| Shirin Sabahi

Postscript, 2009, coated paper 150 gr., glue binding, double-sided, color print, 34 pages, English

Sébastien Berthier and Shirin Sabahi in Conversation
On the new politics of memory in an ethnographic museum and a utopian housing project

Postscript is a conversation between an artist and an architect/artist who in their approaches to architecture have found a similar interest: how architecture forms the memory of the time past and the time to come. This interest manifests itself differently in the visual analysis of human behaviour in a Swedish housing project by Sabahi and the genealogy of French ethnographic museums by Berthier. Talking about their former projects Cannibale Museum (2009) and Bo01ers (2009) demanded Berthier and Sabahi to quickly set up a common language which was achieved by revisiting related literature.

September 2009, Stockholm
Edited by Shirin Sabahi and Sebastien Berthier

“Why are nations in need of a past? Because they need a “we”- a designation of what their citizens have in common. Even if this identity is to some extent fictive, that doesn’t make it less real. A common past is helpful; it shows what the “people” have always had in common, what they have shared for a long time. How else can it be decided who belongs and who doesn’t? A common past can also serve the nation’s need to legitimize its geographical boundaries. It provides the bricks and even the cement for the self-awareness of a national community and its political class.”

Although he mainly talks about memorials it reminds me of Musée du Quai Branly. You told me about the politics of memory that is applied there.

Sebastien Berthier: Jacques Chirac is indeed completely aware of this need to build a museum propping a nation’s geographical boundaries and moreover history. In these times of globalization and interior social tensions, the undertaking of a museum with a program that is directly linked to the sulfurous post-colonial period that France was part of, is a difficult political project that rather tends to question than to unify an already plural nation.
His schema is rather simple: he enters into a symbolic rhetoric about the repentance over the fact that different cultures were considered in minority positions within the French cultural field. This is a common and broad polemic. The Louvre, one of the first public museums is nowadays seen as the tool of a cultural elite where only some cultures are allowed to enter, and others are not. This universal parity of representation, one of the two main political projects of museums according to Tony Bennett, is a question that is easily apprehended:
"I wish that this museum will be the instrument for a renewed citizenship. [...]. But I wish above all that it will be an instrument for peace which fully testifies to the equal dignity of cultures and human beings,"

But the problem is not so much about whose cultures deserve to be part of the museum exhibition (it is already the case in ethnographic museums for a century), but by praising a kind of universal art genius different cultures should have, the museums loses all political criticality! We are not dealing with people here (fighting to get a visibility within this homogeneous nation…) but with cultures.
Henri Pierre Jeudy calls this process a “cultural pacification” which would prevent all fervor by making of the cultural diversity a universal and atemporal understanding, smoothing up all political struggles.

Sebastien: Yes. Diversity is something difficult to grasp and it is much easier to appreciate these artifacts as common art pieces like a Greek statue or a renaissance painting. This aesthetical strive to transform all the artifacts present in ethnographic museums into art pieces has already been exposed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais in their short movie “Statues Also Die”:

“Art, here, starts with the spoon and ends up with the statue. And this is the same art… We are looking at primitive art as if its reason to exist lies in the pleasure it gives us. The intentions of the Negro who creates it, the feelings of the Negro who is looking at it, we can not grasp. As they are inscribed in the wood, we apprehend his thoughts as statues. And we see the quaint or picturesque, where another member of the black community perceives the characteristics of a culture.”

Chirac’s museum is acting as if the museum visitor cannot locate himself within these cultural habits and for example understand the ritual or ceremonial quality of some artifacts. Moreover, some pieces can also appear shocking or discriminative and as source of judgment for an occidental mind: some magical artifacts must not be seen by any woman for instance or must be destroyed after a ceremony… and the museum then should explain it to its audience. This raises too many problems, and on the other hand, beauty and genius are universal… well, for us at least.

