Staging the Museum
OASE#111

"... The thirteen essays in this OASE issue speculate on the importance of the architectonic staging of the museum visit or activity, and highlight generally one dimension of this question within one building. The scenes of the museum are not examined on the typological level of the museum building, but in an exploration of meaningful places, building fragments, or motifs. The issue thus takes a walk that starts in the (urban) landscape, then crosses the interior landscape of museums, over stairs, bleachers, and other theater-like situations, before finally looking out over the city again from within the museum. Between the ten contributions of our guest authors, we as editors also inserted three punctuated interludes. They are emblematic of the fragmentary reading of museum buildings that occurs in most longer texts as well. Attention is paid to rhetorical aesthetics, to the evolving codes and conventions of both the dressed and the stripped-down public interior. The museum is structurally a place of contradiction - it screens and unpacks, it seeks to enchant and expose, to build and scatter attention. In individual museum buildings this exciting simultaneity is sometimes played out, sometimes covered up or smoothed over, but most of all it is dismantled into juxtapositions and sequences of moments, specific places, and images - into scenes."

Extract from the editorial by
Maarten Liefooghe, Aslı Çiçek, Jantje Engels

With contributions by
Maria Alvarez Garcia, Camille Bladt, Aslı Çiçek, Adria Daraban, Georgios Eftaxiopoulos, Tony Fretton, Matteo Ghidoni, Aurélie Hachez, Sandra Kisters, Maarten Liefooghe, Elena Montanari, Mark Pimlott, Michele Porcelluzzi, Gennaro Postiglione, Elsbeth Ronner, Chiara Velicogna, Paul Vermeulen, Stefaan Vervoort