This conversation has been originally published in the EUR_Asia digital brochure realized by the Museum of Civilizations and the Asian Art Museum of Turin (MAO) in the context of the exhibition EUR_Asia (October 3rd – in progress) at the Museum of Civilizations. The conversation explores artist Gala Porras-Kim’s installation A Recollection Returns with a Soft Touch, the result of her research fellowship at the Museum, which was presented in the EUR_Asia exhibition.
A conversation between Gala Porras-Kim and Matteo Lucchetti
Gala Porras-Kim’s installation A Recollection Returns with a Soft Touch is the result of the artist’s work since 2022, during her Research Fellowship at the Museum of Civilizations. Over these two years, the artist delved into the cataloging systems of the various collections and placed them in relation to the biographies of the individual objects, reconceiving the collections as living entities endowed with their own intrinsic subjectivity developed over time and space in relation to their original contexts, functions, and meanings, as well as the interpretations given by the museum institution.
By tracing the history of the materials and techniques used in the creation of these object-subjects and reconstructing the different cultural ancestries and histories that survive their interpretation in the museum institution, Porras-Kim brings to light the dichotomy between their origins – within diverse ritual contexts – and the inequity of the Western’s orientalist gaze in re-signifying them as museum objects. Porras-Kim recontextualizes the objects and, in doing so, conveys the processes that led to their entry to the collections, observes their material and immaterial transformations, and shares the knowledge that enabled their preservation, focusing on what she calls the “conservation anxiety” of the curators.
In A Recollection Returns with a Soft Touch, the artist asked permission of the staff who care for the collections of the former National Museum of Oriental Art to film them as they presented some objects to which they are particularly attached, whether for professional or personal reasons. Their stories are presented within the same showcases that house the objects, thus giving the words, memories, and sensibilities of the curators/conservators a rare visibility – different from the official, seemingly neutral, and impartial Museum voice. By asking to respond personally, the work breaks the illusion that historical objects can be treated solely scientifically to forefront the authors of the way we understand the past. In the videos, only the hands are visible as the objects in the collection are handled as these stories are told, giving them a phantasmal aspect, as if they were apparitions of the many lives the objects in the collection have lived. The gesture of giving materiality to these multiple interpretations substances the idea that it’s possible to activate a sensible relation with all museum collections – since in these there also coexist the lives and stories of those who have ensured their existence and preservation over time. In the following conversation, the Museum of Civilizations Contemporary Arts and Cultures Curator, Matteo Lucchetti, discusses with Gala Porras Kim her artistic practice and the process of making A Recollection Returns with a Soft Touch.
ML: My first question relates to your artistic practice, and specifically to how you have decided to deepen your knowledge around many kinds of museums – mostly encyclopedic, ethnographic, and academic ones; those built through the Western lenses of creating narratives around the world’s cultural objects. You developed a methodology that departs from the act of recognizing, within mainstream narratives, a certain degree of framing of objects and materialities belonging to the people who did not have a part in that framing. Given such a start, have you ever considered that your work could become a tool to liberate objects from their captivating framing?
GPK: I think that many museums feel similar, but they’re all actually very different. The way in which they approach the challenges people inherit from the past, because the collection is accumulated its particular way for a long time usually, is actually quite different per institution, and feeling the collection’s specific personality is what I like when looking into institutions. To do so is to look at the registration, conservation, or the way in which the display is made, and also how distant is the mission of the museum vs the reality of how its run. The existing methodology doesn’t have the flexibility to incorporate all the contexts in which historical material existed, so everybody has to figure out a loophole, a way of dealing with real problems in this strict and narrow institutional framework. Museums think they can be objective, but there’s so much subjectivity in dealing with these impractical questions – like how to keep things forever or how to tell a true story of the past. There’s no way to do that in this narrow space. Part of the work is to recognize the subjectivity behind these decisions.
ML: How do you feel about the idea that your work might, or might not, liberate objects from these very specific and situated methodological solutions?
GPK: I don’t think in terms of liberating them, but of making them denser. The object has existed without the museum but right now it just happens to be inside of it. Some historical objects have been operating in the context in which they existed before they were in the museum, and so just because now they are in the historical collection it doesn’t mean that that function stops. Museums are temporary containers, and collective stories are happening simultaneously inside them. They don’t cancel each other out. The issue is when an institution presents it to the public in a singular way, just as a historical object when it’s actually all these multiple layers. It’s historical, but it’s also the thing before, it’s a part of nature, and it’s also in context with humans or the environment. It’s all these things collectively. So, I’m not necessarily liberating the objects, but recognizing that these materials are part of other worlds.
ML: You mentioned that in your work what gets revealed is the subjectivity at play in every museum and the «anxiety of the conservator» is perhaps one of the motors with which your work gets started. Can you elaborate on this element of anxiety in connection to the relationships you establish with museums’ curators and conservators?
GPK: I think that anxiety might exist because curators, conservators, and registrars already know that there is a conflict between the way they practice their job and the care of objects in a collection beyond its materiality. Visitors can’t see that there is a subjective interpretation of many of the decisions they have to make. Wood has its own specific scientific and conservation needs, but the object itself is not only just its material – yes, it is physically wood, but the wood is just kind of the container of other cultural information, manifested through the shape. How does this cultural part get preserved? That’s the curators’ job, to negotiate that past history with their own interpretation.
ML: You told me about growing up within the academic background of your parents, that you used to play with them cataloging daily objects, and how this familiarity with the foundational act of museum-making makes you think of your work as a sort of academic research through images and visual materials. I would speculate that your artistic practice creates loopholes in what academia considers out of the line and not acceptable by a peer-review methodology. How do you stay at peace with the idea that your work could be also seen as academic research? Can you make a comparison between the two? Where do you see the similarities and the discrepancies?
