The Atlantic Wall: why a museum on European soil
Gennaro Postiglione

[...] Profanare significava [...] restituire al libero uso degli uomini. [...] Ma l’uso non appare qui come qualcosa di naturale: piuttosto a esso si accede soltanto attraverso una profanazione. Tra ‘usare’ e ‘profanare’ sembra esservi una relazione particolare [...].
[...] La profanazione dell’improfanabile è il compito politico della generazione che viene.
(Giorgio Agamben, “Elogio della profanazione”, in “Profanazioni”, Roma 2005, pp. 83-84, p. 106)

Museums and identity
Created as embodiment of the rhetoric of the power of knowledge, the museum – or its precursors such as the cabinets des curieux or Wunderkammern -, and its forms have followed a development which has led to a gradual opening of their limits and a change of their objectives, according to a process which has, over the centuries, resulted in an increase of the number of patrons, from a restricted and privileged group to the masses. Nonetheless, even if its borders are less insurmountable and its role has been transformed, the museum has remained an architecture for the public manifestation of political power, a privileged place for the exercise of a control which no longer represents segregation – for a long time prisons and museums have shared the same categories -, but rather that of the foundation of a national identity with which to identify. In fact, the museum represents the institutional "form" of Western memory, and in particular that of the social group founding it, providing a specific image of the "dominant" culture. The message associated with this identity is aimed, in different ways, to the members of the community and to outsiders; the former are invited to share a symbolic well-being and the others to act as observers. Emerging as public institutions in Nineteenth-century Europe, museums have served as sites for the collection and formation of an identity. This kind of articulation, whether national, regional or ethnic, collects, celebrates, commemorates, evaluates and sells a way of life. It is a process which sustains the existence of an "imagined community”. In a global context where the collective identity is represented by the possession of a culture (a way of life, a tradition, an art form) the museum finds its primary raison d'être.
As a consequence of the "postmodern" condition characterizing the contemporary European countries, an historical-cultural revision of the ideas and forms on which museums are based, as well as the techniques of their expansion, is needed, since every representation inevitably involves someone who was, until not so long ago, the other, the foreigner, and not only as user but also, and simultaneously, as object and subject. A questioning of positivistic universalism, on the one side, and the very idea of cultural identity as factor of discrimination on the other, undermines the global structure of knowledge/power, until recently accustomed to articulating itself in an autonomous and uncontested manner. Showing a more open attitude towards the other histories and cultures inhabiting the modern period, which have the same rights to be represented in places serving this purpose, museums discover the need to rewrite the history and memory they are responsible for conserving. This re-writing must be capable of programmatically renouncing the opposition of differences, and be inclusive rather segregative, cutting the dominant culture down to size and rendering the subjects homogeneous with respect to one another. In fact, the culture to which also the self-same "dominant" class belongs to is not univocal, but rather the product of a process of continuous contamination which the contemporary city increases, even if it rejects it.
“In the idea of roots/routes and cultural authenticity there lies a fundamental, even fundamentalist, form of identity that invariably entwines with nationalist myths in the creation of an ‘imagined community’, even at an European level. […] However, whenever tradition appears in the form of a temporal and cultural continuum that unfolds according to he logic of its origins, that is teleology, its version of the past (and the future) is inescapably accompanied by the appendix of a historical interrogation. […] By disentangling the knots of that monothetic discourse and loosening ourselves from its rigid ordinances, a further, more open, discontinuous and historical, framework emerges”. It is the lesson provided by the Post-colonial Studies that have revealed the impossibility of a culture, a society or an identity to remain separate and self-referential. Sterile fruit of the despotic desire of self-assertion – nurtured through the elimination and demonizing of alterity, - the attempt to virtually escape the contamination and hybridation imposed by continuous transits, migrations and translations is bound for failure. The incursion of "the other" in our everyday life makes heimlich and unheimlich co-exist, disrupting positivist confidences based on the dialectic of opposition and undermining the self-same idea of "authenticity" and "original community" on which the Western culture has organized its knowledge and built its traditions.
