Three recent experiences have suggested this direction. The first is Camille Henrot’s video piece Grosse Fatigue, which collapses a whole history of mankind in only 13 minutes of desktop computing; the manipulation of fragments – myths, songs, objects, nature – has rarely been so powerful. The second is Thomas Demand’s installation Processo Grottesco, where an artificial cave is shaped out of a collection of all the caves in history of mankind, mostly in postcard format. The third experience is a trip to Mexico City, where a visit to the Museum of Anthropology and the encounter of Frida Escobedo triggered some of the architectural themes presented here. Without being reductive, each contribution reveals a particular take on collecting combined with a reflection on time: the collection is activated, put in movement, performed. This displacement, always conceptual, can simply be a displacement of the viewing subject, as Kristien Daem’s lateral viewpoint adopted for her pictures of exhibition devices at the museum of anthropology. It is sometimes a truly physical displacement, as Ištvan Išt Huzjan’s intervention to exhibit a private art collection at the neighbour’s house. Or it can be a displacement of meaning and purpose, as in Pierre Leguillon’s Museum of Mistakes and Camille Henrot’s exhibitions. Displacement is also performed in architectural terms, as is the case with 51N4E’s symbolic projects in Albania, Frida Escobedo’s pavilions made to be altered by the people, and Peter Märkli’s ‘changeful’ house for two performers. Perversion is the alteration of the original sense of things: the perverse museographer – be it architect, artist, photographer – challenges the codes of a collection, or creates a new collection out of the ‘failures’ of the institutionalised ones. This results in a mix of estrangement and kinship that come and haunt the relationships between all the items in the collection. To do so, the museographer doesn’t follow any secured knowledge. He or she proceeds by empirical attempts, aiming to question the order of things rather than reinforce established narratives.
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1 Such methods can be traced back to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1918–20) and T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land (1922), where ancient literature, mythology, spoken language, minor histories and ‘modern life’ are condensed into a single text.
Roger Caillois’s The Writing of Stones (1970), pp. 120–121
Accattone #4 stems from the idea of collection to explore mythical methods and visual ethnographies in contemporary practices, with an interest in the compression into a single artefact of long ages of history, power relationships, memories and everyday experience.1