Skin in the Game E-Book

Clémentine Deliss

• Herausgeber: Hatje Cantz Verlag
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Hatje Cantz Text
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 300

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Skin in the Game follows on from the acclaimed fieldwork diary, The Metabolic Museum. In this new book, Clémentine Deliss expands on how artists understand risk and contention both in their work and with regard to historical collections. Through a series of compelling conversations, questions are raised on how to work on colonial collections through the concept of the "prototype" as generative of a multiplicity of non-exclusive interpretations. The book includes interviews with leading women artists spanning two generations—Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Andrea Zittel—in which they discuss that moment of "skin in the game," when each of them took the decision to become an artist, to enter the Hades of an uncertain existence and the Heaven of aesthetic experiment. What was the prototype that defined their career and their life's trajectory, that like a revenant returns over the course of an artist's lifetime? CLÉMENTINE DELISS (*1960, London) is an independent curator whose practice crosses the borders of contemporary art, critical anthropology and curatorial experimentation. She is internationally recognized for her seminal work on the Post-Ethnographic, on African modernism, and for her interventionist practices in art. She is Honorary Global Humanities Professor of History of Art at the University of Cambridge, and Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin.

Leseprobe

Photo: Christian Werner

Clémentine Deliss is an independent curator whose practice intersects the fields of contemporary art, critical anthropology, and curatorial experimentation. She is internationally recognized for her seminal work across different platforms including publishing, arts observatories, exhibitions and research on subjects as varied as the post-ethnographic, African modernism, future academies, and interventionist practices in the visual arts. She has taught at numerous art colleges in Europe, is Global Humanities Professor of History of Art at the University of Cambridge, and was Associate Curator at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin between 2020 and 2023. She lives in Berlin.

Further titles in the Hatje Cantz Text series:

Clémentine Deliss

The Metabolic Museum

ISBN 978-3-7757-4780-6

András Szántó

Imagining the Future Museum: 21 Dialogues with Architects

ISBN 978-3-7757-5276-3

Tirdad Zolghadr (ed.)

REALTY: Beyond the Traditional Blueprints of Art & Gentrification A Reader

ISBN 978-3-7757-5171-1

Beate Sóntgen and Julia Voss (eds.)

Why Art Criticism? A Reader

ISBN 978-3-7757-5074-5

Niklas Maak

Server Manifesto: Data Center Architecture and the Future of Democracy

ISBN 978-3-7757-5070-7

András Szántó

The Future of the Museum: 28 Dialogues

ISBN 978-3-7757-4827-8

All books in the Hatje Cantz Text series are also available as ePub and ePDF.

www.hatjecantz.com

Skin in the Game

Skin in the Game

Conversations on Risk and Contention

Clémentine Deliss

Contents

Preface

The Museum Lazaret

Clémentine Deliss

Metabolic Museum-University

Clémentine Deliss

Collections and Contention

Bureau d’Esprit with Matthias Bruhn, Clémentine Deliss, Desiree Heiss, Iman Issa, Ines Kaag, Augustin Maurs, Tom McCarthy, Henrike Naumann, Margareta von Oswald, Manuel Raeder

Syncopathologies

Bureau d’Esprit with Matthias Bruhn, Clémentine Deliss, Desiree Heiss, Ines Kaag, Augustin Maurs, Tom McCarthy, Henrike Naumann, Azu Nwagbogu, Elhadj Abdoulaye Sène, Luke Willis Thompson

Reverse Engineering Collections

Bureau d’Esprit with Tarek Atoui, Matthias Bruhn, Clémentine Deliss, Iman Issa, Ines Kaag, Augustin Maurs, Tom McCarthy, Margareta von Oswald, Manuel Raeder, Elhadj Abdoulaye Sène, Krista Belle Stewart, Luke Willis Thompson

The Undead and the Land

Bureau d’Esprit with Matthias Bruhn, Clémentine Deliss, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Desiree Heiss, Iman Issa, Henrike Naumann, Krista Belle Stewart, Luke Willis Thompson

Secretaries and Vampires. Some Restless Undead Thoughts for the Bureau d’Esprit

Tom McCarthy

Prototypes and Ominous Objects

Bureau d’Esprit with Matthias Bruhn, Clémentine Deliss, Desiree Heiss, Iman Issa, Ines Kaag, Augustin Maurs, Tom McCarthy, Margareta von Oswald

