Narrating place: the sense of visiting

Abstract

Famously, Jean-François Lyotard claimed the exhibition visitor to be ‘a body in movement’ whose trajectory within an exhibition is comparable to that of a character in a novel. Moving from Lyotard.s affirmation, the article considers exhibition narrative through the theoretical framework offered by Michel de Certeau and Michel Serres. Certeau.s analogy of walking to the speech act, and the figures of speech that can govern movement in space, and Serres. Appreciation of visiting as a kinetic form of seeing that encompasses all the senses, offer relevant perspectives to analyse exhibition narrative and the centrality of the visitor as an enactor within it. The article uses two case studies to explore the role of place as crucial to construction of knowledge in exhibitions and further elaborates on Serres’ notion of ‘visiting’ as a way to disrupt such construction to enhance the unfolding of narratives and responses.