Metapraxis

Métapraxis is an agency specialising in museography and interpretative resources for museums. Museography is often perceived as a collection of different practices, in some ways a hybrid process, which borrows from different areas of know-how, different fields of knowledge or indeed a combination of skills.


This is true insofar as museography is not a science. It has barely begun to explore its epistemological foundations and much of the knowledge accumulated has yet to be formalised. However it doesn’t ring true if we consider that museography is increasingly called upon, independently or in conjunction with other resources, to reflect upon the position and display, and specifically the representation, of objects and works in a building, that is to build specific relationships between visitors and objects in the public arena.


Casa del Alabado, museo d'art precolombien, Quito, Equateur - © Daniel et Zaïane Schmitt

To do this, museography puts forward spatial and cognitive strategies which tend to establish it as an independent practice and set it apart from architectural art per se. Museography finds its credibility not in the extra discipline and practical solutions it brings to the architecture but in the very nature of the relationship it creates between objects and people. This is particularly true when an exhibition sets out to attract large crowds and the scholarly language of architecture alone is not sufficient to describe the complexity of the work or the object, its connections, history, educational value and meanings.


Casa del Alabado, museo d'art precolombien, Quito, Equateur - © Daniel Schmitt

Our museography speculates on the visitor’s intelligence and tends not to be overcomplicated. It focuses on the positioning, shaping and lighting of the objects themselves, although we do use digital information and communication technologies (DICT) where we feel they are necessary. We concentrate our efforts on creating a visitor circuit which is intelligible, ensuring we offer different points of entry for different frames of reference; the notion “public” is useful when considering the visitor numbers, however in terms of the visitor experience, we focus on the individuals, the life journeys, each of whom connect, in their own unique way, with the objects and texts we have put together for them.