Enigmatic Debris

Clémentine Deliss

Photographic Reportage

Metabolic Museum-University

Skin in the Game

Between Heaven and Hades

Clémentine Deliss

Placebo

Rosemarie Trockel

Hole, Spot, Stain

Conversation with Joëlle Tuerlinckx

Proximity to Intimacy

Conversation with Collier Schorr

Breeding by Design

Conversation with Andrea Zittel

Fattening Room

Conversation with Otobong Nkanga

The Body is Open Despite Itself

Conversation with Ruth Buchanan

Image captions and credits

Colophon

In memory of my mother, Michèle

Preface

Rather like the human body, art has a visible side, an epidermis that conforms to various understandings of accomplishment. Today, this public-facing dimension overrides the complexities of practicing art. But under the skin of what is shown in museums, art fairs, and biennials, there is another, more visceral system of communication and circulation, in which several organs and alliances work together.1 It is this backstage metabolic condition that has formed the core of my curatorial endeavor. The publishing platforms and gatherings that I have set up over the past thirty years in cities ranging from London to Dakar and Oslo to Tokyo are often invisible to a wider audience, difficult to monetize, and greatly unforeseeable. I research and curate practices of conceptual intimacy, sometimes alone, but mainly with artists. Methodologies of art overlap into mine, blurring borders and pointing to a common style of inquiry. I have spoken of myself as an entre-pologiste, someone operating on the see-saw of extremes. But the connotations of anthropology are evident, and I refute any revenants of this colonial discipline, which I studied because of artists, then abandoned.

In 1995, following the exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Whitechapel Gallery, London), which I developed with five artists and curators from the African continent (Chika Agulu-Okeke, Salah Hassan, David Koloane, Wanjiku Nyachae, El Hadji Sy), I decided to stop exhibition-making altogether. I wanted to become an artist-to-artist curator, to ignite professional curiosity between artists who worked in locations far apart in a time of global change. I didn’t believe that the increasing normativity of exhibition-making could provide adequate short circuits between practitioners. I set up an independent artists’ and writers’ organ, a publication titled Metronome, that could carry early concepts, or the prelusive phases of art production, across aesthetic, discursive, and geopolitical borders. My accountability was now directly to the artists and writers who engaged with me, and not to the regulatory network of an institution. I stood by Metronome for eleven years, traveling and living, editing, and printing, each time in a different country, supported by art colleges that gave me short-term lets so that I could work and publish on site. I went further and further behind the scenes. I knew my position was borderline, but I always refused to become an institutionalized curator. I could not state that I was an artist either, a shift that I never had the courage to assume, even though today what I do easily falls under the category of artistic research. After twenty years as an independent, I wanted to run a “house,” an institution through which I could consolidate my experience. Rather than lead a museum of contemporary art, I returned to my early doctoral analysis of reflexive anthropology, looting expeditions, and dissident surrealism, and headed for the least acceptable venue I could find: an ethnographic museum.

When I took on the directorship of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt in 2010, I had a model in mind for remediating collections. I had studied post-structuralist semantic anthropology, a nihilistic approach informed by Paul Rabinow, George Marcus, James Clifford, and French thought. However, this stance, combined with my knowledge and engagement in contemporary art, clashed with the historicism of German museums of ethnology. In 2020, I published a field diary of my time at the Weltkulturen Museum and the reasonings behind all the changes I made to this compromised institution (The Metabolic Museum, 2020, Hatje Cantz, KW).

