Le Musée comme la Silhouette

Process Seed for Gathering a Potential Micropolitcal Intervention:

I am designing an exhibition that exists only in description because I notice that in my ‘book as a museum’ I can offer a place for cultural artifacts to speak from, a place that doesn’t exist outside. This comes out of a larger investigation of the museum as a silhouette for an exhibition at the Ecole des beaux-arts de Cherbourg-Octeville. The SoM iteration could be made simply by light cast on a temporary structure (a four sided screen built in collaboration with architect/artist Alex Schweder). A gathering of people behind this screen would form a silhouette, like Plato’s shadow the museum represents itself. I have been talking with Mike Hornblow about a possible collaboration on a molecule that brings a phenomenology of display to the SoM event. I am not directly affiliated with an existing molecule, but the Australian or German one would be possible, and I would be open to hearing how people in those molecules may respond to these ideas. Either in Melbourne, where I was born, or in Berlin, where I live now, I would like to have the Musée comme la Silhouette act as an ephemeral restaurant that recreates an Aboriginal meal. The food would be gathered in Port Phillip working with indigenous artists that I have been collaborating with on museum interventions in the past three years. During the SoM week in May you would be invited to a meal but also to the choreography of this museum as it is built in real time, by gestures during the evening. The gathered participants would be parts of the building in that their movement shifts the silhouette. Hereby the artists/participants sitting at the table cast a shadow on the museum, perhaps to ask whether for the very validation of ourselves as artists must we form and be formed by this structure? Here at the table a toast brings our arms together to produce the silhouette of a pediment. Our bodies are the pillars, our conversation the frieze on which the stories are told. At the moment the museum as silhouette is formed it is also deformed by its performers who may discuss its inability to house objects related to indigenous performances.
To begin this engagement with the indigenous as a micropolitcal intervention, a conversation about the problematic process of appropriations from within academia and via the museum was what i hoped here to contribute as a platform for relation. It is an invitation to open debate and develop ideas on how other projects can employ/adapt this silhouette, food platform, museum in a book, potentially as a SoM proposal.