Shirin: What about the public that Musée du Quai Branly is addressing? Was the homogeneity of the museum’s public a driving force in the design of your proposed museum? Your proposal is replacing the “politics of memory” with the “memory of politics” as a reverse action to acknowledge the French colonial history and its relation to the cultures represented in the museum. To my understanding, Musée du Quai Branly is promoting a new social memory based on this assumption that there is one “public” that is ready to accept this fresh start without looking back…

Sebastien: As you said at the beginning of this conversation, the nation is a fictive identity, an ideological construction that museums were essentially linked to. The strive to go “beyond the postcolonial view” desired by Chirac, is necessarily accompanied by an amnesia, an oblivion of a troublesome past, and that is the contemporary politics of memory.
Practically it resulted in the subsuming of all the collections coming from previous historical museums and their own political agenda into a new statement, a new motto: no more questions about the scientific expeditions launched in the ‘30s in colonized Africa or the first encounter with curious savages.
On the contrary, we proposed to highlight these different political agendas that occidental institutions had towards the otherness. To me, it was important to make a museum about colonialism, a museum about recent immigration or even to show a curiosity cabinet that princes had in the beginning of the 19th century.
A critical institution revealing its own past brings up many more questions than a 2000ish ethnographic museum stating with contemporary words, another impossible description of who the others are. Chirac wanted to make a place where “cultures dialogue”, I prefer a place where “histories dialogue”.
In that sense, “the museum of museums” I propose looks for a critical subject. A subject who reflects upon the political meaning an institution has throughout the time.
But I know this question is something familiar to you. When you explained me your project about this new urban area in Malmö you also went through this process of a public institution preaching a homogeneous public. Can you tell me what were the processes at stake in order to define the citizen of this future city? And where is the place of the current residents within this city of tomorrow, how are they experiencing their new representative status?

Shirin: The European Union, the Swedish government and the city of Malmö are among the sponsors and actors in the housing exhibition project in the western harbor of Malmö so the project is supposed to address the “public” by default. Here, the public is as defined as the museum public which means that it is almost not defined at all. It’s important to note that this model neighborhood is not responding to the current population of Malmö in terms of diversity. Instead, it is addressing a certain class as well as creating a certain “community” by promoting the lifestyle of the people who are already part of the “future” by living in this sustainable city. This lifestyle is the commonality of the neighborhood. In other words, the city of tomorrow is projecting a fictive identity on the imaginary community of its citizens. On the other hand, people who live in the neighborhood have more or less accepted this identity. They situate themselves within this perfect image of tomorrow and participate in maintaining this image by staging the perfect life from inside the house for the viewer who is outside the house. Miwon Kwon has talked in detail about the community-based artworks that project a certain identities on communities in “The (Un)Sitings of Community” in her book “One Place After Another” … This is also the case with architectural projects and the policies applied by them and on them…
What is interesting to me in my project about this neighborhood is the continuation of the housing exhibition where the citizens are voluntarily performing and restaging their lives in a scenery that is provided by the architecture.

Sebastien: It is so funny when you talk about this voluntary act of persons who want to inhabit this cutting edge model city. It makes me think about the graduation project of Rem Koolhaas. It is called “Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” . It was a time in 1972, where architecture students were asked to analyze the archetype of publicity and citizenship in Mediterranean cities in order to see how architecture could participate in the liberation of mankind. Back then, classicism and naïve optimism was still haunting some institutions. Well, basically he took the counter position, and studied the Berlin wall as a negative force whose function is to separate the good from the bad, the freedom from the captivity, the beautiful from the ugly. He took over this idea of the wall as a destructive force by transforming and putting it in the “service of positive attention” by building a gigantic strip of “metropolitan desirability” in the middle of London: a jail where voluntary prisoners were gathering.
This scenario displayed a parody of architecture and especially of positivist and utopian dreams which were very present at that time. His link between this ideological city model and the way of life the inhabitant must encompass seems similar to me.

