Layered and incongruent lines

A large architectural model, based on the Musée
du quai Branly, a museum for non-western cultures in Paris, is floating at eye level, lit, against the backdrop of a monochrome wall. A label-like flatscreen is playing press clippings referring to
the planning of the Paris museum, as of 1996.

On an autumn day, within the context of prepa-
ring for an exhibition project, I was standing in an empty factory building in Geneva. The changes associated with the Berlin Wall were still a thing of the future. As I wandered among the regularly spaced columns on the vacant factory floor, I could not help but think of a number of criteria for exhibition spaces presented as necessities: solid walls, the white of those walls, entrances, series of adjoining rooms, and their influence on the act of exhibiting. At that moment it became clear that my own contextual perspective was very much bound up with a booklet Zaugg had published two years previously. In the recurring debate over whether architecture is the artist’s ally or his adversary, or whether, in view of the givens, one would simply could-shoulder it, I have often brought up the incisiveness of the text by Rémy Zaugg. Because that text is an artistic work which intervenes in precisely the debates that characterize the history of the development of artistic practices in and with architectural space to the present day.

Three audio-guides, made available to the visitors at the Hamburg Ethnographic Museum, in relation to the Oceanian, West-African, and Chinese collections on display, partly in the languages corresponding with the collections: Indonesian, Ewe and Chinese.