15.6.06
Exhibit ideas...
In the following, the conceptual slant leads. Maybe this opens space for new architectures/approaches to exhibit design (as opposed to starting with the artifacts of a particular collection). Many attendant problems: How to illustrate? Why should these themes be framed as exhibits rather than articles? Or photojournalist essays? Why waste the space? What difference lies then between the exhibit and a work of conceptual art? Or is there a difference?
- Meaning of "Indigenous" — political, social and economic implications within a global society. UN validating separation based only on ethnicity, not ideology; indigenousness as the last stronghold of the threatened; the role of identity in global capitalism; evolving definitions of "indigenous" (e.g. in Brazil, where runaway slaves can now claim same); markers of difference; etc.
- On/Off Grid — border zones, "lawless" frontiers of the imagination intersecting with political economies, revisiting ideas of core-periphery ... or re-considering ideas of systemic collapse, the marginalized, globalization etc. "Placeless powers and powerless places" (ref. Michael Watts).
- Home Sweet Home — Evolving household structures (beehive adobe compounds, mcmansions, former soviet apartment complexes, etc.) focusing too on family networks (clans and webs) in a global society.
- "Original" — cultural syncretism, object displacement, cultural appropriation, etc.
- Anthropology and Colonialism — memorize and memorialize something (a society) as it disappears. Being for and against (abetting and opposing) the colonial enterprise. Can also look at changing or conflicting anthropological narratives (e.g. revisiting Redfield's work in Mexico, Weiner vs. Malinowski etc.).
- Going Native — the significance of cross-cultural identification.
- Tools as Prosthetics
- Inventing Tradition — emerging or re-invented practices (offices, campuses, cities, rural communities).