Shirin: Exactly. It is also related to the idea of participatory surveillance which has been looked at many times from literature to political philosophy to cinema. A funny representation of a glass house – the life inside a vitrine – is in playtime of Jacques Tati where the outsider enters the modern city and doesn’t fit within this new life; he can’t manage getting out of a building because he doesn’t know how to open the automatic door – that doesn’t have a mob – and he can’t read English – the must-know language – to understand the instructions and get out…
But back to the notion of publicized private, it is interesting to see how the life of tenants is going on while the spectator can’t hear their voices and instead is surrounded by the sound of the traffic as the ambience. The private – indoor – and the public – outdoor – are merged together in a sense that the window is not merely functioning as a source of natural light and for viewing the public sphere from inside anymore. In a futuristic house, the window is as well a screen pointing back at the interior to the reality show of the tenants of the house… The vitrine house follows the manifestation of power applied in the (exhibitionary) buildings. In “The birth of the Museum” Tony Bennett has talked about the exercise of power inside the buildings of museums. He refers to Gramsci’s notions of cultural hegemony and “the government as the educator” and Foucault’s notion of discipline highlighting the behavior management that is done by means of the building itself. He compares the museum and the prison and says:

If the orientation of the prison is to discipline and punish with a view to effecting a modification of behavior, that of the museum is not to know the populace but to allow the people, addressed as subjects of knowledge rather than as objects of administration, to know; not to render the populace visible to power but to render power visible to the people and, at the same time, to represent to them that power as their own.

A house where the tenants can be seen also obliges them to “behave” in a way that is expected from them. In this sense, I would relate the vitrine house to the museum and the prison where power is both granted and applied in order to civilize the future citizen from the ones who have already entered the city of tomorrow to the one who is watching the new mode of civilization as an outsider…
The reverse in the views is also applicable to your “museum of museums”. You make the institution visible to a point that the administrative structure of the museum becomes part of the exhibition on view, right?

Sebastien: Yes, the public space is no more experienced as an enclosed volume, separated from the rest of the world by an opaque shell. You can experience the depth of the institution: literally, by perceiving a series of working rooms or ateliers, and metaphorically by understanding the different processes the institution employs in order to function. As I said earlier, museums like Quai Branly have political agendas, goals to achieve. As a pedagogical apparatus, the museum continuously produces knowledge, organizes exhibitions, edits catalogues and organizes symposiums. At the same time, it also continues to enrich the French Patrimony by collecting different artifacts in order to complete the collection of the museum, by inscribing them into the inventory, by restoring them, etc. These different functions are not neutral. The act of choosing some artifacts rather than the others for example, depends on time-related criteria. The place where this compiling and amassing is happening – the collection – is also representative of the political intentions: for example, one of the main initiators of the Musée du Quai Branly is an art dealer. Since the end of Colonialism, collecting artifacts in foreign countries are not possible anymore, so the only official (and often unofficial) source of expanding the collection is the private market.
So making different parts of the museum visible such as the archives, the ateliers dealing with the collection, research laboratories and even the private patron rooms lift up the curtain to actually show what the institution really is. It highlights the fact that the museum has a pedagogical purpose which is dictated by broader agendas dealing with society in general. The visitors are then not considered as spectators to be entertained anymore (as Stéphane Martin suggested) nor as objects to be educated on how to behave but they are subjects put into critical posture, where they can understand that the viewpoint of the institution is partial and politically oriented.
Before continuing, we should make a small step back and rely once again on Bennett’s text. He is basically saying that the museums have two political demands: first, the equal access for everyone, and second, the representational adequacy of all cultures and people. But unfortunately, the museum’s own rationality which results into the separation of people, makes these two demands “insatiable”. So as a result, the museum puts policies into place which ensure a kind of equality of universal representation of access.
The fact to make the visitor able to understand the institution as a communicative agent propping specific meanings and cultural values (Bennett), as a consequence places the institution and its different policies in front of public criticism. It results in a strange situation where the institution that is supposed to distribute knowledge to its visitors, is finally put bluntly in front of the judgment of the latter. Therefore, the hierarchy of power and knowledge that the institution has in relation to its visitors is threatened.

