The Cultural Odyssey

When the objects were released from the open prisons to the atopian cities, they were no longer manacled by their colonial past. For decades, doppelgängers of the remains found their place in the city. Re-appropriated perhaps by imagined communities in the guise of Benedict Anderson. The difference, is they no longer speak on behalf of their motherland.

The project seeks to negotiate post-colonial debates in museology about the centralisation of artefacts in the west, while breaking existing circuits within the art world system, mobilising cultural artefacts as ‘relational objects’ (to use Lygia Clarke’s phrase) and infiltrating them into various social conditions. A new anti-collection-repositories association will operate on the semi-permanent parameters of retaining art works for no less than ten years and no more than twenty. The collection will be constantly changing as it continually renews its status as a resource of contemporary work, rather than acting as a monument to the past. By adopting a travelling museum model, the system aims to negotiate the conflict between the cultural objects, their custodians and local conditions. The new location of this association of repositories is networked between ‘atopian countries’. The project treats the atopian locations as alternative neutral grounds, where a hybridised cultural identity comes from a struggle between multiple colonial powers and its local condition. The proposed travelling repositories system negotiates the spectrum of our global condition, with London being lauded as a city of universal culture at one end and atopian locations at the other with their struggles regarding their own identity. The new system suggests that the cultural properties should be truly universal and transposed into new relationships; in both spatial and social scenarios. With today’s systems of digital preservation, museum artefacts can be transposed into ‘relational objects’ and be disseminated into cites through reproduction and use. Cultural artefacts will be re-classified according to an alternative ‘Pataphysical’ (ludic) taxonomy based on their architectural features. The proposal is to turn the museum digital library into an alternative architectural specification: ‘Spolia’ of reproduction. With the impossibility of classifying the entirety of world knowledge, cultural artefacts will be curated according to relational juxtapositions or irreverent everyday scenarios.