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

Abstract

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