Walls that tell stories

a perspective from social semiotics to multimodality in expographic processes of memory points

Abstract

The multimodal analysis of texts will allow the investigation of how semiotic modes are orchestrated in processes of meaning production. By accessing the full potentiality of these modes, it is possible to reveal how the discourses are constituted and re-signified. Thus, this study focuses on the analysis of new tools and methodologies used in the elaboration process of exhibition collections of Memory Points that propose to tell the stories of the communities where they are located. Seeking to understand the relations and the ways that these new tools and methodologies dialogue with museological work based on the place of marginalized social groups, breaking with the museum models as we know them today, the so-called traditional museums. The Points of Memory build the narratives of their expographies through the proposed reading of the communities where they are located as texts that are placed, in their signification process, in direct dialogue with their territory. In order to propose a discussion on the articulation of semiotic modes in the construction of multimodal meanings in expographic processes of Points of Memory and the relationship with the re-signification of spaces of memories, in which they are based and supported through the theoretical and methodological assumptions of Social Semiotics and Multimodality, as proposed by Hodge, Kress (1988); Kress, Van Leeuwen (1996, 2006) and Kress (2010). It is proposed an analysis of the elaboration of semiotic meanings in exhibitions of the Taquaril Museum of Memory Points, Belo Horizonte - Minas Gerais and the Memory Point Museum of Favelas - MUF, Rio de Janeiro - RJ. The analyses were based on the analytical categories of Functional Systemic Grammar and Visual Design Grammar. The results indicate that the parallelism and intersemiosis of verbal and visual semiotic modes are evidenced in the reconstruction of meaning in the elaboration of the expographic processes of these Points of Memory based on a social semiosis.