Ways of seeing: The poetics and politics of exhibiting Italo-Australian cultures in Sydney

Abstract

This article reflects on the theoretical nodes behind the organisation of the exhibition Italiani di Sydney, Museum of Sydney, 30 August- 7 December 2003. It argues that exhibitions are produced through situated knowledges and it analyses the particular situatedness of the curator. Notions of imagined communities, the poetics of the carnivalesque, the everyday, the importance of objects, cultural heritage in the making, heterogeneity and heteroglossia, gaps between official narratives and lived actualities, hybrid spaces, and hyperlinked narratives, are interwoven in the text with a review of the exhibition.