Cultural Memory

With the process of commodity exchange and colonization, culture spreads on a global scale, constantly breaking through the limitations of the region and mode of the national culture. For museum and exhibitions, the national boundary should be broken and construct in a global vitision. As a public instruction institution, the national heritage exhibited in the museum aims to find a general public history. With the sharing of resources and cultural exchanges,  "the hegemonic culture influencing the entire world will ultimately result in the end of cultural diversity."² "Although homogenizing influences do indeed exist, they are far from creating anything akin to a single world culture"³, instead, the mixture of different cultures is an entire process globally, so the exposure to the respectively other culture can lead to a better understanding between the cultures, and adapt the benefit elements for a better worldwide culture formation.

Cultural globalization involves the formation of shared norms and knowledge with which people associate their individual and collective cultural identities to create a “cultural memory”. In social dimensions,  cultural memory is “the faculty that allows us to build a narrative picture of the past and through this process develop an image and an identity for ourselves.” ²  Cultural memory is like an impression related to specific history and facts to discribe the consequence in the public of the culture change. Through the collective cultural memory, an entire era can be restored. 

Timing

In the history, the culture has been developed crisscrossly because of the communication between different cultures. For example, because of the bussiness trading, Chinese goods saled to the Europea leading a cultural revolution and the public's taste has been changed. Therefore, the culture history can be divided into different period based on different features influced by different cultures. According to Michel Foucault , the museum is defined as a "heterotopia of indefinitely accumalating time."1 Audience can shuttle the history by going through the entire exhibition based on the timeline order of the selective objects. "History" is a concept created to describe the existed humanity development. It is an objective concept so people relate to historical stroies based on their understandings of the cultural diversity. To better understanding our own culture, we have to understand the differences between different countries or other backgrounds. 

However, histroy is numerous and jumbled. The historical story told by the exhibition should be classfied for audience to self-study. For Assmann, cultural memory is based on fateful events of the past, on fixed points which he calls ‘figures of memory’ 1. I am thinking of using the typical icons of the cultures to restoll the memory of a specific cluture in a period.

Exhibition as a dialogue to see the equal cultural memory for a better cultural understanding 

Eventhough the artefacts in the exhibition are real, the cultural understanding created by the exhibition is a impression not reality. Therefore,  the intervention exhibition in this book is not an archaeological exhibition, instead, the core concept is to create a dialogue between the New England culture and the Beijing culture.

Living room is a intersection of the public space as well as the private space, therefore, everyone in the livingroom has a rich memory privately and commonly. So I chose the living rooms against two cultures in different period as the lens through which to explore the historical background of two cultures.

The living room in the exhibition is a figure of the cultural memory consisting of chaotic furnitures, decorators as well as architecture structures. Through the living room, audience are encouraged to recall the previous aesthetic, traditions, fashion, war, pain, etc.

There will be a democratic dialogue in the exhibition. Two different cultures will be stand side-by-side to tell their stories equally. But considering of the  transportation limitation, in Providence's exhibition, the collections from Beijing will be hybrid virsus physical and fictional. Relatively, the exhibition in Beijing will mixed physical collections locally and virtual collections from New Endland museums.