Skin in the Game – Conversations on Risk and Contention continues where I left off and represents a further stage in the analysis of collections through another curatorial platform: the Metabolic Museum-University (MM-U). These essays and dialogues embody three years of practice at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Arriving at the institution in summer 2020, I began by drawing together a circle of active minds in law and literature, musical composition, visual art, design, and iconology. I proposed that we meet to analyze assemblages of artworks and artifacts from private and public collections in Berlin. I hoped this would lead to a transversal methodology for interpreting materials considered contentious or caught in the straitjacket of nineteenth-century systems of classification. Contention can relate to the unresolved status of colonial archives, just as it can to artworks of all periods that feature bodies, symbols, identifications, or conditions that are no longer acceptable for public viewing. Then, in 2020, the isolation precipitated by the Covid-19 pandemic halted all access to collections and live debates in Berlin. The physical MM-U relocated to an online “Bureau d’Esprit,” which ran every three weeks. Our sessions were animated, enjoyable, and we spoke freely about our personal research and ways of dealing with complex material. Finally, in November 2021, we were able to hold a physical “Debating Chamber” at KW with a group of guest participants. This took place around a constellation of “Prototypes and Ominous Objects,” understood as living, divinatory phenomena that cannot be held down to one particular discipline, context, or time. The proceedings and analysis of our meetings constitute the first part of this publication.

Throughout the book, the reader encounters terminologies that have grown out of my practice. These include “remediation,” “organ,” “metabolic,” “museum-university,” “prototype,” “transgressive adjacency,” “academic iconoclasm,” and the curatorial trope of “neighborly dislike.” Each expression establishes an empirical basis for concept work with collections, both historical and contemporary. The term “prototype” connects the first part of the book to the second half. Here, contention and risk are expressed in the conversations I had with artists Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Andrea Zittel. These dialogues address the specific moment of “skin in the game” when each artist took the plunge, and committed their life to art, to a precarious yet autonomous existence. Individually, they disclose the prototype or generative instance that led to their emancipation. Several speak about figureheads that influenced their individual development. Rosemarie Trockel’s contribution takes the shape of Placebo, a list of polysemic work titles written between 1978 and 1988, which read as encoded references to her life and concerns as an artist. The essay “Between Heaven and Hades,” presents the parameters of the exhibition that opened at KW in September 2023, taking “neighborly dislike” as its curatorial concept.

Like an intruder or squatter, Skin in the Game takes over the pink and black walls of the previous exhibition at KW. By making do with what is there, the installation points to questions of sustainability, economic stringency, and proposes an expression of institutional critique in 2023. Skin in the Game is an exhibition as halfway house, protecting artists from the glare, keeping the doors shut, so the bailiffs of art history cannot enter and identify the organs. With Mur aveugle (blind wall), Joëlle Tuerlinckx whitewashes the windows; Ruth Buchanan’s banner, 24 Hour Body, shields the visitor from outside inspection, and the Metabolic Chairs incite visitors to sit down and rest. This studiolo becomes an architectonic, metabolic rendition of a Bureau d’Esprit, an office for visual thinking. Indeed, the motto of the MM-U is “To enter a museum, no exam is necessary.”

The book includes an extended sequence of photographs that document the MM-U’s iterations in Kyiv, Karlsruhe, Ljubljana, and Berlin between 2015–23 up to the exhibition Skin in the Game. While I took some of these images, on-site photographers including Jana Hoffmann in Karlsruhe, and Urška Boljkovac, Nejc Ketis, and David Kunc, courtesy of MGLC in Ljubljana, took many others. Eva Stenram shot photographs of activities at KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin. Stenram, an artist who deploys photography in her work, was given free rein to document the different situations that took place. Her image-works offer an additional set of assemblages, which rather like teaching tools can activate the MM-U process of analysis and discussion.

