Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum

Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum
Gaynor Kavanagh
Continuum International Publishing Group, 1/05/2000

Social memory creation through simultaneous experience.

It takes place in personal time, through choice, and has a goal of promoting some form of social union through role enhancement by the sharing of an experience. Thus, by enjoying an exhibition with a friend, the friendship is further bonded. P3

… ultimately it is the museum’s short and long term agendas which have priority in creating memory as a product. P3

The importance of the senses on memory creation and recall.

the extent of recall is enhanced by access to prompts, things which stimulate the senses. P4

cultural critics also underestimate the visitors’ capacity to answer back, to disassociate from museums and what they say, and to find their own meanings. Perhaps the hardest part of all is that some critics appear to dismiss the simple human need to remember, to feed the spirit and the mind. This helps to place a life in context by touching something of others; lives and by connecting to a broader historical frame of reference. This may not be madness nor ignorance nor human frailty nor a grand social plot, but something honest, thought provoking and personally enabling. P6

he also argues that ‘by reconnecting history with its origins in its narrative form of everyday communication, attention to memory transcends specialisation by speaking the language of face to face association and firsthand experience. P7

—thelen, 1990a, viii

without a feeling for people’s lives and histories, museums become remote and irrelevant. P8

what we understand about the making of memories is that they are context-dependant and highly sensory. P14

Our senses substantially aid our access to and absorption into memory. This is because in our daily lives we constantly use them to explore and measure our encounters. They are the systems through which we participate in life, and through them we gain admittance to perception and judgement. Very little of this happens with our full awareness. P14

we rarely stop to appreciate the senses we have unless they have become impaired or are lost. P14

smells can be particularly evocative: roses, brewing coffee, wet dog, baking bread, disinfectant. Smell is by far the most fundamental of our senses and exists within the very centre of the brain… those memories ‘fixed’ by feelings and smell seem to be particularly strong.

Projecting memory onto objects.

The experience of reminiscence work and handling sessions would appear to suggest that objects provoke memories and ideas in ways that other information-bearing materials do not, or may not to the same degree. The experience of people in a position of care with research into objects as memorabilia in life, suggests otherwise. Whereas objects may be cherished, it is photographs that aid memory, seconded by jewellery (Sherman, 1992).p.20

The encodement of memory within photographs goes far beyond what an ‘outsider’ may read into the image.

We project our thoughts an feelings onto objects, and by doing so engage in the process of transference… in actual fact, an object is neutral, contained and inanimate. Because of this, it is useful in the mediation of thoughts, memories and agendas. P22

The growth of interest in past geneaology promotes knowledge of connections to past generations beyong living memory, gives a sense of rootedness, even pride in family and can help reveal all sorts of connections including patterns of health problems… it involves the salvaging of information about families and groups, however sparse, that time, migration and resettlement have dispersed. P23a