Shirin: So the exhibitionary institution you’re proposing not only points at the history that the French identity politics would very much like to cross but also through the architecture and the reverse in public and private, is critical towards itself, being aware of the hierarchy accompanied by the pedagogical role it’s taking.

Sebastien: Uhum… This shift of the viewer and the one who is being viewed is perhaps the meeting point of these two situations although they result in different manners. Let me finish with a quote from Leslie Kaynes Weisman:

“…The spatial arrangements of buildings and communities are never value free nor neutral ; they reflect and reinforce the nature of each society’s gender, race and class relations.”

Lolle Nauta, “The Democratization of Memory”in Experimenting with Truth, Documenta 11_Platfom 2 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002)

Jacques Chirac, "Speech of M. Jacques Chirac, French President at the time, during a building site visit of the Musée du Quai Branly”, Paris, October 15, 2004.

Henri Pierre Jeudy, "La Culture en Trompe L'œil", Culture et Musées n° 5, July 2005. Cited in Chanal, "Le musée français face à la représentation de la diversité des cultures aujourd'hui"

Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, “Statues Also Die”, 1953.

Miwon Kwon, “The (Un)Sitings of Community” in One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (London: MIT Press, 2002)

Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vreisendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis, “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture”, 1972

Tony Bennet, “The Political Rationality of the Museum” in The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Lodon : Routledge, 2005)

Leslie Kanes Weisman, “Architecture” in Cheris Kramarae & Dale Spender, eds., Encyclopedia of Women’s Issues an Knowledge (New York & London: Routledge editions, 2000)


