from the Critical Zone to a Carrier Bag Theory of Museums

A couple of snapshots of thought for this post, essentially to say that the two excerpts below from Critical Zones - the book of the exhibition thought experiment curated, conceived, instigated by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel - are everything I’m excited about right now. It teases out a tangle in my last post about designing experiences that give access to ideas in motion, designing different types of knowledge generating experiences.

I tweeted about Critical Zones a few weeks back….

Big thanks to Jon Dovey for pointing me in the direction of the amazing virtual platform for the exhibition at ZKM - the Centre for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, who’ve been on my list of interesting people to talk to for a long time…. You can still explore it online here

Anyway, here’s a couple of paragraphs from the intro in the Critical Zones book that I’m feeling fizzy about.

So this is an exhibition experience designed as a thought experiment in motion. YES! it’s asking something new of cultural institutions and art. YES! And presumably asking something new of 'audiences/participants too - I want to talk them about that to find out more.

And the whole book closes with Donna Haraway (professorcyberfeministfutureofhumansandtechthoughtpioneer) talking about Ursula K. Le Guin’s (visionaryfeministnovelist) Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction in the context of how sci fi is crucial in building a caring human relationship with the planet.

If you have 5 minutes, and have not read Le Guin’s essay before, it’s here. It’s wonderful.

I only came to this very recently and in fact only just now in the process of writing this post, has it hit me that perhaps what I’ve been orbiting around, in thinking about a hybrid creative practice and an Un-Museum of ideas, is in fact, the Carrier Bag Theory of Museums. That museums have very much been originated, way back, in the bone pointing weaponised narrative of heros and their objects, and what if we now built future museums, as essential containers of what it is to be human in this world, this universe, and where, crucially…”still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.”

Comments, as ever, are so welcome. If someone has already built the Carrier Bag Theory of Museums I would love to see it. Or if you know about other exhibition experiences like Critical Zones, beyond the three previously produced by Latour and Weibel, I am ready to be pointed in directions I’ve inevitably missed.

I’ll finish up with another Le Guin quote, which I encountered today in the excellent thinking being shared by the pioneering Watershed in Bristol from their Equitable Futures visioning group.

I keep getting despondent about how we can ever make bubbles of change join up within the vast problematic structures we’re having to operate within. This really re-fired me up about that. On we all go.

We live in capitalism, its power can often seem inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art.

Ursula K. Le Guin, National Book Foundation Medal speech 2014