“Grandfather’s house key”: Subject-based and visual narratives in the space of family memory

The authors look into the little studied issue of communicating family memory via family (home) museum expositions. The principles of using various subject-based and visual narratives as part of communication in the museum space are analyzed, taking into account the role structure, modes of communication, and participants’ competence in the topic. The discourse of memory arises when the museum space is problematized, when there is a need to explicate whatever meanings hidden within it. Important here are the principles of organizing space and the content of expositions, the ways of framing expositions and their symbolization, the parameters of situations in which memory narratives are communicated, built both on template schemes (scripts) and on multimodal schemes with flexible scenarios. At the same time, the specific gravity of subject-based and visual narratives and their relationship with verbal narratives varies significantly depending on the initial meaning (metaposition) of the museum space and the method of its framing. Interpretation of an exposition depends both on the nature of participants’ interaction and on the degree of their involvement, when the facts of each participant’s episodic memory underlying a given thing form a common communicative space - communicative memory. The explicated values that belong to the individual memory of each of the participants in communication generate new connotations in the semantics of this thing, updating their common cultural memory on the basis of shared emotional experience and deployable narratives. The museum narratives analyzed in the article focus on a specific era, period, or event. A family history or biography is used in them as a sign of belonging to a local or large history. The distinctness of the museums studied is that they rely on the Soviet past, which, depending on the chosen optics, appears in them as the history of the USSR or the life of Soviet people in a chronological perspective.

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