ABSTRACT
The global military and economic concerns that sit behind distant suffering are perhaps too complex and abstract for many visitors to grasp, or to want to grasp, and too extensively concatenated and contested for museums to communicate. The museum as medium has the potential to combine empathy and analysis through the modulation of exhibitionary techniques, through thoughtful transitions and switches between them that can prompt visitors to new forms of reflection. Italy’s migration story is different from those of other countries in the occident; certain representational, ethical and emotional commonplaces exist across museums that are explicitly concerned with migration experiences. Maps and arrows and the textbook pedagogy of which they are part have been conventions of history museums whose intention is to posit a closed and completed past that is severed from the politics of the present. Portraits of individuals in museums capture a sense of what global issues mean on the body determinants and possibilities of a life lived.