I would like to acknowledge the engagement of all who participated in the Metabolic Museum-University stretching back to the early days in Ukraine, through to the KW sessions in Berlin. They include Lesia Prokopenko, Hedwig Saxenhuber, and Georg Schöllhammer, (Kyiv Biennale, 2015), designer, Andreas Müller and the students of my class in Curatorial Theory and Dramaturgical Practice at the Karlsruhe University of Art and Design (2018–19), Slavs and Tatars, who invited the MM-U to the 33rd Biennale of Graphic Art in Ljubljana (2019), and in Berlin, the Faculty of 2020–21: Matthias Bruhn, Krist Gruijthuijsen, Desiree Heiss, Iman Issa, Ines Kaag, Augustin Maurs, Tom McCarthy, Henrike Naumann, Azu Nwagbogu, Margareta von Oswald, Manuel Raeder, Elhadj Abdoulaye Sène, Krista Belle Stewart, Luke Willis Thompson, and guest artist Tarek Atoui, as well as Jakob Karpus and Thais Nepomuceno who produced the filmic reportage of our Debating Chamber (2021). My thanks to Krist Gruijthuijsen for his support of my work and to my colleagues at KW, in particular Nikolas Brummer and Marc Hollenstein. My gratitude goes to the individuals and collectors in Berlin who helped us in our research, in particular, Hubertus von Amelunxen and Mariamargherita Maceli at Archivio Conz, Erika Hoffmann, and Ivo Wessel. It has been a pleasure to work once again with Lena Kiessler, Fabian Reichel, and Neil Holt of Hatje Cantz, and particularly with Kimberly Bradley. I would like to acknowledge the following for their dedicated assistance with the exhibition Skin in the Game, in particular Denise Kokko for Joëlle Tuerlinckx (Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin, Cologne, Munich); Carla Donauer for Rosemarie Trockel, and Monika Simm and Anja Trudel for Andrea Zittel (Sprüth Magers); and Cristian Alexa and the team at 303 Gallery, New York, for Collier Schorr. Finally, my warmest thanks and admiration go to the artists Ruth Buchanan, Otobong Nkanga, Collier Schorr, Rosemarie Trockel, Joëlle Tuerlinckx, and Andrea Zittel for their trust and willingness to embark on this journey of curatorial and artistic research with me.

Berlin, September 2023

1Organs & Alliances was a yearlong inquiry I led in 2017–18 with a self-elected group of fine art students from the École nationale supérieure des Arts, Paris-Cergy and the Academy of Fine Arts, Leipzig. It was an inquiry into how structures of trust and communication operate between artists. Following seminars in both locations, the students decided to pool their funds and purchase an early version of an offset printer, originally exported by Heidelberg to the colonies, where it became the generator not only of colonial tracts, but also of manifestos related to emancipation and independence. The plan was to move the Tiegel machine from Leipzig to Paris in a purpose-built trailer, stopping off at various locations and printing on site. Venues were to include art spaces, but also slaughterhouses, hospitals, and refugee centers in towns and cities. The infrastructure became the alliance, created by the action of purchasing the machine, rather than a common aesthetic or political discourse. See mm-u.online.

The Museum Lazaret Clémentine Deliss

During the lockdowns in 2020–21, museums and art venues in Europe were largely closed. Precautionary measures prevented both the production and consumption of exhibitions. As the surges in the pandemic waned, entry to venues was restored, yet restricted to the vaccinated. In London, artist Abbas Zahedi outmaneuvered British law by converting a former postal sorting office in Chelsea into an artwork conceived as a place of repose, an exhibition solely accessible to frontline health workers.1 However, most museums and art venues deferred planned exhibition openings and closed their doors, all the while maintaining considerable running costs. Gagged by exceptional health and safety regulations, it was difficult to envision the nature of alternative activities within the museum space, even though curators and artists alike felt the need to do something. At the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, Carolyn Christov-Barkagiev installed a vaccination center against the backdrop of a wall painting by Claudia Comte. This courageous initiative proved to be an isolated incident. At this point I wrote the following text, curious as to how a “museum as lazaret,” like a makeshift shelter in a situation of crisis, might affect the norms and forms of curatorial practice.

The Museum Lazaret

The museum is empty of walking, consuming human beings. It has become a lazaret for vulnerable bodies. In the frescoes on the ceiling, the lying watch the pursuits of angels in the embrace of flesh and cloud. Paintings hung lower than the golden rule match the bedridden gaze. Spotlights complement the microfocus of each prostate sufferer. No longer controlled by the norms of visitation, curators tend to patients, not publics, offering solace and distraction. Performing non-invasive operations like whispering or awakening, they speak to the afflicted through visual projections and spoken words that re-energize the metabolic flow. Through their agency, they transport the immobile person out of their solitary imagination. Curators are nurses.

Curators are farmers. Plants, like exhibits, live off nurture and care. Sometimes a landscape becomes a collection; we begin to treat it like a museum. We walk through it, respecting cultural divisions, accepting routes and rules, recognizing flowers, bushes, and trees, as taught. But what if curators perform disobedience, refuting colonial plantations, and chiseling out sidelines and backroads to lose museological norms on the way? No longer cultivated in isolation and sealed off from the spores of a nearby stranger, the newly tilled field with its toss of fertile references waits to be sown.

