Łódź as an Archive: “The Museum as a Repository for Local Identity and Social Capital: Audience development in performing the exhibition.”
Łódź as an Archive: “The Museum as a Repository for Local Identity and Social Capital: Audience development in performing the exhibition.”

Summary/Abstract: With the performative turn in the humanities, researching the exhibition visitor’s experience has gained ground in museology and arts studies, the notion of an exhibition as something that is performed by the visitor being the crux. Questions like how does the design of an exhibition affect the visitor during the visit, and what does s/he get out of the visit have been raised. This paper explores different strategies of exhibition design from the performance studies approach – the exhibition seen as a staging of the visitor performing the exhibition. The main focus is on how audience development can be a tool for audience emancipation through design and how can a design allow for social inclusion and become a “theatre for development”. In this sense emancipation must strategically rely on the topos or geographical place of the exhibition, in order to speak to the local sense of identity. To make this point we have chosen to analyse two exhibitions in Łódź that for cultural reasons seem to be either uniquely associated with this city (even Poland) or located in a site that poses interesting possibilities for reaching new attendees, namely the Film Museum neighbouring the world-famous Łódź Film School and ms², part of Museum of Arts in Łódź, which exhibits collections of 20th and 21st Century art next to the central shopping and entertainment venue Manufaktura. From the audience development point of view, these museums have potential as repositories for Bourdieusian social capital and local identity, which is readily available to large audiences. Or are they?

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