“Here, in the post-colonial world, the arrow of time, of linearity, of nation and identity, the ‘progress’ of occidental history, is deflected into diverse spaces that disrupt the single, unfolding narrative by introducing multiple site of language, narrative, his-stories and her-stories, and heteronomy of different pulses”.
In these terms the "single and homogeneous" identity is dissolved, to be represented solely through "multiple and complex identities".

National cultures and hybrid narration: forthcoming Europe
The contemporary condition faced by most Western urban realities poses to an increasingly marked extent the question of "the other". The continuous migratory flows which saturate the physical and cultural spaces of the contemporary city cannot be ignored or segregated for long any more – ghettos, shelters, etc. – and neither is the opening of certain museums focusing on local realities a valid solution, because, by presenting a kind of exhibition of "the other", they underscore separation rather than integration.
The question of cultural integration and the consequent multiethnic realities only apparently represent a recent issue induced by the international economy, the process of globalization and the European Union politics. In actual fact the problem of "the other, of the migration of humans and cultures, is central in the formation of the modern society. In a certain sense the movement of peoples, histories, cultures and individuals is the salient fact of modernity, since its onset five centuries ago, from the European expansion in the Americas to the slave trade, from the Chinese Diaspora in South-Eastern Asia to the overseas emigration of southern Italians. In spite of this, the cult of nationalities has been a crucial factor in the history of the young and nascent European nation-states of the Nineteenth century, which probably finds its most consonant form of expression in literature.
“The nation-as-unity is the reflex of the idea of the nation as founded on linguistic purity and homogeneity, but as Bakhtin pointed out, such conceptions of a unitarian language are in fact the expression of a desire to limit what is fundamental to the nature of language – its diversity and its tendency to fragment into a multiplicity of voices. […] ‘Tradition’ is a term which has been used as an insistence on inner unity, but like the proponents of standardized languages such unity is in fundamental conflict with the very nature of the processes of tradition-making and tradition-receiving: traditions are heteroglossic[…]. The nature of a national imagination, like a language, is an unending series of interactions between different strands of tradition, between influences from within and without, between the impact of new experiences and the reinterpretation of past experiences”.
Tradition, seen from this point of view, as collective, public memory which is the exclusive trait of a particular culture, reveals its nature as simultaneously both selective and discontinuous, as not all elements are treated in the same way: some are withheld, while others are ignored or even suppressed. This way to remember is completely different from the one belonging to the "historicist" sense of tradition, where it is represented as a continuous, uninterrupted and homogeneous flow which the museum institution has, for centuries, conserved. No isolated tradition exists, nor is this possible; every tradition inevitably repositions others which come into contact with it, and these are at the same time modified in their turn. The result is unexpected hybridations; rather than defending ourselves from them to protect a "hypothetical" purity and "authenticity" we have to be able to accept the invitation to reconsider our own position and repositioning in terms of space and time, culture and identity. “The 'place' of the national culture is not unitary and cohesive, nor can it be considered simply as 'different' with respect to what is beyond or outside it: the border has two sides, and the problem of interior/exterior is transformed in a process” of continuous hybridation.
"The other is never outside or beyond us; it emerges vigorously within our own cultural discourse when we believe we are speaking 'intimately' and in the native dialect, "between us".

