The home to come

Nick Axel, Madrid

The feeling we get from looking at this issue’s image, upon closer inspection, is becoming increasingly common. We all know what it’s like to enter this state of mind. It is the process that gets us from one place to another. It is the act of change. We can walk in our city for not nearly 15 minutes and see its work. Dumpsters and moving trucks. The only difference between these two rectangular containers is where their contents end up. It does not so much matter how we decide which of our things go in which metallic box, but what that decision makes them mean.

Only in these processes of transition does our world of material goods truly obtain some sort of significance that is capable of transcending their their use and exchange value. They represent our notions of what is to come; of what will be useful, desired, and what will be forgotten, discarded. It is the necessary value we give to things when we are forced to take a leap of faith. By imbuing our things around us with significance-to-be (or lack-there-of), it brings us into this new place that we call the future.

The act of change, of provoking the present out of its stasis, the act of moving, is echoed in the process of curation. Curating is to narrate an aesthetic history. The curator evokes a string of sense from within the chaos of the archive. While remaining above the economy of material goods, the curator seeks to look past the spectacle and reveal the inherent potential in each thing to act as the material basis of our epistemological framework.

As purveyors of knowledge and explorers of the substance that lays underneath the realm of appearances, the curator can lay home virtually anywhere. But what does this say about the act of moving? If Foucault’s maxim is that we should “live each life as a work of art”, then we must first and foremost comprehend the basic fact that no piece of art is autonomous, that its significance as Art is lost in a void. Therefore, if the act of moving is to be conceived as an act of curation, then the act of inhabiting space is equal to living within the context of the museum.





Referencias:

Lisa & Leo's Domestic Museum (aka Sound of Silver) by Fake Industries Architectural Agonism, Photo courtesy of Droog

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