cabinet of curiosities

by MIA MACALLISTER layout JAYCEE JAMISON photographer IAN WOOD set design SOPHIE WYSOCKI

The first thing I notice about the room is the smell. It’s old, musty, and honestly, it smells a lot like death. The English civil wars ended three years ago, and London’s air is only now beginning to clear up. I can’t precisely place the scent — all I know is that it doesn’t smell local. Mixing with the odor of stale death are whiffs of the humid dangers of a faraway rainforest, the hot grits of deserts.

The sons of Britain’s aristocracy have just returned from their coming of age trip around Continental Europe, and the room is suffocating, self-importance crashing around the room in waves. On this Grand Tour, they visited the sites of history’s greatest civilizations and encountered cultures that had never been touched by outsiders. These privileged young men have returned to England, and they cannot wait to show off their new treasures.

Shelf after shelf of an enormous armoire overflows with strange objects to the point that the walls are covered as well. Everything seems to be put in the wrong order. While nothing is immediately recognizable, the way the objects are arranged gives them an air of importance and power, even in their deteriorating state.

On a high shelf, a fancy bronze knife sticks out of a crumbling clay pot. In a back corner, a lizard skull is attached to the body of a cat. I walk further into the room, past rows of indistinguishable clutter. Are these weapons, or are these children’s toys? I truly wouldn’t be able to tell. On the very back wall sprawls a collection of nonsensical drawings. The host of this event had bragged that they were authentic “hieroglyphs,” smuggled out of a tomb.

There are several conversations going on as the recently returned expeditionists spin stories about the cultures they took these items from. Their audience listens with bated breath. I can’t tell which, if any, of their tales are true.

Men who revere objects tend to rewrite history, and this event only further proves that to me.

In their prior lives, these artifacts had sentimentality and purpose. Now, they are simply strange objects to marvel at. Their humanity is gone. The men who collected them want to flaunt how educated and cultured they are, but they don’t care much about using the truth to do this. These Cabinets of Curiosities are a physical demonstration of the collector’s power.

The pattern is simple yet repetitive: go to a foreign country, visit their cultural heritage sites, and take anything and everything that seems interesting. Permission doesn’t need to be asked for; people are either too afraid or too apathetic to prevent the removal of their heritage. In a time when it seemed as though every inch of land across the world had already been claimed by England, it must have taken a bit more creativity to feel the same sense of fresh dominance and power that their fathers felt.

Without a doubt, these men were able to crack the code of domination in this new world and find a way to keep the power in the hands of the rich white man. They discovered that by taking ancient everyday objects and showing them off as pieces of “curiosity,” they could rewrite history. Aristocratic collectors, intentionally or not, defined what parts of history were deemed important enough to study, how to study them, and, unfortunately, how to interpret them.

The small pieces of obsidian that litter a field don’t seem to be anything special to the landowner, just pieces of rubble. But this changes when the Grand Tour passes through: suddenly, these objects can symbolize an ancient war field or the last remnants of an exotic, hidden society. While a crumbling clay pot could be the remnants of an ancient culture devoted to sacrificial offerings to their gods, it might actually be just a container for holding dried beans.

When you put aside contextual clues and fail to compare an unknown item to existing knowledge, an everyday item can become a curiosity. In the absence of historical accuracy, we instead learn history through the eyes of the affluent and find importance solely in the objects displayed in their homes.

These collections pretend to be full of variety and difference, but their biases are dangerously clear. When the only opinions and theories surrounding your finds came from rich, white men, it must be nearly impossible to come up with an objective statement. The hypocrisy is not lost on me: the men who traveled around Europe and glorified the Romans also visited South America and demonized the Mayans.

These decisions on which parts of history are good and important have and will continue to define the past, present, and future of these cultures for generations to come.

Science is progressing faster than ever before, but I am unsure if it will be fast enough to prevent these misinterpretations from sticking and becoming a reality. I continue to walk around the room, considering the lives of the people who owned these items and whether these exhibits will ever do justice to their lives. There is no way to preserve intent; time decays everything. All that can be done is to hope that future generations will be more forgiving when they inevitably re-interpret our lives. ■