A Recollection Returns with a Soft Touch is an audio-video installation by Colombian-Korean-American multidisciplinary artist Gala Porras-Kim, Research Fellow of the Museo delle Civiltà and Artist in Residence with the Museum of Oriental Art in Turin. The installation concludes her two-year research journey at the Museo delle Civiltà. It welcomes us as equal participants in the intimate relationship between the objects of the museum collections and those who regularly care for them. Investigating concepts such as context of provenance/de-contextualization, use/preservation, meaning/interpretation, the artist relates the collections to the figure of Museum Officer (archaeologist, art historian, curator, conservator-restorer), identifying these as the main instruments of institutional knowledge. During the two-year period, the artist delved into the cataloguing systems of the collections and placed them in relation to the biographies of the individual objects, reconceiving them as living entities, endowed with their own intrinsic subjectivity, developed through time and space with respect to their original contexts, functions and meanings, and through the interpretations assigned by the museum institution. Porras-Kim recontextualizes the musealized objects with the aim of sharing their history of materials and techniques, their different cultural ancestries and histories, and the processes that led to their entry into the collections. She invites us to observe their transformations, while sharing the knowledge that enabled their preservation, dependent on what the artist calls the ‘conservation anxiety’ of the museum institution.
In the artist’s installation, the focus shifts from the artifacts chosen by the Officials to their hands, moving and describing them. Rather than the objectivity of the artifacts, the focus becomes the personalities and functions of the individuals who preserve, study, and interpret them to the public. Their stories are presented within the display cases typically used for museum objects, thus endowing the words, memories, and sensibilities of the museum curators with a kind of alienating visibility. The videos are presented through the illusory technique of “Pepper’s ghost,” revived in 1862 by English scientist John Henry Pepper (1821-1900) from the invention of Italian philosopher and alchemist Giovanni Battista Della Porta, who wrote about it in his Magia Naturalis as early as 1584. The “ghost” technique involves shining a light projector on a reflective surface, creating an illusory three-dimensional perception of an object where it does not truly exist. Through the use of this technique, the artist gives these stories a phantasmal aspect, as if they were apparitions of the many lives that the objects in the collection have lived—not only in the act of their creation, but also in their encounters with those who cared for them. The awarding of materiality to these multiple interpretations offers a “soft touch”— activates more deeply human relations with all museum collections—since in these there also exist the lives and stories of those who have ensured their existence and preservation over time.
Completing the work are a selection of display cases arranged in the manner of a sacred construction. In these, in turn, are arranged the works “erased” by the artist in her installation, thus reaffirming their original cultural and ritual functions and overcoming the supposed neutrality of the museum institution.
at Museo delle Civiltà, Rome
until March 31, 2024