Translating environmental memory in a natural history museum

Abstract

Faced with the environmental crisis, natural history museums have started to redefine their roles and look for new ways to represent natural changes. In exhibitions, this has led to an evolution conceptualized here as a shift from natural history to environmental memory. The article starts with theoretical reflections from museum and memory studies, and is followed by an analysis anchored in a case study of the Museum of Natural Sciences in Brussels. Central is a display where memories about nature's past and present are shared in the form of fictional audio testimonies in four languages. I contend that the transition from history to memory in representations of the environmental crisis is, in fact, a translational problem that manifests itself on multimodal, intralingual, and interlingual levels.