Hospital or field, lazaret or farm, the museum takes on this fateful turn, translocating its functions from its ubiquitous walled classicism or twentieth-century colonial modernity to a flat expanse, a borderless, at times digital, venue. Here it cares for the growing, the dying, for healing and restituting. All artworks become returns, points of reflection and potential objects of virtue, like chairs in a room ready to start a conversation. But artworks are interlocutors who don’t speak the canon any longer. They have become multiple agents, double-crossing their disciplinary tongue. Dragged down into lowercase, the act of healing draws them into a common condition. So let museums become lazarets for the sick, places to heal the mysteries of life and death through artworks, in every medium that we can imagine and curate.

April 3, 2020, Berlin

The museum as lazaret could suggest a rehabilitation center for Covid-19 patients, a refuge for the displaced, or a venue that works to remediate the pain caused by the violence of colonial extraction. With the trailing effects of the pandemic, multiple wars and conflicts, and mounting climatic and ecological urgencies, it may be time to rethink the museum in terms of its spatial and ergonomic logic, the deployment of its collections, and its outdated regime of exhibition programming. Does the grid of permanent and temporary shows mean anything today? Is it economically sustainable, and even relevant to the public? What alternative rhythms and activities can revitalize the museum and the interpretation of its holdings, setting this institution apart from the speed of the digital, or the drug-like power of a scenography derived from department-store aesthetics dating back to the nineteenth century?

Meanwhile, much has been discussed around the curatorial concept of care, and the responsibility of a museum toward the well-being of its visitors. Circling around these questions of civic responsibility are the growing humanitarian needs of refugees. The backlog of asylum applicants in Europe means that people from all walks of life are being placed in camps under inexcusable conditions, provided with minimal sanitation, poor nourishment, and insufficient medical attention. The option of providing education to the stateless in the museum, an institution for which you need no exam to enter, and which abounds in visual languages, is not so much a utopia as a challenge.

The museum as lazaret proposes a dialogical model for healing and rehabilitation. It sets up exercises for curators and visitors alike. Artists are also part of the conversation for they, too, suffer from the unhealthy polarization of institutionally-driven exhibitions and market-driven production. I think back to 2020, when artists might have worked in the sealed-off museums, transforming galleries into temporary studios, and melting the frozen format of a three-month show with a unique syncopation. During 2022, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin put on two such ultra-temporary exhibitions, or Pauses. The first was with painter Tobias Spichtig, and the second with artist Lydia Ourahmane.2 Both questioned the condition of the sentient human within the exhibition space. Spichtig did this with a sea of secondhand mattresses that covered the venue’s entire ground floor and could be used to lie down on, or in the case of many delighted children, fall onto. Berlin-based novelists and poets held readings in the evenings. Spichtig’s concise, four-day exhibition drew out complex political connotations of homelessness, and more unexpectedly, imagined environments for orgies performed on an endless mattress and derived from the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Roland Barthes. A few months later, in the same space in KW, Lydia Ourahmane created a large rectangle of black chairs, each one fitted with audio wiring that transmitted nothing but the rhythmic heartbeats of a rote of seated visitors, nonstop for twenty-four hours. Her exhibition was a one-day exercise in public auscultation, and KW remained open to the public throughout.

KW has no collection, but what about the many museums that have reservoirs full to the brim with artifacts, artworks, archives, documents, books, and films that are rarely brought into dialogue with one another, unless selected for a forthcoming presentation, or for the purposes of conservation, provenance study, and very occasionally, repatriation? European ethnology built its museums on actions comparable to those of mediocre bailiffs confiscating every dimension of a person’s life in the hope of extracting the unknown capital lodged in their cultural heritage. Today, these convolutes from the former colonies are held in museum depots, wrapped in plastic and sprayed with repellents—chemical, scriptural, and legal. To perform the decolonial on the spoils of capitalism is to transmute the museum to the less glamorous condition of a halfway house or lazaret, which administers—or curates—different therapies with alternative terminologies.

