During the lockdowns in 2020–21, museums and art venues in Europe were largely closed. Precautionary measures prevented both the production and consumption of exhibitions. As the surges in the pandemic waned, entry to venues was restored, yet restricted to the vaccinated. In London, artist Abbas Zahedi outmaneuvered British law by converting a former postal sorting office in Chelsea into an artwork conceived as a place of repose, an exhibition solely accessible to frontline health workers.1 However, most museums and art venues deferred planned exhibition openings and closed their doors, all the while maintaining considerable running costs. Gagged by exceptional health and safety regulations, it was difficult to envision the nature of alternative activities within the museum space, even though curators and artists alike felt the need to do something. At the Castello di Rivoli in Turin, Italy, Carolyn Christov-Barkagiev installed a vaccination center against the backdrop of a wall painting by Claudia Comte. This courageous initiative proved to be an isolated incident. At this point I wrote the following text, curious as to how a “museum as lazaret,” like a makeshift shelter in a situation of crisis, might affect the norms and forms of curatorial practice.
The Museum Lazaret
The museum is empty of walking, consuming human beings. It has become a lazaret for vulnerable bodies. In the frescoes on the ceiling, the lying watch the pursuits of angels in the embrace of flesh and cloud. Paintings hung lower than the golden rule match the bedridden gaze. Spotlights complement the microfocus of each prostate sufferer. No longer controlled by the norms of visitation, curators tend to patients, not publics, offering solace and distraction. Performing non-invasive operations like whispering or awakening, they speak to the afflicted through visual projections and spoken words that re-energize the metabolic flow. Through their agency, they transport the immobile person out of their solitary imagination. Curators are nurses.
Curators are farmers. Plants, like exhibits, live off nurture and care. Sometimes a landscape becomes a collection; we begin to treat it like a museum. We walk through it, respecting cultural divisions, accepting routes and rules, recognizing flowers, bushes, and trees, as taught. But what if curators perform disobedience, refuting colonial plantations, and chiseling out sidelines and backroads to lose museological norms on the way? No longer cultivated in isolation and sealed off from the spores of a nearby stranger, the newly tilled field with its toss of fertile references waits to be sown.
Hospital or field, lazaret or farm, the museum takes on this fateful turn, translocating its functions from its ubiquitous walled classicism or twentieth-century colonial modernity to a flat expanse, a borderless, at times digital, venue. Here it cares for the growing, the dying, for healing and restituting. All artworks become returns, points of reflection and potential objects of virtue, like chairs in a room ready to start a conversation. But artworks are interlocutors who don’t speak the canon any longer. They have become multiple agents, double-crossing their disciplinary tongue. Dragged down into lowercase, the act of healing draws them into a common condition. So let museums become lazarets for the sick, places to heal the mysteries of life and death through artworks, in every medium that we can imagine and curate.
April 3, 2020, Berlin
The museum as lazaret could suggest a rehabilitation center for Covid-19 patients, a refuge for the displaced, or a venue that works to remediate the pain caused by the violence of colonial extraction. With the trailing effects of the pandemic, multiple wars and conflicts, and mounting climatic and ecological urgencies, it may be time to rethink the museum in terms of its spatial and ergonomic logic, the deployment of its collections, and its outdated regime of exhibition programming. Does the grid o