GPK: I think this question falls under the type of cataloging. What people think the limit of both academic research and art making might be: people have different expectations towards what is academic and what is not. To me, those are not set boundaries at all. I came up in a Western institutional sphere, and it’s been a real struggle to learn, unlearn, and relax some of my expectations of what things need to look like to be inside this boundary. But when you think about the amount of knowledge that exists outside of the institution, you ask yourself why, how come it is not integrated, like for example learning history through oral traditions is a very different and democratic way of passing information, but why do we prioritize learning with books over oral traditions? It’s about relaxing the shape of what the information and the packaging should be. What is the essential part? Is it the actual information or the way it’s presented? When I started making works, I presented a lot of them at academic conferences. I thought that the art field has the widest boundary, but it still feels like people put a boundary where there is supposed to be no boundary at all. To make artistic research fit in an academic setting is very difficult, because it has to hit all of these requirements. I made a lot of projects within academic institutions because I want the long-term structure to approach the research in a different way. There’s the shape of information, like a tunnel, and outside of it there you have to make it up.
ML: I like the image of relaxing the given shape, stretching it to enlarge the points of view.
GPK: I think that academics are also stretching the shape all the time. They’re finding loopholes, using terms that other people will recognize, so it doesn’t look like a loophole when it definitely is. It’s the same with the law, it feels strict, but it’s actually very subjective. You can move the rules all the time if you know how the institution works. When I’m in the studio, my material is the museum, the institution, or the collection, and I try to learn its qualities and how it moves, similar to material tests in other mediums.
ML: When you first visited the Museo delle Civiltà, you thought you were coming to one museum, and instead you experienced a museum made of museums where entirely different ways of cataloging were clashing with one another. Sometimes they were not even making any sense, or they were showing holes in the way they didn’t connect with this idea of the catalog as the museum’s infrastructure. What was your first impression when you approached the museum and realized the materiality with which this museum has been shaped?
GPK: What I thought particular about the museum was that it felt really fragmented because many of these collections are still separated within the museum. Museums everywhere are made of different collections, but over time they get sort of homogenized and absorbed into a singular-looking new shape, a new collection. It’s like the provenance of your collections has been updated, but you can still see the particularities of each one of the previous collections that constitute it. It felt like it was still unresolved, like a time capsule where you can still recognize the particular personalities of each of the sections of the museum because it hasn’t been fully merged into the idea or vision that it would become one collection. It feels like an octopus where different sections are, in theory, attached to a central place, which I think is not even there yet. It’s just legs without the center. But even though the collections are not linked through a collective catalog, they are linked materially through the conservation department that cuts across all the sections materially.
ML: The next step from this first overview was to work specifically on the National Oriental Collection. How and why did you decide that the work would be about asking the curators or the conservators about their favorite objects, the ones they were more attached to?
GPK: I think that conservators always have to think so scientifically that when you ask them something subjective, it’s often difficult to answer. The project is based on asking curators and conservators in the museum to find their favorite object, whether they worked with that material or taught something about it. I wanted to capture them telling the reason why they personally connect with the object as well as them handling it, because conservators are the only people who physically intervene in the work so they try to be very objective and really only use a scientific touch. But as they were describing the objects, you can actually start to recognize their very personal touch. The conservator, who’s supposed to touch the object scientifically, is now touching it very subjectively and talking about the relationship with that material, in contrast with the general work of their day-to-day separate and neutral voice.
ML: Were there any anecdotes that came out of their storytelling that you remember or that particularly struck your interest?
GPK: Conservators had their emotional connection to the specific object, which was the premise of the work, but their willingness or hesitation made the project for real, because they were asked to step out of their daily work. I liked not only their individual anecdotes, but especially the emotional jump to acknowledging that their touch is attached to their own specific subjectivity and body.
I think that the touch itself is very meaningful. In Italy, there are a lot of gestural moves, so I wanted the touch to actually be recognized because through it we can recognize the move from an institution to an individual, and how those two things exist in the same body. The way an object is handled scientifically versus the way an object is handled emotionally is so different.
GPK: What I was also thinking about with the hands was when you see such an old object, you can imagine so many different generations like ghost hands touching it in a very similar way. When people see the object in a museum, that’s what they might also imagine. How did someone use this object or how was it interacted with? One of the most jarring breaks in its story is that nobody’s touching it anymore – like a bowl that someone drank from it every day, and all of a sudden it’s in a vitrine, not being touched at all except by mainly a conservator, In that sense, from the objects’ point of view, something that has been handled so often and is integral to this other non-historical version of its existence can only be partially reenacted through the institutional handling.
ML: Indeed. The ghostly element has occurred in other works of yours, not only for this idea that the cultural object has been separated from its daily use but also for the idea that the object is subjective in itself. My last question is a funny one: how many ghosts have you encountered in your work and what kind of relationship did you establish with them, if you did?
GPK: I think that ghosts are infinite. I like to think that everybody who has ever been alive except us is dead. This, in a way to quantify the amount of ghosts that might exist. Plants can be ghosts; animals, when they die, also become ghosts since we don’t now the technicalities of what constitutes one. I think it depends greatly on the definition of what a ghost might be – and that is again a cataloging question. It’s more like a ghost vs an immortal thing that is supposed to do something forever. A ghost feels like it retains the particular attributes of a past time, where as an immortal being is always incorporating its contemporary definition as part of itself.
