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

eference of the story, since it makes possible for the visitor to schedule the duration ofthe visit and the order to follow. That is because the visitor can use the newtechnologies to stop time, recreate it or stop the present time and invent the future.Here we have the virtual spaces where visitors move freely through a place out of theirtime and can change using multiple media.Another important element for the setting of exhibitions is lighting. We can create andrecreate different environments and textures that make possible to stress theimportance in some objects and create an adequate atmosphere to go deeper in thenarrative structure we want to catch. If this is correct, museology must not ignore thisfundamental component of the narration that we can find in different cultures andsocieties, and must be ready to create their own narrations in order to transmit them tocontemporary men and women. But this discourse must be elaborated having in mindseveral essential key questions if we want to give it a specific content and meaning.First of all, we have to analyse the museum narration concept. This means thecapability that museums have to tell stories, that is, to use objects, pictures and otherelements with meaning that contribute to the configuration of a textual and constructivediscourse whose final meaning was the story we want to tell. This means a methodicaland systematic arrangement of facts, in order to make easier the discovering,description, explanation an application of the system, the process and the mechanismsthat museum narration must develop when showing its contents or telling its stories.In accordance with narrative morphology, Vladimir Propp (1971), in his workMorphology of the Fairy Tale, finds out that all tales have a common globalorganization structure, based on the collection of several constant elements thatconforms together a particular kind of narrative work. The narrative morphology muststudy and analyse the narrative structure that make possible the developing of thenarration as a whole. There are two main elements in the structure of the tale: thecontent or story, and the expression or discourse, which can be divided into form andsubstance (Moreno, 2003:43; García Jiménez, 1993: 16).In relation with museology, we can say that the form of museum content is the story wewant to tell, and its components are the facts, the objects, place and time. All theseelements must be in the tale, and they must contribute to the comprehension of the talewith their different characteristics. The substance of the content could be the specificway in which the elements are made concepts and manage according to the culturalcharacteristics of the authors. We are referring to the reader-narrator that is telling thetale, who shows the ideas and arguments that the exhibition wants to transmit. Theform of the expression is the specific semiotic system linked to the narration ordiscourse, and it can be the cinema, the radio, the television or the hypermedia used inmuseums. Finally, the substance of the expression could be the material nature of theexpressive significances that make the narrative discourse, such as the voice, music,sound effects, graphics, pictures, infography, videography and photogrammar. Allthese elements must be present in the museum narrative if we want the message to betransmitted to society. Communication inside museums will not be possible withoutsomeone telling the story and someone willing to listen to it. And there must be a codebetween them to get the narrator and the reader or visitor be important through thestory. We must not forget that the code is the main component of any communicationprocess with a specific system of rules, directives and decisions for the emitter tocreate the message and the receiver to be able to understand it. But it is also true thatmuseums will have to be able to articulate stories with a great narrative and persuasivevalue using those narrative elements that best favour the communication.From its semiotic function, museology means rescue and clarify the sense, present andabsent at the same time, that appears through the narrative character of the word, theimage, the sensations and the perceptions from the objects and facts, as Rusconiremarks (2000: 100), or, in other words, from the exposition itself. All expositions musthave the narrative dimension of museums as a base, where perception, image,sensations, the word, the myth, the ineffable and the virtual mix up, trying to transmit a308