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commonplacing

spectacularity

SPECULATIVE INQUIRY presented at the​
19th Inclusive Museum Conference

spectacularity | decolonisation | autoethnography | museum-making | interpretation | narratives | exhibition practices |spatiality

ABSTRACT

Spectacles in museums across the globe are commonplace. They extend the sense of wonder that exhibitionary practices have always tried to generate. But where once objects were central to the production of wonder, today, wonder is being produced through the conditions of their encounter.

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In India, we live with spectacularity in the public sphere. Our festivals, processions, events, rallies, and community celebrations organise collective experience through performance, sensory intensity and affect. Spectacle is thus a familiar mechanism which exhibition-makers are increasingly using to draw and hold visitor attention in Indian museums.

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Spectacularity here does not simply mean the state of being spectacular but also the conditions, including spatial, sensory, and technological, through which a spectacle is produced and orchestrated and through which attention, affect and interpretation are conditioned. A spectacle emerges out of spectacularity.

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This shift and increasing reliance on spectacularity matter as museums globally debate and explore decolonisation, questioning whose knowledge is authorised, whose voice matters, who is represented and how. The exhibition is a critical site where interpretation is spatialised in narratives and experience; the production of *spectacularity* treats the visitor not as a passive spectator but as a body carefully positioned within the act of making the spectacle.
 

Using comparative case studies and autoethnographic reflection situated in exhibition practice in India, the presentation examines spectacularity as an interpretive condition and investigates the relationship between spectacle and spectacularity through a decolonial lens, asking what it reveals about the production of museum narratives.

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In the Sound & Light show at Cellular Jail, India, spectacularity is performed through sound, voice, light, enclosure and imagery towards a prescribed response. At Vasa Museum, Sweden, the ship is a spectacle in itself, enhanced within the space that holds it. When human remains are displayed within these conditions, it raises questions on the ethics of looking and the act of interpretation.

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Spectacularity makes narrative malleable, but it risks not allowing for interruption or contestation, and the space for the visitor to think otherwise.

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This presentation addresses the museum makers who, irrespective of their title, mediate the practice of translating, interpreting and communicating on the exhibition floor through different mediums. As spectacularity becomes increasingly commonplace on the drawing board during exhibition production alongside decolonial concerns of how knowledge is encountered and authorised, what are we truly conditioning: the spectacle, the visitor, or the possibility of interpretation itself?
 

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