Extended Abstract

Introduction

Rural heritage museums make everyday life visible by selecting and displaying buildings, tools, clothing, and cultural practices. Heritage in this sense is not a stock of surviving things but a product of choices about what is shown and how it is framed (Smith, 2006). Following Lefebvre (2014) and de Certeau (1984), everyday life is treated as a field where lived experience, social relations, and institutional order meet. A museum display is therefore a constructed representation, not a neutral record.

This article examines three digital collage posters made in 2012 in connection with the Guilan Rural Heritage Museum near Rasht, Iran. Collage places fragments from different contexts on one surface and keeps the tension between part and whole in view (Brockelman, 2001). Each poster builds a large human face from photographic fragments of heritage. The study does not try to recover the designer’s original intent or to judge the posters as publicity. It asks how meaning arises from the selection and arrangement of visual elements and how “the face as an archive” can serve analysis. This concept is a heuristic metaphor and an analytical tool, not a claim that a face holds an actual archive or the memory of the people portrayed. The reviewed literature treats collage, the face, and everyday heritage separately and does not combine them in the analysis of graphic works linked to an Iranian rural heritage museum.

Methods

This is a qualitative, a posteriori case study of three posters. The data are images of the posters and the reflective notes of the designer-researcher, who is one person. The notes were written while this article was being prepared, so they record later recollection. The posters were made after a student visit to the museum as a course assignment. Most source images were photographed in the field during the visit, and a few came from internet sources to supply details that could not be photographed on site. I assembled each poster in Adobe Photoshop from dozens of layered images. The faces were modeled on real people at the museum, an elderly visitor, a man involved in a lafand-bazi performance, and a young attendant, chosen intuitively and not by a theoretical criterion. Textures cover the faces, so the individuals cannot be identified.

The analysis had three stages: visual description, examination of the part-whole relation, and institutional and archival interpretation. Because the designer and researcher coincide, the initial interpretations were also reviewed by an independent third party. The review confirmed some categories and narrowed other claims, but it does not replace audience research or independent coding. No interviews or reception research were conducted.

Findings

The three posters share one structure: a green band with the museum’s name in English at the top, a matching Persian band at the bottom, and a large face between them. The skin is made of textured fragments such as wickerwork, bread, and cracked earth, and cut-out images of rural architecture and everyday objects surround it. The borders between fragments stay visible, so the viewer sees the face as a whole and also sees that it is assembled.

The subjects relate differently to their surroundings. The elderly visitor appears with thatched houses, wicker crafts, and market scenes, which places the face in an encounter with a rural environment. The figure linked to lafand-bazi appears with performance equipment, a carpet loom, and copper vessels, so performance and bodily activity come forward. The young attendant appears with a wooden house, pottery, and a tea tray, which links the face to care and the ordering of objects. Read afterward, these subjects correspond to visitor, performer, and attendant, but because they were picked by chance, this is a limited reading of these three works and not a typology.

The face as an archive shifts attention from what each image contains to how its elements are organized. The face frames the fragments within a human outline, and the viewer meets a human whole before recognizing its parts. As in any archive, selection is unavoidable, though the absence of an element cannot be taken as deliberate exclusion. The posters also show a double representation: elements were selected by the museum and then selected again in the collages. The second poster shows the limits of this process, since lafand-bazi depends on skill, movement, and spectators that a still image conveys only in part.

Conclusion

In all three posters, the face is a composite structure whose fragments keep their visual boundaries. Collage here exposes how heritage is selected and rearranged as it passes from everyday life to the museum and then to the graphic image. The face works as a surface between individual and collective, neither one person’s portrait nor a complete picture of a community. The findings are limited to these three works and cannot be generalized to other collages, other posters of the museum, or rural heritage representation in general. They rest on the posters and later reflective notes, not on audience data or staff views.

Keywords: Digital collage, Guilan Rural Heritage Museum, Face as archive, Everyday life, Poster design