CHRIS FREMANTLE

Two ambitious exhibitions which basically challenge territories and disciplines.

Trembling Museum at the Hunterian aiming to unsettled the ethnography collection of Glasgow University by bringing it under the glaze of Eduard Glissant and into relation with contemporary practices.

The most interesting thing was the idea of threadyness, that the emergence of jazz and blues and hip-hop are all grounded in partial memories of cultures in parts of Africa where people were transported from into slavery. Something really powerful about that cultural continuity, potential becoming something new but still also connected.

Silent Archive at Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh brought a number of artists into relation with aspects of archives, both of specimens and collections but also of for example endangered species. Works were grouped around issues, the palm cut down to enable the restoration of the Palm House, endangered species, species grown industrially and the industrial production processes.

Both exhibitions were perhaps not only across practices and disciplines, but maybe deep mapping, exploring power relations, ‘archives’ in the Foucault sense of “the fundamental formations that determine what is seeable and sayable as history.”

Interestingly both were problematic in their associated interpretation. Trembling Museum had a reading room, but the narratives of individual objects tended to fall back into their conventional disciplinary forms. So items from the ethnography collection were still accompanied by ethnographic texts.

So curious that having taken Glissant as a guide, none of his concepts, particularly opacity, were employed. At the object level everything reverted to clarity and specificity. As noted above some actual ‘interpretation’ or allusive storytelling was evident (thready connections), but the powerful metaphor of volcanic trembling didn’t result in the promised confusion of ethnography and contemporary art, let alone a confusion related to life, a full working out of blurring (Kaprow) as a form of opacity (Glissant). It was Gill, my otherr half, who pointed this out.

At RBGE Gill overheard a lot of frustration at the interpretation too, though in this case because it wasn’t adjacent to works – curatorial keeping space for the work meant hunting for the interpretation. That in turn was only lists of creator, title, date, material, lender. All text was accessible via QR codes. There is maybe more work to think through the digital physical relation.