							Postscript, 2009, coated paper 150 gr., glue binding, double-sided, color print, 34 pages, English Sébastien Berthier and Shirin Sabahi in Conversation On the new politics of memory in an ethnographic museum and a utopian housing project Postscript is a conversation between an artist and an architect/artist who in their approaches to architecture have found a similar interest: how architecture forms the memory of the time past and the time to come. This interest manifests itself differently in the visual analysis of human behaviour in a Swedish housing project by Sabahi and the genealogy of French ethnographic museums by Berthier. Talking about their former projects Cannibale Museum (2009) and Bo01ers (2009) demanded Berthier and Sabahi to quickly set up a common language which was achieved by revisiting related literature. September 2009, Stockholm Edited by Shirin Sabahi and Sebastien Berthier Shirin Sabahi: I have a quote for you from Lolle Nauta: “Why are nations in need of a past? Because they need a “we”- a designation of what their citizens have in common. Even if this identity is to some extent fictive, that doesn’t make it less real. A common past is helpful; it shows what the “people” have always had in common, what they have shared for a long time. How else can it be decided who belongs and who doesn’t? A common past can also serve the nation’s need to legitimize its geographical boundaries. It provides the bricks and even the cement for the self-awareness of a national community and its political class.” Although he mainly talks about memorials it reminds me of Musée du Quai Branly. You told me about the politics of memory that is applied there. Sebastien Berthier: Jacques Chirac is indeed completely aware of this need to build a museum propping a nation’s geographical boundaries and moreover history. In these times of globalization and interior social tensions, the undertaking of a museum with a program that is directly linked to the sulfurous post-colonial period that France was part of, is a difficult political project that rather tends to question than to unify an already plural nation. His schema is rather simple: he enters into a symbolic rhetoric about the repentance over the fact that different cultures were considered in minority positions within the French cultural field. This is a common and broad polemic. The Louvre, one of the first public museums is nowadays seen as the tool of a cultural elite where only some cultures are allowed to enter, and others are not. This universal parity of representation, one of the two main political projects of museums according to Tony Bennett, is a question that is easily apprehended: "I wish that this museum will be the instrument for a renewed citizenship. [...]. But I wish above all that it will be an instrument for peace which fully testifies to the equal dignity of cultures and human beings," But the problem is not so much about whose cultures deserve to be part of the museum exhibition (it is already the case in ethnographic museums for a century), but by praising a kind of universal art genius different cultures should have, the museums loses all political criticality! We are not dealing with people here (fighting to get a visibility within this homogeneous nation…) but with cultures. Henri Pierre Jeudy calls this process a “cultural pacification” which would prevent all fervor by making of the cultural diversity a universal and atemporal understanding, smoothing up all political struggles. Shirin: It also neglects the diversity of cultures itself… Sebastien: Yes. Diversity is something difficult to grasp and it is much easier to appreciate these artifacts as common art pieces like a Greek statue or a renaissance painting. This aesthetical strive to transform all the artifacts present in ethnographic museums into art pieces has already been exposed by Chris Marker and Alain Resnais in their short movie “Statues Also Die”: “Art, here, starts with the spoon and ends up with the statue. And this is the same art… We are looking at primitive art as if its reason to exist lies in the pleasure it gives us. The intentions of the Negro who creates it, the feelings of the Negro who is looking at it, we can not grasp. As they are inscribed in the wood, we apprehend his thoughts as statues. And we see the quaint or picturesque, where another member of the black community perceives the characteristics of a culture.” Chirac’s museum is acting as if the museum visitor cannot locate himself within these cultural habits and for example understand the ritual or ceremonial quality of some artifacts. Moreover, some pieces can also appear shocking or discriminative and as source of judgment for an occidental mind: some magical artifacts must not be seen by any woman for instance or must be destroyed after a ceremony… and the museum then should explain it to its audience. This raises too many problems, and on the other hand, beauty and genius are universal… well, for us at least. Shirin: What about the public that Musée du Quai Branly is addressing? Was the homogeneity of the museum’s public a driving force in the design of your proposed museum? Your proposal is replacing the “politics of memory” with the “memory of politics” as a reverse action to acknowledge the French colonial history and its relation to the cultures represented in the museum. To my understanding, Musée du Quai Branly is promoting a new social memory based on this assumption that there is one “public” that is ready to accept this fresh start without looking back… Sebastien: As you said at the beginning of this conversation, the nation is a fictive identity, an ideological construction that museums were essentially linked to. The strive to go “beyond the postcolonial view” desired by Chirac, is necessarily accompanied by an amnesia, an oblivion of a troublesome past, and that is the contemporary politics of memory. Practically it resulted in the subsuming of all the collections coming from