Catalogue of Uncommon Curatorial Practices

Enlivened Artifacts: On the animation of artifacts in museum settings

by Dr. Erin E. Lynch

By the late 19th century, Western practices of collecting culture for display had migrated from fashionable curio cabinets to the public eye, and museums set about systematically sorting the world “into drawers, glass-fronted cases, bottles, and filing cabinets” (Jenkins 1994: 242).  This way of organizing culture through display was designed to signify humankind’s “mastery” over their domain, including the power of colonial nations to capture and contain other cultures as objects of knowledge and markers of conquest. These practices of display also sensitized the visitor to the “look, don’t touch” codes of conduct in ocularcentric modernity (Howes & Classen, 2006).  Increasingly, however, there has been a cross-disciplinary acknowledgement both of what is lost in these practices of display (in terms of how objects become desensualized and “frozen” or muted in the traditional museum setting [Branham, 1994; Howes & Classen, 2006]) and of the necessity of embracing decolonial practices that re-animate the networks of living relations from which these artifacts have been rent. This involves what Matthews et. al (2021) call a paradigm shift, one that demands both the recontextualization of objects and a reorientation of the priorities of museum display from pure preservation to the restoration of relations.  This probe explores how museums are attempting to enliven their collections in a variety of ways, including through ceremony, sensation, and cultural exchange (Busse, 2008; Hafner, 2013; Pai, 2016; Matthews et. al, 2021).