Oculus Room

The Power of Display. Gae Archive
8-Channel Video Installation

 

The basement as an archive and the archive as a display

If we understand architecture, as Gae Aulenti says, as the foundation of a place, and the Museum’s archives as that which gives form and meaning to what has lost its own place, we could say that Aulenti’s overhauled foundation generates a new landscape where something new has been built. Additionally, his way of working transformed this landscape into an unprecedented artifice in which all the layers are visible, in which the past and the future have a common display, an expanded body.

The enormous effort to consolidate the Palau Nacional building means that this visible architectural display is reproduced in the bowels of the Museum, where an almost impenetrable world reveals the fragile balance to which a large part of our cultural heritage is subjected. This basement laid out as such becomes a powerful display/other in which every square metre is susceptible of being another frame of a video work, while it clouds any remaining white cube in the space.

As Mary Anne Staniszewski 1 warned us in the nineties, when exhibitions only showed isolated and decontextualised objects, audiovisual displays, and here I would add architectural ones as well, propose a broader cultural framework, without hiding the cultural and political potential that lies behind the interstices of the fortunately obsolete white exhibition cube.

The Eye Room allowed us to concentrate information on what could happen at a depth of 6 meters.