Collectors practices and the preserving of their memories: Objects of the First World War in Nord Pas de Calais and west Flanders

This article examines the preserving of the memory shared by collectors and mediators of objects from the Great War in the context of museum mediation. The notion of the memory is understood in this article as the body of knowledge acquired, held and shared by these collectors within the framework of their practice of collection and mediation. We look firstly at the informational and communicative dimension of these collectors’ memory. We show that the collector’s memory relating to the objects collected takes a variety of different forms and that it is primarily communicated in oral and gestural form. The results of our analysis lead us to the conclusion that, today, only audiovisual recording techniques allow preserving a precise copy of memories for the long term. The second part of our analysis presents an audiovisual protocol for preparing, recording and storage of these memory traces.