Performance as a paradigm in designing museum experience

In the contemporary exhibit design field one can see a significant increase of visitors’ engagement process using interactive systems and devices. The exhibit design discipline develops a new planning attitude that exploits the potential of new technologies and techniques typical of the stage design. At the same time the visitor is increasingly involved in the cultural experience in terms of physical engagement and constructive participation; therefore he “performs” the exhibit place through gestures, interactions, attitudes, relations in a more and more participative way. Therefore rethinking the museum experience approach, the design discipline opens itself to interesting hybridizations with arts and new forms of aesthetics. Performance goes into the exhibit practice and visit and it characterizes the visitor’s experience. In this paper, after a first part focused on a short landscape of exhibition design definitions useful to demonstrate the plurality and dynamism of this meaning, one explores the performance as a paradigm of cultural experience. One suggests three possible categories of analysis of case studies: performing visitors where the exhibit layout influences visitor’s gestures, behaviors and attitudes and/or is focused on the visitor’s role-change; performing contents where contents “come alive” in a narrative framework through interactive languages and unconventional ways of communication; performing places: where the exhibition system is a sort of performance because it is dynamic, scenographic and immersive by adopting a staging approach. This dissertation moves to a multiverse concept of performing heritage that represents an interesting declination of this topic because it rethinks the traditional way to consider and valorise cultural heritage.