previous historical museums and their own political agenda into a new statement, a new motto: no more questions about the scientific expeditions launched in the ‘30s in colonized Africa or the first encounter with curious savages. On the contrary, we proposed to highlight these different political agendas that occidental institutions had towards the otherness. To me, it was important to make a museum about colonialism, a museum about recent immigration or even to show a curiosity cabinet that princes had in the beginning of the 19th century. A critical institution revealing its own past brings up many more questions than a 2000ish ethnographic museum stating with contemporary words, another impossible description of who the others are. Chirac wanted to make a place where “cultures dialogue”, I prefer a place where “histories dialogue”. In that sense, “the museum of museums” I propose looks for a critical subject. A subject who reflects upon the political meaning an institution has throughout the time. But I know this question is something familiar to you. When you explained me your project about this new urban area in Malmö you also went through this process of a public institution preaching a homogeneous public. Can you tell me what were the processes at stake in order to define the citizen of this future city? And where is the place of the current residents within this city of tomorrow, how are they experiencing their new representative status? Shirin: The European Union, the Swedish government and the city of Malmö are among the sponsors and actors in the housing exhibition project in the western harbor of Malmö so the project is supposed to address the “public” by default. Here, the public is as defined as the museum public which means that it is almost not defined at all. It’s important to note that this model neighborhood is not responding to the current population of Malmö in terms of diversity. Instead, it is addressing a certain class as well as creating a certain “community” by promoting the lifestyle of the people who are already part of the “future” by living in this sustainable city. This lifestyle is the commonality of the neighborhood. In other words, the city of tomorrow is projecting a fictive identity on the imaginary community of its citizens. On the other hand, people who live in the neighborhood have more or less accepted this identity. They situate themselves within this perfect image of tomorrow and participate in maintaining this image by staging the perfect life from inside the house for the viewer who is outside the house. Miwon Kwon has talked in detail about the community-based artworks that project a certain identities on communities in “The (Un)Sitings of Community” in her book “One Place After Another” … This is also the case with architectural projects and the policies applied by them and on them… What is interesting to me in my project about this neighborhood is the continuation of the housing exhibition where the citizens are voluntarily performing and restaging their lives in a scenery that is provided by the architecture. Sebastien: It is so funny when you talk about this voluntary act of persons who want to inhabit this cutting edge model city. It makes me think about the graduation project of Rem Koolhaas. It is called “Exodus or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture” . It was a time in 1972, where architecture students were asked to analyze the archetype of publicity and citizenship in Mediterranean cities in order to see how architecture could participate in the liberation of mankind. Back then, classicism and naïve optimism was still haunting some institutions. Well, basically he took the counter position, and studied the Berlin wall as a negative force whose function is to separate the good from the bad, the freedom from the captivity, the beautiful from the ugly. He took over this idea of the wall as a destructive force by transforming and putting it in the “service of positive attention” by building a gigantic strip of “metropolitan desirability” in the middle of London: a jail where voluntary prisoners were gathering. This scenario displayed a parody of architecture and especially of positivist and utopian dreams which were very present at that time. His link between this ideological city model and the way of life the inhabitant must encompass seems similar to me. Shirin: Exactly. It is also related to the idea of participatory surveillance which has been looked at many times from literature to political philosophy to cinema. A funny representation of a glass house – the life inside a vitrine – is in playtime of Jacques Tati where the outsider enters the modern city and doesn’t fit within this new life; he can’t manage getting out of a building because he doesn’t know how to open the automatic door – that doesn’t have a mob – and he can’t read English – the must-know language – to understand the instructions and get out… But back to the notion of publicized private, it is interesting to see how the life of tenants is going on while the spectator can’t hear their voices and instead is surrounded by the sound of the traffic as the ambience. The private – indoor – and the public – outdoor – are merged together in a sense that the window is not merely functioning as a source of natural light and for viewing the public sphere from inside anymore. In a futuristic house, the window is as well a screen pointing back at the interior to the reality show of the tenants of the house… The vitrine house follows the manifestation of power applied in the (exhibitionary) buildings. In “The birth of the Museum” Tony Bennett has talked about the exercise of power inside the buildings of museums. He refers to Gramsci’s notions of cultural hegemony and “the government as the educator” and Foucault’s notion of discipline highlighting the behavior management that is done by means of the building itself. He compares the museum and the prison and says: If the orientation of the