A Series of Formulations—Postscript

Read the essay of which this is a continuation here.

A few months ago, I agreed to pursue further the thread of my essay ‘A Series of Formulations on the Musealisation of Photography’, which was featured in the first printed issue of OVER Journal.¹ I had originally contributed the essay, back in May 2019, for the catalogue of thing, aura, metadata. a poem on making, an exhibition curated by Ayn Seda Yildiz for European Photo Based Platform and PhotoIreland Festival.²

In my essay, I presented a way of thinking about photography within the museum or exhibition space under the light of profaned monuments, empty pedestals, and fatigue. I envisioned the museum as a battlefield, and photography as a radical orchestrator of emancipatory collisions.

I am not the first to employ decay and wreckage as renewing, dialectical forces for revolutionary illuminations, and to link them with the museum and photography. In ‘On the Museum’s Ruins’, Douglas Crimp dedicates a long passage to the perspectives of Theodor W. Adorno and Hilton Kramer as he explores this ‘museal mortality’,³ and argues that once photography enters the museum as itself, not as a reproduction but as an object among others, it acts as a custodian of a heterogeneity in discordance with the systematisation and homogenisation the modern museum taxonomy demands.⁴ By shifting the attention from the image itself to the analysis of image production and presentation, photography sets in motion the museum’s destruction and ruin.

The world has endured so many cataclysmic disruptions since June, when the piece was published, not to mention since May 2019. Even so, its seeds of thought have become entangled with my encounters with images and personal research ever since. The following is an account of their afterlife, and of how photography now roams within the demolished walls of my own museum.

In early March 2020, I travelled to Rome for a lecture, a workshop, and my first ever curatorial residency. On a grey moody morning, I found myself in the Trastevere neighbourhood at the Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione. The ICCD provides public access to consultative documentation generated over the years by Italian institutions pertaining to protection of ‘the national territory’, including significant photography and aerial photography collections.  It was 9 March, the first day of my research, and the last day before pandemic-stricken Italy locked down. I will never forget the muteness of the deserted streets and the premonitory feeling of an indecipherable fear seeping into the atmosphere. Nor the feeling of awkwardness during the meeting. It somehow felt inappropriate to have scheduled a physical appointment for that morning but nobody was fully aware why.

I had requested to view photographic records related to displaced or vandalised public monuments and museum artefacts. Alessandro Coco, an ICCD staff member,⁶ kindly guided me through various depositories. I was struck particularly by a series of photographs documenting preventive operations undertaken before and during WWI and WWII in order to safeguard Italy’s cultural heritage from the destruction wrought by air raids and looting.⁷ In these images, I saw public monuments and museum objects supported and insulated by scaffolding, wooden beams, and sandbags, and turned into a Becher-like inventory of motionless bunkered blocks. I recalled Kazimir Malevich, the manifestoes of his time, and the heavy opaqueness of his Black Square. ‘Life knows what it is doing and if it is striving to destroy, one must not interfere’, he wrote in his famous text ‘On the Museum’ in 1919.⁸ Malevich was calling for the Soviet state to not intervene on behalf of old art collections, because, as he believed, their destruction could pave the path to a true and living art.

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‘The flow of events inside the museum is today often faster than outside its wall’, writes Boris Groys in ‘Entering the Flow’.⁹ But when History irrupts with its crude twists, everything turns upside down, and museum and exhibition heterotopias crash into a million pieces.

In the photographs I gained access to that morning in Rome, fountains and bronze equestrian statues were padded with sandbags and buttressed by masonry, museum sculptures were braced with beams, delicate marble columns were wrapped in wool, and mattresses were propped up against frescoes. In the interval of two decades and two devastating wars, from 1914 to 1940, the same operational choreography was carried out as if on loop: the shielding, the isolating, the attempts to elevate above destruction… On both occasions, a demise was staged and celebrated in front of the camera. The actors and settings were different and yet the same: soldiers and labourers in cities up and down the Italian Peninsula, in the uniforms and with the devices of their era. History repeating itself in ordinary actions.