Artists are engineers in this course of action, subjecting damaged traces to critical analysis and thereby liberating collected artifacts from the entrenched norms of positivism. And yet, no artist needs to be the equivalent of a custodian or an expert in area studies to work with the matter of doubt. Their “traveling eye”3 is emancipated from its “master-explicator,”4 wandering with playful, indeed feral, orientation through the thicket of collections. The fragility of this form of remediation places an onus on the artist to deliver an interpretation that is both intellectually innovative and politically balanced in today’s inflammable environment. What is the language of remediation, of a loving return that heals while translocating? What timing does it require? What risks does it bring with it, and can we allow it to fail? Does critical fabulation—the poetic undercommons of provenance research—achieve the vigilant dissent needed to protect against future forms of extraction?

The question arises of how best to formulate the success of a process of remediation. Based on which criteria can one claim that it has been effective as a decolonial intervention? Remediation must run deeper than formalist engagement, merely wiping the slate clean of references and producing an aesthetic tabula rasa. When an artist works with a collection of so-called ethnographic materials—or in response to artifacts framed by university studies such as archaeology or antiquities—their lack of specialist expertise can disqualify their response. Pejorative terms such as inspiration, appropriation, or ignorance of the requisite contextual information have the effect of discrediting the artist’s reading.

For this reason, it may be more helpful to think of stages in remediation, which, like a healing procedure, do not occur from one moment to the next but require reconnaissance, dialogue, and the kindling of agency. Museum expertise plays on authenticity and context, which is far from the prerogative of an artist. So, while we regard early twentieth-century Primitivism as problematic and weak, we cannot claim that colonial ethnography was better or fairer in its production of contextual travesties. If anything, it could be argued that artistic engagement in the first years of the twentieth century aimed to preclude invasive academic inspection. It stated, let the artist protect the artist, let the interpretation be veiled with a psychotic version of representation to buffer the scientific racism of the time. Nevertheless, the position of the curative agent—the artist—will always be flawed in its effort to encode signification beyond an existing norm. The artist experiments with different resolutions and produces nodal referentiality, articulations rather than statements, desmological bonds rather than disciplinary frameworks.5 This is remediation understood not as the historicist, a posteriori reconstruction of acquisition—for provenance can be falsified, too—but as a process of opening material to multiple interpretations beyond region, ethnicity, function, and masterpiece value. Public renegotiation of complex archives challenges curatorial practice. Yet this practice also needs to navigate the tension between reductive contextualization, expensive and often unnecessary systems of display, and the requirements of different visitor bodies and audiences. I would suggest that the decolonial transformation of the museum is asking us to think together more courageously, and with greater vulnerability, about how museums as civic institutions can go further with their visitors, especially those held in a liminal state between trauma and recovery.

In 2021, Bruno Latour, interviewed on the television station Arte, said:

I invented not schools but several educational devices (dispositifs). … Why? Because you cannot address these ecological issues without the arts. If you don’t have the means to metabolize the ecological situation, then you’re done for because it’s far too heavy. You just have anxiety in your stomach, and you can’t do the work. We have to find associations between other methods. The university has to learn not to be a Humboldt-style university, invented in the nineteenth century. (There are very few working on this question.) It’s about reversing the direction of the university, so that it ceases to be the avant-garde of fundamental research, which is important—we have to do fundamental research—but we have to turn it in the service of those who are affected. (Service does not mean, “I’m teaching you something that you didn’t know.”) We don’t know what the situation is of being on this new Earth, in which we have been plunged, because of the modern history from which we are emerging, so we must do everything to find ways of exploring this new situation.6

