Objects of the city
Lost and Found at the City Reliquary
“The City Reliquary is not a traditional museum on the 19th century Age of Industry model; as its name suggests, it looks to a more medieval model, as the keeper of the sacred ‘relics’ of the civic corpus. Even so, in practice the City Reliquary is more like a cabinet of curiosities, a form that arose in 17th century Europe, as Europeans began bringing back wonders of the wide world, objects that reflected natural and cultural diversity and strangeness. But rather than objects of intrinsic interest or wonder, the City Reliquary presents what might be called souvenirs of the past. They are objects that are not intrinsically valuable-value accrues only when they become attached to narratives of experience or history…
By bringing these lost and forgotten items into the light of day, the City Reliquary opens a window onto the city’s past. More accurately, it opens a series of peepholes revealing fragmentary views that suggest the evocative power of objects and the complex of emotions and intellect we call memory. These acts of salvage are almost magical in their power to transform objects simply by recontextualizing them. In coming to rest at the City Reliquary, fragments are transformed from detritus to relics, objects loaded with meaning and capable of inspiring a wide range of emotions. And because most of these salvaged objects are fragments, they are even more powerful; in their incomplete, ruined state, the objects allow the imagination to play freely with possible meanings and histories.”
See also: On Forgotten, Neglected, and Discarded Objects and Subsequent Utopian Projects
Both scooped from GLOWLAB: FORGOTTEN - and don’t forget Glowlab: Open Lab, a psychogeography festival and exhibition beginning next month in Boston.