Performing witnessing: dramatic engagement, trauma, and museum installations

This article offers a discussion of two interactive museum installations, ‘Remembering the Children: Daniel’s Story’at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, and the main exhibit at the Humanity House Museum in the Hague, Netherlands. Both are examples of what I term self-guided dramas, taking the viewer/participant on an interactive journey through which they will experience a story or event that follows a dramatic narrative structure. These exhibits take as their subject the experiences and perspective of a protagonist forced into refugee status and turn the act of witnessing into a performative engagement for the museumgoer.