storage

Following the Poetics and Politics of Storage and Circular Us group’s work, this three-episode miniseries looks at the symptoms and possible responses to the current challenges of temporary storage and palliative curating of works and legacies. In this first instalment, Anna Manubens, David Bestué, Lucia C. Pino and Francesc Ruiz connect artistic processes to the larger-scale processing of materials. They talk about scrapyards, landfill, sewage treatment plants, and trucks, highlighting the energy and the aesthetic fascination that is sometimes sparked by waste and the intense memory of materials in motion. They also address the proliferation and promises of storage units, storage as crisis or free fall, and the bewilderment of knowing themselves part of a generation which has been dispossessed of space. 

In this podcast, we talk to sociologist Fernando Domínguez Rubio about the ecologies of care that fuel the fiction of artistic stability —a network of infrastructures, climate technologies, conservation laboratories and underground storage facilities, as well as the largely invisible workers whose labour is usually left out of the traditional narrative of art, even though it is pivotal. We talk about the constant struggle against entropy, reflecting on the physical and human resources devoted to it, but also on the ethical, political, and economic implications of trying to slow down the passage of time. Because the way Domínguez Rubio sees it, the museum is much more than a space for contemplation and a collective archive: it is a political and cultural technology aimed at freezing time, ordering the world, and determining what is worthy of conservation. We talk to Fernando Domínguez Rubio about regimes of objecthood, about storage facilities, memory, and greenhouses, about uniqueness, and about other ways of holding onto things.

Following the Poetics and Politics of Storage and Circular Use research-action work group, this three-episode miniseries looks at the symptoms and possible responses to the current challenges of temporary storage and palliative curating of works and legacies. In this second instalment, Anna Manubens, David Bestué, Lucia C. Pino and Francesc Ruiz share experiments and valuable experiences to shape a new institutional hypothesis. They speak of celebratory arrivals, orchestrated destructions, unobscured forms of maintenance, and networks of adoption of works that involve care without ownership. They also explore the possibility of making space and creating forms of public memory that accompany heritage objects through their processes of decay, crumbling, and material transformation.