Inhabiting the museum

From summer 2021 to spring 2022 the Nxt Mu-seum in Amsterdam has run the exhibition Shifting Proximities, meant to investigate the ways in which global events and de-velopments, mediated by technologies “are continually shifting the proximities between us, both literally and metaphorically.” This study wants to offer an account which, starting from this exhibition experience, addresses the temporal variations of the relationship between museums, visitors and their bodies, trying to investigate the extent to which technological devel-opments, guided by changing epistemic paradigms, have contributed to influence display and curatorial choices and their relationship to the visitor’s body. In this interplay artistic intuition – intertwined with technical innovations – will prove essential to trigger institutional changes, together with phil-osophical undertakings of the political ideologies that inform power dynamics in the museum system. The visitor’s body, in its materiality and motion habits, will be seen as engaging in continuously changing ways with the museum space, mir-roring the evolving epistemological paradigms of its times. Through an historical account of bodily practices and customs across museum spaces, this study aims to discuss the ways in which citizens’ dives through museum halls have been and are used to establish socially shared ideas of art and knowledge.