2.7: From the Museum to The Body. Heritage / Narrative / Mnemomotorics / Experience
Contemporary heritage studies focus on the mechanisms of constructing narratives about the past, including how museum narratives are created and the functions served within them by artifacts, ruins, and technologies. Stories of ancient history and cultures are built not only from objects but also through the roles of language, music, ritual, and bodily practices, which together co-create the experience of the past. Modern heritage studies draw attention to that which has been hitherto invisible, repressed, or deemed “uncomfortable” in narratives about the past. Consequently, artistic and curatorial practices capable of revealing museum “blind spots” are subjected to analysis.
This field of research also includes reflection on the role of digital reconstructions: visualizations, simulations, and 3D models commonly used in modern archaeology to construct stories about objects, people, and history. This leads to the necessity of redefining the boundaries between original, copy, and simulation, and raises questions about how our experience of the past is shaped. Therefore, in reflections on heritage, the point of gravity is shifting from the question “what does the object represent?” to the question: “in what way is knowledge of the past entangled in the relationship between memory, intention, and agency?”
The analysis of bodily practices – including modes of movement, competition, and physical contact – is carried out within the Biady Project. This is an interdisciplinary attempt to recognize and recreate a forgotten folk form of wrestling, once practiced in north-eastern Poland (the Mazovia and Kurpie regions). The developed research method involves combining historical, ethnographic, and archaeological perspectives with reconstructive practice and physical training, treated as a cognitive tool in the formula of the “ethno-archaeology of movement.”
The ongoing research encompasses analyses of written, iconographical, and audiovisual sources, as well as the experimental reconstruction of combat techniques in collaboration with living witnesses of the tradition. Theoretical reflection is accompanied by outreach activities: scholarly publications, workshops, lectures, a documentary film, and a publicly accessible repository of sources.
In many pre-philosophical cultures, “3D thinking” – in the sense we know it – does not function. Understanding the paintings, urban layouts, or landscapes of the distant past requires a departure from the mental frameworks we know today, which often prove unproductive in the context of studying very ancient cultures. The question of space is therefore one of the key issues in contemporary archaeology and cultural studies. It allows us not only to critically rework modern conceptions of topography but also to grasp how ancient communities organized their world and how they transmitted knowledge through inherited spatial arrangements, relationships, and the movement patterns inherent within them.
Memory and Movement as Experience
Research on bodily practices and movement also encompasses the analysis of space as an active element of cultural memory. In a project carried out, among others, in ancient Mycenae, space is not treated as a neutral background for objects, but as a factor shaping perception, thought processes, and action. The method referred to as landscape choreography (mapping-as-dancing) allows for investigating how paths, terrain, light, or acoustics “lead” the body and co-create ancient cognitive matrices. Cultural memory, understood as a derivative of the cultural landscape, reveals itself not only in museum narratives and digital reconstructions, but also in the experience of movement, the senses, and the relationship with the environment.
From Image to Narrative
Research shows that the meaning of works does not arise solely within the image, but also in the ways it is viewed, interpreted, and presented. The analysis encompasses both the language of criticism and the role of museums, collections, and reproductions in shaping narratives about art. Here, art history becomes a narrative of how culture selects, organizes, and remembers images.
↑ Educational comic illustrating the concept of “embodied memory” – social and cultural knowledge transmitted through learned movement sequences and the relationship between the body and space (illustration generated by Academia.edu AI Generator)
↓ Landscape of Mycenae, view from inside the citadel looking toward the road leading to the Lion Gate (photo by S. Borowicz)