Museums for the future
The themes we deal with regard the material culture of and in the territory at an European level. A culture identified as a series of heritages (manufactures, architecture, natural elements) which are object of planning attention in a dynamic of transformations attentive to the preservation and understanding of memories, and to the awareness of their role in the making of a future structure that will be at the same time bearer of adequate and renewed ways of life and of use of spaces and places. It will also increase the value of memories and knowledge that forms and materiality of the past are able to provide in this innovation process. Here a new and fruitful role of the museum institution is assumed, seen as promoter of a new sensitive and attentive planning in territorial compartments, in places and areas where the values deserve to be experienced as cognitive moments of our way of living and inhabiting/dwelling the environment that surrounds us. The museum in places, the systems, the museum nets, all belong to one organization strategy for the diffused knowledge on the territory. It is a working hypothesis that focuses on the possibility of designing and creating exhibitions that can be visited either by moving about nets of physical connections, of materialized places of memory, with crossings and routes, or by using computer networks or other multimedia with the same free capability to look for and find knowledge and learning. A project (or a system of projects) all the same. The territory changes continuously; it is a live, dynamic body. The diffused museum involves polarities and underlines the threads of physical and material memory of matter that is continuously subject to changes, and is therefore a contemporary condition of doing architecture. We know that there is a territory in Europe, The Atlantic Coast, which is in itself a living ‘landscape museum’. Its elements, both natural and artificial, need to be preserved, exhibited, restored and redesigned exactly as the objects belonging to a museum collection. It is a net of places, manufactured articles and products which requires the actual setting up of museums, paths and outdoor museum exhibitions on an environmental scale. The museum ‘diffused’ in places is here thought of as a plan that means to permeate the advanced culture of landscape, ‘seen as cultural landscape’. This would be put into act (both) through the definition of physical reality remodelling and re planning hypothesis towards new meanings and ways of use for the historical landscape. (And also) Through the activation of operations that would/could involve tourism flows, choices for mass free time, the desire to return to nature and the research of local identities as instruments of critical attention to the relationship between man-environment and history. The aim is to experiment in the areas singled out by the individual research units. Themes of these researches are the relationships between museum, city and territory, regarding the acquisition, the conservation and exposition of the heritages and the capacity of the museum institution to make this knowledge active and part of the transformation dynamics of society, culture and of the physical structure of cities and territories, according to the concept of ‘museum outside of the museum’, which means a museum diffused and integrated with community, places, spaces and geographical areas. These researches will be used for studying and planning places where the relationship between museum culture and territory culture is analysed according different possible interpretations.
Such a task requires competences of the disciplines of architectural and landscape design in connection with the disciplines of museum design and with specialist contributions by historians, archaeologists, territory scholars as well. This is done because it is very important to start precise reflections over the different ways and manifestations that the theme of museum rescue for the diffused heritage has created, both for the importance nowadays of the tendency – in a way inevitable - to make museums in existing buildings and also because, regarding The Atlantic Wall remains, it often happens that the building has a particular meaning related to the subject of the museum. It is clear that the problems which bind typologies to spaces in existing buildings (which have the most varied origins because of the abandonment and loss of the original meaning) and to the organization of museum programs, cannot be neglected. This happens both regarding the art museum typologies (contemporary art especially) and also for technical-scientific or historical museums. As a matter of fact, such buildings or infrastructural systems, archaeological excavations or inhabited parts of a city are not always compatible with exhibitions. Therefore both the spatial issue is stated but also problems regarding the meaning of the relationship between architecture and exhibitive programs. A design matter regards the ‘heaviness’ of the new compared to the old and its role in clarifying the museum sense of the old. In some cases the place/building becomes museum of itself: they ‘exhibit’ themselves and ‘tell their story’ as they are. In this case there is a sort of memory coherence between the container and the contents. The eloquence of the manufactured articles thus becomes a priority element especially if we think of the cases where the whole building with all its objects inside becomes a museum. To consider a museum applied to some manufactured objects means also that we recognise that there is architecture, and beyond its documental quality has precise formal qualities. Here, with The Atlantic Wall traces, the problem is the interpretation of heritage difficult to understand but that at the same time constitutes built-cultural-landscapes with a great expressive and cognitive potentiality.
From the architectural point of view, the counterpoint is not only between a rigid restoration and a composing freedom, but also between the manufactured articles and the existing places conservation and their exhibition in an operation of definition of the museum frame. This frame finds the exhibitive sense of the whole in the reciprocal completion of parts succeeding thus in creating spaces and places of the excellence of knowledge typical of the material culture. As a matter of fact the museums, in their most advanced forms, place themselves today in the meeting point between the necessity of conservation and exhibition of historical products, which is the main feature of the museum idea, and a more innovative ability to rouse interest, attention, stimulus regarding the continuously changing forms of man’s acting.
