Key Concepts of Museology - ICOM

of being in the median position, that
of a third element which places itself
between two distant poles and acts
as an intermediary. While this position
characterises the legal aspects of
mediation, where someone negotiates
in order to reconcile adversaries and
reach a modus vivendi, it also points
to the meaning that this concept
takes in the cultural and scientifi c fi e
ld of museology. Here too mediation
is an in-between, fi lling a space that it
will try to reduce, creating a connection
or even acceptance.
1. The notion of mediation works
on several levels: on the philosophical
level it served Hegel and his disciples
to describe the movement of history
itself. Dialectics, the driving force
of history, advances by successive
mediations: a fi rst situation (the thesis)
must pass through the mediation
of its opposite (antithesis) to progress
to a new condition (synthesis) which
retains something of each of the two
preceding moments.
The general concept of mediation
also leads us to think about
the institution of culture itself as
the transmission of that common
heritage which unites the members
of a community and in which they
recognise themselves. In this sense
of the word mediation, it is through
the mediation of its culture that individuals
perceive and understand the
world and their own identity; several
writers speak of symbolic mediation.
Again in the cultural fi eld, mediation
acts to analyse the ‘making public’ of
ideas and cultural products – their
being taken care of by the media
– and to describe their circulation
in the whole social sphere. The
cultural sphere is seen as a dynamic,
nebulous area where products mix
together and take over from one another.
Here the reciprocal mediation
of cultural products leads to the idea
of intermediality, of the relationship
between medias and the way in which
one media – television or cinema for
example – translates forms of production
made in another media (a
novel adapted for the cinema). These
creations reach their targets by one
or other of the various technical aids
that make up their mediatisation.
From this angle, analysis shows that
many mediations are set in motion by
complex chains of different agents
to guarantee content in the cultural
sphere and ensure that this content
reaches a broad public.
2. In museology the term mediation
has been in frequent use in
France and in European Frenchspeaking
zones for more than a
decade, when speaking of ‘cultural
mediation’, or ‘scientifi c mediation’
and ‘mediator’. Essentially it refers
to a whole range of actions carried
out in a museal context in order to
build bridges between that which
is exhibited (seeing) and the meanings
that these objects and sites may
carry (knowledge). Mediation sometimes
seeks to favour the sharing of
experiences and social interactions
between visitors, and the emergence
of common references. This is an
educational communication strategy,
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