About the museum:
The Marin Držić House was conceived in 1989 as a special synthesis of all experience deriving from the areas of theatrical studies, set design and costume design, conceptual art and information science. In its totality the Marin Držić House is a theatre museum and a scholarly and documentary institution, an exhibition space and a theatre happening, a cultural and tourist experience of a segment of the past of Dubrovnik. Established as memorial museum of one of Croatia’s greatest dramatists, Marin Držić, today it is a unique example in Croatia of a theatre museum, while because it fits so well into the context of the old city core and because of its authentic appearance, it can also be perceived as a special example of an ambiental museum. The basic activity of the institution is to collect, study and disseminate theatre studies material, as scholarly research material to other interested institutions and researchers, or as an aid to theatre workers in their activities. For this purpose, the institution has at its disposal a theatrical collection composed of posters, programmes and photos of performances of Držić in Croatia and outside the country, documenting the life of the theatre of the last half a century in the framework of the Dubrovnik Summer Festival and other Croatian stages. Through organised, constant and continuous presentation of the collected theatrical material, the Marin Držić House should be able to become a real research centre in which visitors can be initiated into the bases of Držić studies, as well as the more broadly understood context of Renaissance world view and literature, presented above all through the Croatian dramatic heritage. The special feature of the institution is its display, a mobile and visitor-friendly theatrical and conceptual installation that, in the spirit of the post-modern and the conceptual, endeavours to reconstruct the period of the Renaissance as the time and space of Držić’s life. In this case, we are not dealing with an authentic museum collection from the 16th century, rather with a stage set, closer to stage props and costumes than a classic museum display. Visitors, though, surrounded by dolls, posters, and typical stage ingenuities and guided by an audio guide in which actors’ interpretations of Držić’s texts are inserted, feels more like a participant perhaps even as a creator of a theatrical performance than a visitor to a usual kind of museum.
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