Exhibiting Exhibitions. Re-staging, Re-viewing and Re-considering the Role of Seminal Displays

The re-staging of seminal exhibitions is an emerging phenomenon, based on the re-enactment of historical shows, often within larger displays accurately recovering or even reconstructing installations that have played a significant role in the evolution – or in the revolution – of the exhibition practice. Beyond its more obvious outcomes (e.g. to disseminate the exhibitionary culture and to rescue its milestones from oblivion), this activity is contributing to set forth some important advancements in the conception and use of exhibitions. In particular, it contributes to reconsider some episodes or some aspects that may have been neglected (e.g. those pertaining to the museographic dimension), it enhances the acknowledgment of exhibitions as multidimensional constructs and historically engaged media, and eventually it expands the growing interest for exhibition histories, that in the last decades have become particularly attractive case studies to museologists, historians, architects and cultural researchers at large. The paper proposes a synthetic overview on the origin, the tasks and the potentialities and criticalities implied in the re-staging practice, with the aim to envision its possible contribution to the agenda and the prospects of contemporary museums