On the first Friday of the Artifact project, we did a really interesting activity in which we were told to bring in some objects and put them on the tables in our base rooms. We had a discussion of a group of artists in New York who collected objects and works of people from their own neighborhoods, and put the objects that their neighbors had deemed important in a gallery. We were told to break apart to select objects to make a mini museum.
I chose objects somewhat randomly. The curation piece was somewhat two-fold, as the initial selection had been made by whoever brought the object in, and it was up to our groups to elevate them and create a dialogue amongst them in relation to the other objects in our group.
We didn’t really know anything about our objects except for what we had in front of us. It reminded me a little of the conversation that we had had with Clare in our debriefing about the museum the previous day, which was that you ‘get’ what you come in with. So we had some knowledge, but it was limited. Thus, we experimented with as many relationships as we could create.
We tried putting all of our objects in one long connecting line, where contours met.
We tried organizing by warmth or coolness of colors.
We attempted to organize by what we thought might be made in the East vs. the West (though our assigning this was somewhat problematic).
Physically, we also attempted to organize according to age and size, but there was an emerging line between categorizing according to physical characteristics vs. story. Eventually, we ended up drawing from an improv game, which was a story creation. What we would do was pick an object, and one by one place them, say a sentence, and continue the story. So, for example, I picked up the bottle, placed it in the story space, and said, “There once was a prince who lived in a glass house,” and then someone would be left to pick another object to start off in a way to continue the story.
We ended up having the most fun with this because it allowed us to reimagine the objects in the most ways, and it threw away the notion of a crystallized interpretation of an object. Here they were all just starting points which could relate to any object in any other object through literally any interpretation.
The stories we told together ranged all over the place, from romcoms to Sci-Fi action stories. Regardless, they made us laugh a lot and engage with the objects in ways we couldn’t have imagined. Perhaps this reinterpretation was a bit irreverent towards the intended purpose of the objects, but the value of making stories and encouraging interactivity was more important to us for the purpose of this exercise.
We decided to call the museum the TheirStory museum, to reinterpret the crystalized notion of an object’s history and give it to ‘them,’ meaning whoever came to our museum. In order to provide some structure and a gameification of the exercise, we wrote down a bunch of different genres and put them in a hat so that people could come in, draw a genre, and have an idea of where to start in their object based storytelling. Some people were a bit timid to get involved at first, but the museum staff ended up participating a fair amount to facilitate some of the storytelling. It was very silly, but it was delightful to find so many permutations of storytelling and collaboration in the arrangement of the objects.
Additionally, we got to go around an explore different museums curated by our peers. This was incredibly exciting because so many people took vastly different approaches. Some people used the floor or created walls. Others strung objects from the ceiling or walked you through a story of an individual. One museum had pop ups paper silhouettes where you had to guess what objects were.
Overall it was an amazing activity, and it was incredible to see all of the diverse approaches to organizing and reinterpreting objects in relation to one another.
RCA Graduate Diploma 