Latour’s statement in relation to the university applies equally to the museum. The inverted venue, the “museum-university,” is open to all visitors, whatever their age, class, economic condition, or level of literacy. In a wing of a museum, furniture provides the public with the opportunity to sit down for several hours and study. Mobile vitrines and units are filled on a regular basis with items from the collection. Every month or so, new material is received, overlapping with other sets of artifacts or artworks in different media. The museum-university draws in the public simply because it advertises the arrival of new convolutes from its reservoirs. Suddenly, those artifacts that stem in large part from colonial expeditions, or represent secondary collections according to the canons of art history, can be reconfigured into assemblages for analysis and interpretation. Yes, the museum must let go of a small quantity of its duplicate artifacts for study purposes, and yes, this may affect the conservation of such items for a foreseeable eternity. But this is part of the decolonial procedure, and, no, conservation is not a universal norm, but an ideological discourse engrained in a museum culture that has to account for inclusivity, community participation, and sustainability. Visual thinking, transdisciplinary cross-connections, and the inquiring eye are cultivated in this safe space where art and erudition meet. There is a cruel irony to the fact that the first exercise of the Metabolic Museum-University took place in Kyiv, Ukraine. The “School of Remediation,” as it was named, occupied the entrance hall of the National Museum of the History of Ukraine for one week in the summer of 2015. At the time, the Russian invasion of Crimea was a topic of conversation in Kyiv’s many cafés and art venues. The artist Nikita Kadan had started a new collection for the National Museum consisting of shrapnel fragments and bomb shards, which he hung like a mobile in the museum’s central staircase. And so questions arise of whether the remnants of material life should be seen as body parts that have survived their original bearer? Whether the colonial collection is an organ of visceral morbidity, a naked fetish with the enduring frisson of obscene violence? From museum-lazaret to museum-university, the central question remains how to defuse, heal, and rehabilitate the past. If the museum provides expanded social medicine, it also requires backstage protection for it to survive, providing shelter to artists and cultural workers and their acts of experimentation.

1 Abbas Zahedi, Ouranophobia SW3, December 5, 2020–January 17, 2021, organized by General Release at Chelsea Sorting Office, London.

2 Tobias Spichtig, Die Matrazen, January 19–22, 2022; Lydia Ourahmane, sync, October 1–2, 2022, both at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin.

3 Michel de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching” in The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley, 1984), p. 170.

4 Explanation is the myth of pedagogy, claims Jacques Rancière, and emancipation is both “experiment and experience” combined with the will or desire to learn. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Palo Alto, 1991).

5 I am grateful to Luke Willis Thompson for introducing me to the term “desmological,” derived from Greek desmos, which signifies a bond, a tie.

6 Interview with Bruno Latour, Building Collectives 6/12, Arte video, 13 min., 2021, directors Camille de Cheney and Nicolas Truong, https://www.arte.tv/en/videos/106738-006-A/interview-with-bruno-latour/ (accessed August 21, 2023).

Metabolic Museum-University

The curatorial concept drafted for KW Institute for Contemporary Art (KW) in June 2019 carried the initial title “Institute for Concept Work.” Neither an artist’s studio nor a laboratory, neither an educational program nor a series of public lectures, the Institute for Concept Work would bring together minds and things to exercise different forms of dialogical thinking. At the center would be an investigation into the public and private collections of Berlin, strewn across former East and West, partially merged after 1989, and manifold in contents. Objects and artworks in different media, configured into challenging assemblages, would trigger collective research and interpretation and push against disciplinary borders inherited from Enlightenment specialisms and nineteenth-century European colonialism. Such academic iconoclasm would incite disorder in taxonomies and the construction of proof. It would defy “species narcissism”1 and find “illegitimate ways of knowing.”2 Located backstage, it required communicational abstinence, ensuring that the process was not compromised by the spectacle of public viewing.

When the project was launched in June 2020, the name had changed to Metabolic Museum-University (MM-U), extending my earlier research in Frankfurt, Kyiv, Karlsruhe, and Ljubljana since 2010. At KW, there would be a core group or faculty of twelve to fourteen trusted interlocutors, all of whom would be based mainly in Berlin. There was also the option for a visiting collegium, bringing movement and new perspectives to the project as it progressed. Private collectors would be invited to collaborate with us, supporting the MM-U in different ways, for example, by providing us with access to their collections, lending works, and artistic ephemera, hosting meetings, and contributing financially to the project. As part of its curatorial dramaturgy, the MM-U would cast these collections as players in a series of Debating Chambers, enacted between people and objects. We would outline the trace of a new methodology created out of the fertile adjacencies between our individual positions and those “organs of thought”3 we brought together from diverse collections and archives. At the time, I wrote the following propositions:

The MM-U would be a venue-in-the-making, growing organically and recursively based on the conditions and results it generated.

It would test a new conceptual, visual, sensorial, and analytical method of inquiry centered on the observation of heterogeneous, dormant, and secondary collections located in Berlin.