prison is to discipline and punish with a view to effecting a modification of behavior, that of the museum is not to know the populace but to allow the people, addressed as subjects of knowledge rather than as objects of administration, to know; not to render the populace visible to power but to render power visible to the people and, at the same time, to represent to them that power as their own. A house where the tenants can be seen also obliges them to “behave” in a way that is expected from them. In this sense, I would relate the vitrine house to the museum and the prison where power is both granted and applied in order to civilize the future citizen from the ones who have already entered the city of tomorrow to the one who is watching the new mode of civilization as an outsider… The reverse in the views is also applicable to your “museum of museums”. You make the institution visible to a point that the administrative structure of the museum becomes part of the exhibition on view, right? Sebastien: Yes, the public space is no more experienced as an enclosed volume, separated from the rest of the world by an opaque shell. You can experience the depth of the institution: literally, by perceiving a series of working rooms or ateliers, and metaphorically by understanding the different processes the institution employs in order to function. As I said earlier, museums like Quai Branly have political agendas, goals to achieve. As a pedagogical apparatus, the museum continuously produces knowledge, organizes exhibitions, edits catalogues and organizes symposiums. At the same time, it also continues to enrich the French Patrimony by collecting different artifacts in order to complete the collection of the museum, by inscribing them into the inventory, by restoring them, etc. These different functions are not neutral. The act of choosing some artifacts rather than the others for example, depends on time-related criteria. The place where this compiling and amassing is happening – the collection – is also representative of the political intentions: for example, one of the main initiators of the Musée du Quai Branly is an art dealer. Since the end of Colonialism, collecting artifacts in foreign countries are not possible anymore, so the only official (and often unofficial) source of expanding the collection is the private market. So making different parts of the museum visible such as the archives, the ateliers dealing with the collection, research laboratories and even the private patron rooms lift up the curtain to actually show what the institution really is. It highlights the fact that the museum has a pedagogical purpose which is dictated by broader agendas dealing with society in general. The visitors are then not considered as spectators to be entertained anymore (as Stéphane Martin suggested) nor as objects to be educated on how to behave but they are subjects put into critical posture, where they can understand that the viewpoint of the institution is partial and politically oriented. Before continuing, we should make a small step back and rely once again on Bennett’s text. He is basically saying that the museums have two political demands: first, the equal access for everyone, and second, the representational adequacy of all cultures and people. But unfortunately, the museum’s own rationality which results into the separation of people, makes these two demands “insatiable”. So as a result, the museum puts policies into place which ensure a kind of equality of universal representation of access. The fact to make the visitor able to understand the institution as a communicative agent propping specific meanings and cultural values (Bennett), as a consequence places the institution and its different policies in front of public criticism. It results in a strange situation where the institution that is supposed to distribute knowledge to its visitors, is finally put bluntly in front of the judgment of the latter. Therefore, the hierarchy of power and knowledge that the institution has in relation to its visitors is threatened. Shirin: So the exhibitionary institution you’re proposing not only points at the history that the French identity politics would very much like to cross but also through the architecture and the reverse in public and private, is critical towards itself, being aware of the hierarchy accompanied by the pedagogical role it’s taking. Sebastien: Uhum… This shift of the viewer and the one who is being viewed is perhaps the meeting point of these two situations although they result in different manners. Let me finish with a quote from Leslie Kaynes Weisman: “…The spatial arrangements of buildings and communities are never value free nor neutral ; they reflect and reinforce the nature of each society’s gender, race and class relations.” Lolle Nauta, “The Democratization of Memory”in Experimenting with Truth, Documenta 11_Platfom 2 (Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2002) Jacques Chirac, "Speech of M. Jacques Chirac, French President at the time, during a building site visit of the Musée du Quai Branly”, Paris, October 15, 2004. Henri Pierre Jeudy, "La Culture en Trompe L'œil", Culture et Musées n° 5, July 2005. Cited in Chanal, "Le musée français face à la représentation de la diversité des cultures aujourd'hui" Chris Marker, Alain Resnais, “Statues Also Die”, 1953. Miwon Kwon, “The (Un)Sitings of Community” in One Place After Another: Site-Specific Art and Locational Identity (London: MIT Press, 2002) Rem Koolhaas, Madelon Vreisendorp, Elia Zenghelis, and Zoe Zenghelis, “Exodus, or the Voluntary Prisoners of Architecture”, 1972 Tony Bennet, “The Political Rationality of the Museum” in The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (Lodon : Routledge, 2005) Leslie Kanes Weisman, “Architecture” in Cheris Kramarae & Dale Spender, eds., Encyclopedia of Women’s Issues an Knowledge (New York & London: Routledge editions, 2000)
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