Moreover, we have the experience - all in recent history of this institution - of the musealization of entire ambits, sites and territories; where the deposition of signs, objects, figures and materials produced by human activity is visible, meritable and sensitive to a cultural re-composition, in a sort of process of territorial appropriation on the part of the museum and where its pervasiveness, described above, finds its expression. Not long ago the news appeared of the musealization of ‘Route 66’, an intervention which was greeted as ‘the world's longest museum’; an itinerary more than 3000 kilometres long from Chicago to Los Angeles, where the history of the most recent internal migration from the American east to the American west took place. As can be easily verified by connecting to the numerous Internet sites dedicated to it, along ‘Route 66’ local museums, committees, groups of enthusiasts and agencies of the American cultural heritage network have long banded together to constitute a ‘museum federation’ on a national scale, united by the thread of the real ‘linear museum’. The reclamation of this infrastructure, or landscape architecture represents a significant experiment in the field of contemporary museographic design for its ‘open’ and dynamic systematics. Herein is expressed an acceptation of the museum which tends to escape from its traditional functions as the ‘house of art and science’ to put itself where “history has happened” articulating a new, fruitful relationship between the museum institute and the territory, community and surroundings. Starting from the historical experience of the English open air museums and the German Freilichtmuseen, up to the French practice of ecomusées, the values of memory, the sense of identity of the past, of history, i.e., the essence of the museum idea, today involve the territory and its landscapes in a comprehensive way that sees the museum itinerary expanding into wider dimensions, coherent with the cultural expressions of the postmodernist and post industrial conditions, equally identifiable in the equivalent terms patrimonio, patrimoine, heritage. These lead us to a continuing and ever-expanding confrontation not only with the memory of our civilization and with the meaning of its consumer products but also with the forms of its transformations in space.
A system of museums in places can be put into effect by referring basically to two models: a museum system defined as ‘linear’, that works in oro-geographical structures, where the physical consequentiality of places, goods and exhibitions is defined; a museum system defined as ‘park’ or ‘area structure’, defined by homogeneous and interrelated characteristics.
The thematic park represents one of the main subjects of contemporary architectural debate. Borrowed from the large pavilion exhibitions of our century, it seems to represent a possible frontier for the contemporary project, in which the connection between the individuality of the architect's intervention and the others is found in the feeble red thread of the theme.
The linear museum is based on the idea of a widespread museum, organized in a system, or net. Its structure is composed of many different small structures which work together as a complex, coordinated organism. In this case the single operations are unified by a sort of map which is ideal, but at the same time concrete, where the different centres work together in harmony, but with a degree of independence. Among the various centres there are differences in the ambits of cultural identification, as well as in the architecture and in the design choices for the arrangements and exhibitions. These are of course elements belonging to a history in the making, subject to the economic and social alterations of the life of the people living in that area.
Both seams to fit to the musealization of The Atlantic Wall, where the linear structure, at a local dimension, interacts with the landscape and with its thematic values and heritages. Connecting the system with local thematic parks.
With this purpose, changing the concept of contact zone formulated by M. L. Pratt, i.e. a place in which geographically and historically separate persons come into contact among them establishing mutual, interactive relations, one may reconsider the identity of the museum. The museum as a historical theme, tackled on the basis of new cultural productions and new relations. Consequently, if we consider them as "contact areas", their organizational structure understood as "collection" becomes a topical historical, political and moral relation: an exchange of power relations. In a manner that is in some aspects utopian, museums are being reconsidered as public venues for collaboration, shared control and complex translation; places of power turned into places of cultural integration.
