In many Indian languages, the word for ghost, bhoot, is also a word for the past, as well as for the material substance of things. Following from this, we could say - "if history is a ghost story, it must also lay the foundations of a metaphysics of the future".
Inside the museum, infinity goes up on trial
this is what salvation looks like after a while
Bob Dylan, ‘Visions of Johanna’
In many Indian languages, the word for ghost, bhoot, is also a word for the past, as well as for the material substance of things. Following from this, we could say - “if history is a ghost story, it must also lay the foundations of a metaphysics of the future“.
Orhan Pamuk calls museums apparatuses for turning time into space. The space of most museums takes up a lot of time. As one of the three members of a collective art practice that often enters a museum through the back door, or the ‘staff entrance’, while installing art work, or researching objects and documents in the basement or storage area, I have known what it takes to be reduced to near insignificance in the sprawling labyrinth of most museums. It is for this reason that I am drawn repeatedly, sometimes in actuality, at other times in memory, to a re-viewing of a sequence in Jean Lucy Godard’s film - A Bande Apart, in which two men and a woman run breathlessly through the halls and corridors of the Louvre in Paris, past masterpieces and their guards, who look on, as if puzzled by the trio’s effort to escape. Whenever I see this clip, usually on YouTube or in dreams, I am reminded of my collective’s repeated transit and sojourn through museums. I wonder what we are running from, and what we are running towards. I wonder who or what gives us chase.
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