I had not been completely unfamiliar with this register of scenes. In my homeland, Greece, a similar operation of sizeable proportions was conducted to protect antiquities just before the outbreak of WWII. During a period of six months prior to the Nazi invasion of Greece, in April 1941, a group of workers and archaeologists dug up the floors of the National Archaeological Museum in Athens and buried its most valuable, non-transportable artefacts. Statues were placed within deep ditches topped with reinforced cement, then covered with inert materials, after which the ditch was sealed.¹⁰ There, under the earth, hypnotised and suspended, these kouroi and korai appear, I imagine, embedded with their scaffolded Italian comrades in the same bunker of time.

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Monuments bear literally the weight of time. They do so, until they collapse under the strain, and, with them, we find ourselves underneath the rubble.

That morning, as the whole world was re-enacting the utter isolation of these monuments, I felt like those museum artefacts in the ditch. Enclosed, squeezed, suppressed by scaffolding, load-bearing walls, buttresses, pilasters.

That morning, the thick walls of the monumental complex of San Michele a Ripa Grande, in which the ICCD’s facilities are housed, dissolved before my eyes. The archive emerged into the world to punctuate the roar of the battle that was taking place outside its walls. The restaging of the operations unfolding in those photographs left me to wonder whether we were taking part in a similar crescendo of preventive measures in the face of impending disaster.

That morning, photography acted in a premonitory role, translating into plain language what we were sensing but unable to articulate.

As a ‘comrade of reality and time’,¹¹ it dissolved the safe walls of my museum.

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By ‘museum’, I refer here to an individual or collective space, comprised of imaginary and symbolic assemblages, that engages with the world under the at times pretentious presupposition of immunity within it. For, since its inception, the museum has been formulated as an ideologically aspiring heterotopia that supports, inspires, and extends a sense of freedom into uncharted lands; or, alternatively, brings it back to neglected, or undervalued, territories of systemic authority.

That morning, the call to maintain physical distance between one another was accentuated by those archival images, alongside the sense of fear and imminent collapse it foreshadowed. In fact, what was, and still is, shattered, was the order of my own museal sphere. Photography aroused from its lethargy as an abrupt reminder that, in order to validate her intellectual schemes, projects, and aspirations, one has always to resort back to the brokenness that reigns in the empirical world hors les murs; to the here-and-now field of sounds and scents, trial and error. As an instigator of rupture and as an igniter of a novel urgency of union and coherence, photography prompted me not to take distance for granted, but instead to question its generative and constituent power; to agree again upon it; to sign the contract anew of what images mean to me and of how images can gain their sense of meaning.

The text was mentally carved while I was confronting those photographs at ICCD. As if with a lantern, it began reconstituting disjointed times and fragments of marble and bronze that spoke to the vulnerability of the pasts we have been implicated in, utilised and misused. A counter-monument rose up before my eyes, exposing the convictions I had relied upon as an utterly haphazard and disjunctive mass of contradictions.

That led me to a radical conclusion. Writing, curating, and engaging with images are processes bound to an allegorical poetics of remembrance and counter-remembrance, even as they demand a turn toward a visceral and material engagement with sites and objects of memory. If photography supposedly instructs individual and collective experiences on how to remember, live, and breathe, it is also unavoidably about overlapping, contaminating, and contesting multiple narrative perspectives and temporalities. It is ultimately about re-establishing a sense of reciprocated integrity with the world that surrounds us.

As I walked before the Colosseum some hours later, a feeling of numbness pervaded me. I found myself crossing an empty stage, devoid of tourists. The postcard depicted a desolate world, as if an anti-terror buffer zone had been established around heritage sites. Had those photographs been meant to be unearthed and examined by me on that specific day? Were they there to predict shifts, mutations, and disintegrations in/of our biopolitical body and the mechanisms of control around us? Was my (real, virtual, and imaginary) destiny inscribed into theirs? Suddenly, it all melted down. It continues to do so.