second is a relationship of a communicative type and the third is a relationship of participation with the performance .
With this interpretation , Davallon , proposing a systemic type of the above mentioned form of exhibition , and above all moving the archaeology display conceptually towards a scientific type display suggests intelligently what could be the conceptual strategies , and consequently also operational , to enhance the communicative potential inherent in websites and archaeology museums .
All this is translated into the identification of three kinds of strategies , which correspond with the same number of styles of museum exhibits : an aesthetic strategy , which has the prerogative to devise every exhibited object as an objet qui apparaît -object that appears- to the public , a communicative strategy , whose aim is the compréhension d ’ un savoir -understanding of a knowledge- and , finally , a playful strategy , which aims at a physical solicitation of every visitor , namely a kind of transport du public -transport of the public- , both literally and figuratively , ( Ibidem , p . 103 ).
In order to explain the semiotic function of the exhibitions , it ’ s still Davallon who has recourse to a general pattern of analysis in which so-called “ three logics of language ”: logic of speech , spatial logic and gestural logic , ( Ibidem , pp . 92-100 ) stand out . They stress the transformation of knowledge – from the scientific text to the confrontation with the viewer – and generally correspond with the three most paradigmatic moments of any exhibition : museological project , museographic layout and the museum tour .
Within spatial logic , the French sociologist identifies two kinds of operations , in relation to the making of the exhibition , which is obviously the aspect we are interested in the most in this discourse : spatialization and symbolization . With the first term , he refers to everything about the positioning and the movements of a visitor within the exhibition space ( e . g . the various relationships : in front of-behind , above-below , rightleft , in-out , verticality-horizontality ) and also the scale ratios , the texture of the materials , the colours . The second term , on the other hand , covers a quite complex set of processes . Their common feature is making the multiple components of the exhibit meaningful : from the various educational devices to the texts , from the use of colours and logos , which can take on different meanings , to the typography and from the shapes to the objects .
All these meanings , which the visitor has to identify , inerpret and decode , have the prerogative not to be universal , and cannot be codified or generalized , but they depend , from time to time , on the context which forms the exhibition in its totality .
239