Museums and language: a semiotic analysis of the interactions between museums and cities

Abstract

The article considers a methodological base for the study of museums as semiotic objects. After a theoretical and methodological introduction, the work proposes a reading of the Jewish Museum of Berlin as a text that places itself, in its architecture, in a direct dialogue with its historical and topographical environment, through a language linked to absence and emptiness, with the dialectic of what is said and what is silenced. In a second moment, it examines the constitution of a museum that constructs the narrative of its objects through the fiction, the Museum of Innocence, illustrating the possibilities to institute a collective memory of the individuals, through the recovery of the memory of Istambul at particularly historical moment, that of the Turkish process of modernization in the decade of 70. In both the analyzed cases, the museum presents itself as a complex text whose layers can be analyzed.