ICOM International Council of Museums - International Institute for ...

will use to show our museum narration, such as the traditional panels with 3D pictures,video, interactive activities and computer games. Finally, we have to remark theconceptual design in which to enclose the basic ideas of the narration we want to tell,such as the general aspects of museums, the environmental features, and all thoseelements useful for creating the model in the computer or in the project on paper.Nevertheless, we must realize that the real main characters of the museum discourseare the objects and equipment preserved in museums. This does not mean that wecould not stress the relevance of the scenic resources available with new technologies,because these can be useful to articulate a discourse with a well founded historicalcontent, and their visual contents and sequential language make easy for public theaccess to past time, when only several signs remain, signs we must analyse andinvestigate in order to improve their understanding and make interpretation easier.Keywords for the making of a museum discourse.When we want to analyse what is the most important to make a museum discourse, wefind the problem of choosing the right narration, able to show the society the messageinside the objects in museums, in a clear and accurate approach. Museology ought tomake different kinds of discourse, expressions of an exhaustive analysis of theirsignificant works, and the knowledge that make them possible. So, it is necessary tomake and describe the specifications of museology and museographical discoursefrom an enunciatively point of view of the texts, having in mind at the same time thedifferent textual competence involved in the making of discourse.That is the reason why museology needs building a theory and methodology on theanalysis of narrative inside museums. We must not forget, as Roland Barthes pointsout (1993: 163), that the narration is present in all periods of time, places and societiesin different ways, whether they be myths, legends, fables, tales, short novels, epics,stories, tragedies, dramas, comedies, pantomimes, paintings, glass windows, cinema,comics, pieces of newspaper or conversations; so, we may assert that narrations areborn at the same time as history of mankind, and that there is no people or civilizationwithout their own tales, even the most different.Chatman himself (1990: 11) agrees with Barthes, and complains that critics only thinkof traditional writing, when practically they use every day stories from movies, paintingsand sculptures, so there is a common substratum that links all media. That authorreaches this conclusion from the narrative analysis of novels and movies, and does nothesitate to follow the French structuralists, such as Roland Barthes, Tzvetan Todorovand Gérad Genette, and he wonders what the narration must tell (that is, the story) andhow (the discourse). Consequently, in order to have a narration, there must be twoessential components: the story and the discourse.The place where the facts happen is an important point of the narration, as well as theactions of the characters. Every story we want to tell needs a physical space to situateit, whether it be the real place (sites museum) or build specifically to tell the story(museum, temporal exhibition). It is evident that the election of the place will determinethe other elements of the story, because the facts will happen there and the objects willbe shown in the same place. The senses of sight, hearing, touch, and sometimes smellare very important in the perception of the place. A visitor who goes to a museum feelsshapes, colours and volumes, listens to sound, music and messages that stimulate theimagination; this visitor experiments tactile sensations that let him to get in touch withobjects and detect different smells. Sometimes, the location is the main character ofthe exposition, as Guggenheim in Bilbao, where the most important is the buildingitself, and the pieces and messages shown remain in the background.Time is another important element. For Chatman (1990: 103) time is the dimension offacts of the story. Any story has a time dimension where the facts related to the plot ofthe narration develop. When visitors go into museums they have a specific time tocontemplate the paintings, and they must schedule and calculate this time to get theiraim: seeing a specific exhibition or a special piece of art. But, according to Moreno(2002: 164), the audiovisual discourse develops and makes a reality the temporal307