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Deconstituting Museums Landing Page

Page history last edited by Helen Graham 3 years, 5 months ago

 

We have been deconstituting museums. We have worked and worked at the constitutional knot and it is loosening, it is fraying. We did not always know that our work was the work of deconstitution. Yet naming it as such makes palpable its signifiance. Calling the work deconstitution proposes a method. It also generates a question: is a differently constituted museum possible? 

 

Deconstituting Museums is an open inquiry. The open inquiry will enact and refine a deconstituting method. A method that links the diagramming and diagnostics of constitutional thinking with following the alternative potentials already underway through evoking affect and atmosphere. It will trouble the idea that another, differently constituted, museum is can emerge. It will approach this work head on, too harshly, with lights that are too bright and it will approach this question slowly, often indirectly, from oblique angles. Over time the spade work graft of democratic design will begin – but whether this democratic design can be for alternatively constituted museums will remain an open question. Let’s suspend the assumption too often made that an answer to any of the questions urgently animating the world is: museum.

 

Deconstituting Museums is also an experiment in open access academic work. The work will be done in two linked places. The everyday work will be done on a website. The longer pieces, that might be chapters, that might become a ‘book’, will be published here on the Liquid Books wiki. This allows for work to be edited, reused and repurposed.

 

Deconstituting Museums will begin in May 2021 with two peices:

Museums Thought Constitutionally: Opening the Inquiry.

Deconstituting Museums: Opening the inquiry in a different register

 

All commments, edits, suggestions and uses of any part of Deconstituting Museums are very welcome indeed - and if you do anything with it let me know, either via a comment here or via email: h.graham@leeds.ac.uk 

 

 

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