Embodiment and theatricality in post-museum practice

A recent shift to a more performative and relational understanding of the museum and its practices can be witnessed in the field of museum studies. This shift reimagines the museum as experience, process or performance, and is reflected in what has been termed the 'post-museum'. The post-museum challenges the representational practices of the museum, and introduces a potential 'liqud imaginary' which dissolves the traditional boundaries of what constitutes a museum. While these ideas point to relevant changes in the way museums are perceived and practiced, the field has so far failed to explore the implications of this shift for the practice of museum research. This study examines the potential of the post-museum for developing new approaches to research practices. It contributes to the field of museum studies by exploring creative research methods that qualify as site-responsive, experimental means of critically engaing with the museum. These creative methods of research are developed on-site at the National Maritime Museum Greenwich, London. Under-represented in the museological literature, maritime museums provide potent opportunity as sites for experimentation into creative, more-than-representational approaches to museum research. The study examines creative research methodologies through the embodied mode of inhabitation, which it conceptualises through the notions of dwelling and travelling. Drawing on the concept of the 'mariner's craft' from maritime literary criticism and so-called wet or liquid ontologies from human geography, the research explores the potential of post-museum thinking from a cross-disciplinary perspective. Inhabiting the Museum through creative-experimental doings, the thesis-in-motion maps out an uncertain voyage into the uncharted territories of creative maritime museum research, a voyage of exploration, intervention, and creativity.