The MM-U’s selection for Debating Chambers would focus on artworks, unauthored phenomena, as well as enigmatic debris in all media, either prototypical for the future, or contentious in the present.

Debating Chambers would squat exhibitions, so that the agency of artifacts and artworks would be supplemented by their temporary insertion within an existing show.

The “Metabolic” would indicate the vitality and necessity of relationships made across fields of knowledge and experience, leading to the aggregate competence of the MM-U Faculty.

The “Museum-University” would intentionally clash these two civic institutions, providing space for the “democratic intellect,”

4

and the inscription and remediation of collections in contemporary thought.

The MM-U would aim to build its own research collection based on various inquiries led by the Faculty. This research collection would constitute the MM-U’s symbolic capital and energize debates both on the role and politics of collecting, and non-normative forms of research and education.

The decolonial imperative would be addressed through academic iconoclasm, breaking down hierarchies and pushing against disciplinary and classificatory divisions from art-historical, to ethnological, scientific, and design-based.

The results of each inquiry would be disseminated via a print journal passed from hand to hand, entitled “Proceedings of the Metabolic Museum-University.”

In the second phase, a special call would be sent out to engage cross-disciplinary student “Companions” to develop the MM-U with the Faculty. They would test the tools of interpretation developed in the Debating Chambers, expanding, critiquing, and revising them in their own way. Companions would magnify the range of local collections in Berlin, delve deeper into neighborhood museums, and analyze the holdings of dispersed archives and university collections in the city.

In the third phase, one floor of KW would house the MM-U’s inquiries with a growing constellation of objects, mobile furniture, and digital technology to encourage members of the public to sit down, observe, and engage in their own research. Artifacts, artworks, and ephemera would be changing and combinatory. The tests, errors, and breakthroughs of the MM-U would be presented as part of the study.

I defined the competence of the MM-U Faculty as follows:

Four to six artists, working in different media, based in Berlin and ready to attend regular meetings and take part in Debating Chambers

An image theorist and historian of visual thinking

A novelist and artist whose work engages with theory and history through narratology

An anthropologist working on colonial discourse and feminism

Situation designers who morph the specificity of place and function with critical design

A curator exploring forms of digital life associated with the activities of the MM-U

An editor and publisher working in different media and formats

A lawyer ready to build new juridical parameters around collecting practices

An economist with a flexible, socially-conscious and risk-driven mind

A filmmaker/photographer

A therapist

On July 15, 2020, I invited a group of interlocutors from different fields to take part in a test Debating Chamber at KW. It was held for three hours in the center of Hassan Sharif’s exhibition I Am the Single Work Artist (May 30–July 19, 2020).5 Each person brought an artifact and placed it on a simple trestle table. These “agent-objects,” a term that places artworks and artifacts on the same level, included musical notation, a flag, colored glass slides, a photograph of open books, a carved wood figurine, an old porcelain plate, gilt chains, part of the skull of a horse, and two kilos of fresh cow’s liver in one piece. We moved these items around as our discussion began to warm up. Direct contextual information was kept to a minimum, and instead we spoke about the evocations created by the artifacts and their connections and incommensurability.

Our collective insight from this test meeting was to work with a minimal structure. Then, with the pandemic, we were forced to transfer all physical meetings to online sessions. This became the “Bureau d’Esprit,” which took place every three weeks between autumn 2020 and summer 2021. Regardless of this disembodied format, our Bureau d’Esprit proved effective and curiosity, collegiality, and conceptual intimacy emerged and developed between us. As the MM-U evolved, it also changed. Some participants had other commitments, worked outside Berlin, or couldn’t take part regularly, so new members were invited to be part of the adventure.

While the pandemic stymied all further plans, KW was able to advance fees for the faculty, but funds still had to be raised for the MM-U. If our research was initially private, how could we access public funding? We applied extensively for grants and received only negative answers. Was this due to the mood of conservatism and increased competition during the pandemic? How could we forefront the value of the MM-U as a transversal, artist-generated initiative that reflected the urgent need for conversations between practitioners to be held behind closed doors? We estimated that a Debating Chamber could cost between 7,000 and 8,000 euros, which included all honoraria; insurance for works, packing and transport; the scenography and furniture for the event; photographic, video, and audio documentation; technicians; and equipment.