It is clear that a vision of this kind appears, to some extent, utopian due to the history of museums and their relationship with national contexts, but the current hybridation of contemporary culture calls for a profound revision. “[…] It can open up a potential move beyond the merely ‘exotic’ to suggest another way of being in time. If museums provoked a response in this fashion it would be forced to abandon the disciplinary predications of an authorized ‘tradition’ […]. Here the limits of its precise location would open the door on to the interrogations that arrive from elsewhere. Museum finds itself responding not only to the increasingly diasporic condition of the contemporary world, but would itself become increasingly diasporic [..]”.

note
Some of the issues discussed in the article are related to, and part of, the wider research themes undertaken by the research unit “Sezione di Museografia”, at the DPA-Politecnico di Milano (actually composed by: Luca Basso Peressut, Project Leader, Gennaro Postiglione, Associate Professor, Mariella Brenna and Imma Forino, researchers), presented and partially developed during the last years within the Italian University Research Programme, and Granted by MIUR in 2003: Museums and sites. Museal networks, systems and parks to enhance cultural heritages in cities and territory: architectural and museographical design.
Ref.: T. Bennett, The birth of the Museum, London & New York 1995.
Ref.: I. Karp, D. Lavine (ed.), Exhibiting Cultures, Washington 1992.
Ref.: B. Anderson, Imagined Communities, London 1983.
J. Clifford, Routes, Harvard 1997, pp. 70-72.
Ref.: J. Clifford, Routes, op.cit.; H. K. Bhabha, The location of culture, London & New York 1994.
Ref.: J. Clifford, Routes, op.cit.; H. K. Bhabha, The location of culture, op. cit.
I Chambers, Migrancy, Culture, Identity, London & New York 1994, p. 73.
Ibidem.
D. Lavine, in I. Karp e D. Lavine, Exibiting Culture, Smithsonian Institution, Washington 1992.
C. Craig, op.cit., p. 31.
Ref..: I. Chambers, Tradition, transcription, translation and transit, in “AREA” n. 51,
July-August 2000, p. 2-5.
H. K. Bhabha (ed.), introduction to Nazione e narrazione, Rome 1999, p. 38 (original title Nation and Narration, London & New York 1990).
Ibidem.
Ref.: AAVV, Vers une transition culturelle. Sciences et techniques en diffusion. Patrimoines reconnus, cultures menacées, Presses universitaires, Nancy 1991.
Ref.: F. Drugman, I musei del territorio, in I luoghi del lavoro nel Pinerolese. Tra mulini e fabbriche, centrali e miniere, ed. by A. Cerrato e C. Ronchetta, Celid, 1996.
Ref.: G. J. Ashworth and P.J. Larkham, ed. by, Building a New Heritage : Tourism, Culture and Identity in the New Europe, Routledge, Londra-New York 1994.
Ref.: L. Basso Peressut, ed. by, I luoghi del museo. Tipo e forma fra tradizione e innovazione, Editori Riuniti, Roma 1985.
Ref.: S. Shama, Paesaggio e Memoria, Mondadori, 1997.
Ref.: K. Hudson, Museums of Influence, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987.
Ref.: F. Choay, L' Allégorie du patrimoine, Edition de Seuil, 1992.
Ref.: K. Walsh, The Representation of the Past. Museums and Heritage in the post-modern world, Routledge, London-New York 1992.
Ref. : F. Drugman, I musei in rete nel territorio. Sistemi museali e progetto in: AAVV, Il Museo diffuso. I luoghi del Museo nel territorio del Polesine, “Rivista Beni Culturali e Ambientali in Polesine”, n.3, 1999.
Ref.: A.-M. Eyssartel e B. Rochette: Des mondes inventés. Les parcs à thème, Paris, La Villette, s.d.).
Ref.: M. L. Pratt, Imperial Eyes. Travel Writing and Transculturation, London & New York 1992.
J. Clifford, op.cit., pp. 86-90.
I. Chambers, Tradition, transcription, translation and transit, in “AREA” n. 51,
July-August 2000, p. 4.