ABSTRACT
The ephemeral quality of memory renders it difficult to capture for display and therefore, in museums, memory has to be mediated through a hermeneutic form, such as a narrative. This paper will examine the concept of narrative as a specific exhibitionary medium used to represent and mediate memories in memorial museums, and will investigate the complex relationship that narratives have with silence, remembering and forgetting. By their very form and structure, narratives require the use of silences in order for an infinite number of potential plotlines to be turned into a meaningful and cohesive story (Trouillot 1995). Narratives also require narrators situated within particular sociocultural milieux to ‘tell’ the story, which inevitably means silences, in a variety of forms and enacted for a number of purposes, are a crucial component of the narrative-making process (Bauman 1986). The relationship between narrative and silence is therefore complex and requires the concept of silence to be decoupled from a binary relationship with forgetting, allowing for an understanding of the inextricable connection between silence and narrative as hermeneutic foundations of meaning-making in the memorial museum.
