Key Concepts of Museology - ICOM

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be incapable of using the resources
of a library. This also explains experiences
of visits adapted for blind or
partially sighted people, where other
senses are called in to play (hearing
and especially touch) to discover
the sensory aspects of the exhibits.
A painting or a sculpture is made to
be seen fi rst of all, and reference to
a text (or reading a placard if there
is one) only comes afterwards and
is not absolutely essential. Thus we
can say when of the museum that it
fulfi ls a “sensory documentary function”
(Deloche, 2007). (2) Marginalising
reality, because the museum
“specifi es itself while separating
itself” (Lebensztein, 1981). Unlike a
political fi eld where it is possible to
theorise about the management of
the concrete lives of people in society
through the mediation of institutions
such as the State, that which is museal
on the other hand serves to theorise
about the way in which an institution
creates, through separation and decontextualisation,
in short through
the putting into images, a space for
sensory display “at the margin of all
reality” (Sartre). This is the essence
of a utopia, that is to say a completely
imaginary space, certainly symbolic
but not necessarily intangible.
This second point characterises what
one might call the utopian function
of museums, because in order to
change the world, one must be able
to imagine it otherwise, and thus to
distance oneself from it, which is
why utopia as a fi ction is not necessarily
a lack or a defi ciency, but rather
the imagining of a different world.
DERIVATIVES: MUSEAL FIELD, MUSEALIA,
MUSEALITY, MUSEALISATION.
CORRELATED: MUSEOLOGY, MUSEUM,
MUSEUMIFICATION (PEJORATIVE), REALITY, SENSORY
DISPLAY, SENSORY EXPERIENCE, SPECIFIC RELATION.
MUSEALISATION
n. – Equivalent in French: muséalisation;
Spanish: musealisación; German: Musealisierung;
Italian: musealizazione; Portuguese:
musealisaçāo.
In the accepted understanding of
the term, musealisation means the
placing in the museum, or more
generally, transforming a centre of
life, which may be a centre of human
activity or a natural site, into a sort
of museum. The expression ‘heritagisation’
is undoubtedly a better description
of this principle, which rests
essentially on the idea of preservation
of an object or a place, but does not
cover the entire museal process. The
neologism ‘museumifi cation’ translates
the pejorative idea of the ‘petrifi -
cation’ (or mummifi cation) of a living
area, which may result from such a
process and which may be found
in numerous critical reviews about
the ‘musealisation of the world’.
From a strictly museological point
of view, musealisation is the operation
of trying to extract, physically
or conceptually, something from its
natural or cultural environment and
giving it a museal status, transforming
it into a musealium or ‘museum
object’, that is to say, bringing it into
the museal fi eld.