The Museum Lazaret Clémentine Deliss

During the lockdowns in 2020–21, museums and art venues in Europe were largely closed. Precautionary measures prevented both the production and consumption of exhibitions. As the surges in the pandemic waned, entry to venues was restored, yet restricted to the vaccinated. In London, artist Abbas Zahedi outmaneuvered British law by converting a former postal sorting office in Chelsea into an artwork conceived as a place of repose, an exhibition solely accessible to frontline health workers.1 However, most museums and art venues deferred planned exhibition openings and closed their doors, all the while maintaining considerable running costs. Gagged by exceptional health and safety regulations, it was difficult to envision the nature of alternative activities within the museum space, even though curators and artists alike felt the need to do something. At the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, Carolyn Christov-Barkagiev installed a vaccination center against the backdrop of a wall painting by Claudia Comte. This courageous initiative proved to be an isolated incident. At this point I wrote the following text, curious as to how a “museum as lazaret,” like a makeshift shelter in a situation of crisis, might affect the norms and forms of curatorial practice.

The Museum Lazaret

The museum is empty of walking, consuming human beings. It has become a lazaret for vulnerable bodies. In the frescoes on the ceiling, the lying watch the pursuits of angels in the embrace of flesh and cloud. Paintings hung lower than the golden rule match the bedridden gaze. Spotlights complement the microfocus of each prostate sufferer. No longer controlled by the norms of visitation, curators tend to patients, not publics, offering solace and distraction. Performing non-invasive operations like whispering or awakening, they speak to the afflicted through visual projections and spoken words that re-energize the metabolic flow. Through their agency, they transport the immobile person out of their solitary imagination. Curators are nurses.

Curators are farmers. Plants, like exhibits, live off nurture and care. Sometimes a landscape becomes a collection; we begin to treat it like a museum. We walk through it, respecting cultural divisions, accepting routes and rules, recognizing flowers, bushes, and trees, as taught. But what if curators perform disobedience, refuting colonial plantations, and chiseling out sidelines and backroads to lose museological norms on the way? No longer cultivated in isolation and sealed off from the spores of a nearby stranger, the newly tilled field with its toss of fertile references waits to be sown.

Hospital or field, lazaret or farm, the museum takes on this fateful turn, translocating its functions from its ubiquitous walled classicism or twentieth-century colonial modernity to a flat expanse, a borderless, at times digital, venue. Here it cares for the growing, the dying, for healing and restituting. All artworks become returns, points of reflection and potential objects of virtue, like chairs in a room ready to start a conversation. But artworks are interlocutors who don’t speak the canon any longer. They have become multiple agents, double-crossing their disciplinary tongue. Dragged down into lowercase, the act of healing draws them into a common condition. So let museums become lazarets for the sick, places to heal the mysteries of life and death through artworks, in every medium that we can imagine and curate.

April 3, 2020, Berlin

The museum as lazaret could suggest a rehabilitation center for Covid-19 patients, a refuge for the displaced, or a venue that works to remediate the pain caused by the violence of colonial extraction. With the trailing effects of the pandemic, multiple wars and conflicts, and mounting climatic and ecological urgencies, it may be time to rethink the museum in terms of its spatial and ergonomic logic, the deployment of its collections, and its outdated regime of exhibition programming. Does the grid of permanent and temporary shows mean anything today? Is it economically sustainable, and even relevant to the public? What alternative rhythms and activities can revitalize the museum and the interpretation of its holdings, setting this institution apart from the speed of the digital, or the drug-like power of a scenography derived from department-store aesthetics dating back to the nineteenth century?

Meanwhile, much has been discussed around the curatorial concept of care, and the responsibility of a museum toward the well-being of its visitors. Circling around these questions of civic responsibility are the growing humanitarian needs of refugees. The backlog of asylum applicants in Europe means that people from all walks of life are being placed in camps under inexcusable conditions, provided with minimal sanitation, poor nourishment, and insufficient medical attention. The option of providing education to the stateless in the museum, an institution for which you need no exam to enter, and which abounds in visual languages, is not so much a utopia as a challenge.

The museum as lazaret proposes a dialogical model for healing and rehabilitation. It sets up exercises for curators and visitors alike. Artists are also part of the conversation for they, too, suffer from the unhealthy polarization of institutionally-driven exhibitions and market-driven production. I think back to 2020, when artists might have worked in the sealed-off museums, transforming galleries into temporary studios, and melting the frozen format of a three-month show with a unique syncopation. During 2022, KW Institute for Contemporary Art in Berlin put on two such ultra-temporary exhibitions, or Pauses. The first was with painter Tobias Spichtig, and the second with artist Lydia Ourahmane.2 Both questioned the condition of the sentient human within the exhibition space. Spichtig did this with a sea of secondhand mattresses that covered the venue’s entire ground floor and could be used to lie down on, or in the case of many delighted children, fall onto. Berlin-based novelists and poets held readings in the evenings. Spichtig’s concise, four-day exhibition drew out complex political connotations of homelessness, and more unexpectedly, imagined environments for orgies performed on an endless mattress and derived from the writings of the Marquis de Sade and Roland Barthes. A few months later, in the same space in KW, Lydia Ourahmane created a large rectangle of black chairs, each one fitted with audio wiring that transmitted nothing but the rhythmic heartbeats of a rote of seated visitors, nonstop for twenty-four hours. Her exhibition was a one-day exercise in public auscultation, and KW remained open to the public throughout.

KW has no collection, but what about the many museums that have reservoirs full to the brim with artifacts, artworks, archives, documents, books, and films that are rarely brought into dialogue with one another, unless selected for a forthcoming presentation, or for the purposes of conservation, provenance study, and very occasionally, repatriation? European ethnology built its museums on actions comparable to those of mediocre bailiffs confiscating every dimension of a person’s life in the hope of extracting the unknown capital lodged in their cultural heritage. Today, these convolutes from the former colonies are held in museum depots, wrapped in plastic and sprayed with repellents—chemical, scriptural, and legal. To perform the decolonial on the spoils of capitalism is to transmute the museum to the less glamorous condition of a halfway house or lazaret, which administers—or curates—different therapies with alternative terminologies.

Artists are engineers in this course of action, subjecting damaged traces to critical analysis and thereby liberating collected artifacts from the entrenched norms of positivism. And yet, no artist needs to be the equivalent of a custodian or an expert in area studies to work with the matter of doubt. Their “traveling eye”3 is emancipated from its “master-explicator,”4 wandering with playful, indeed feral, orientation through the thicket of collections. The fragility of this form of remediation places an onus on the artist to deliver an interpretation that is both intellectually innovative and politically balanced in today’s inflammable environment. What is the language of remediation, of a loving return that heals while translocating? What timing does it require? What risks does it bring with it, and can we allow it to fail? Does critical fabulation—the poetic undercommons of provenance research—achieve the vigilant dissent needed to protect against future forms of extraction?

The question arises of how best to formulate the success of a process of remediation. Based on which criteria can one claim that it has been effective as a decolonial intervention? Remediation must run deeper than formalist engagement, merely wiping the slate clean of references and producing an aesthetic tabula rasa. When an artist works with a collection of so-called ethnographic materials—or in response to artifacts framed by university studies such as archaeology or antiquities—their lack of specialist expertise can disqualify their response. Pejorative terms such as inspiration, appropriation, or ignorance of the requisite contextual information have the effect of discrediting the artist’s reading.

For this reason, it may be more helpful to think of stages in remediation, which, like a healing procedure, do not occur from one moment to the next but require reconnaissance, dialogue, and the kindling of agency. Museum expertise plays on authenticity and context, which is far...