ARCOmadrid

Mariana Silva

Madrid, Spain

Friends of Interpretable Objects is a hybrid between an exhibition and an installation, accompanied by discussions with invited guests and/or audio interviews displayed in tablet devices and reclining seats. At ARCO Madrid, Silva presents an ongoing collection of animations which seeks to look at the surpluses and unaccounted blindspots of language and display that lead to the presence of objects in museums, their identification with the ambiguous notions of culture, access, or public property. The animations aggregate objects, both art and artefacts, fact and fiction, which derive from museological and natural history museum case-studies. A first interview conducted with Miguel Tamen, Prof. of Comparative Literature at the University of Lisbon may be heard on the reclined seat. 

The works presented at ARCO Madrid approach the idea of culture, as the moderns collected and classified it, as a type of material production to be preserved, copied. Notwithstanding this investment under the guise of knowledge, culture to this day evades definition, being either too obvious or too vague a term, too porous or too varied for agreement. But if this clear-cut division among Science/Humanities, and Nature/Culture is blurring with climate change, what is happening to the culture end of the dichotomy, the life of its objects and their exhibition?