This curatorial research emerges out of being affronted by a partial taxonomy of ‘unworkable’ objects paralysed within collection contexts that privilege ‘in perpetuity’ thinking as authoritative. To destabilise this, it employs curiosity, reflection and questioning to acknowledge, reject, rupture and transform the collection logics that condemn the ‘unworkable’ to be wounded objects that remain trapped in sick institutions. It re-understands fieldwork as a treatment of working slowly, in support, and in care; this fieldwork responds to an institutional call to create conditions in which people, objects and institutions can heal. It seeks new understandings of how to act, asking which forms of address can facilitate more sustainable collecting, working and exhibitionary practices. It considers critically what contingencies could emerge from the company we choose to keep.
It comes to understand speculation as a conscious permitting of thinking without (empirical) knowing, highlighting unruly, devalidated, unstable, deviant and undisciplined knowledges as unfamiliar lenses through which to gaze and commune with unworkable matter, dissipate borders, and make muddy dominant ways of knowing. While some diagnose these lenses as pathology, I wish to understand them as forms of knowing that are no longer certified by dominant western and modern thought. This research is therefore a demand to negotiate and transform the default ontologies and gestures permissible when ‘making things public’ within the museum institution.Lenanton, Kati
