Phenomenal Others Post-Search Update

The slideshow below offers a brief chronicle of our visits to the Haffenreffer Museum in Bristol, RI on March 9 and 16. The pictorial narrative that I present here only began to resemble a meaningful history after sharing thoughts with others (thanks especially to Emily, Chanelle, Robert, Nina and Dorin), and after I established a little bit of distance from the search experience itself:

Road to the Haffenreffer

We went to the Museum on March 16. The sun was out and the snow was beginning to melt.

The search began

We strapped on the GoPros, collected our search cards, and introduced ourselves to many of the museum's phenomenal others.

Wait… but what is this?

Dorin asked Kevin to lead us to something used for conjuring. We arrived at a wooden pot, but Dorin was looking for something made of stone. We were just about to move on when Emily asked Kevin to tell us more about the pot. He told us that it was a mouse oracle from the Baule people of the Ivory Coast.

The search continued

Dorin asked to see something shimmering and made of stone, which inspired Kevin to show us one of the Haffenreffer's nkisi nkondi figurines from the BaKongo people (Democratic Republic of Congo). Nkisi nkondi are containers for spirits. They attract the spirit with magical substances hidden inside. This one had a mirrored belly that concealed its powerful contents.

Where in the world is that from?

During our second search, Chanelle pointed up high to an incredible object that Thierry described as a mask made by the Odelay people in Freetown, Sierra Leone. It was used for urban street masquerades in the 1970s.

What do objects remember?

There were moments when the objects seemed to be speaking to us as surrogates for people who were absent. Some of us felt them viscerally. We wondered about the violent experiences that might have led to their separation, especially now that the objects have been made to fit within the archival assemblage. How do we address these sensations?

So much to discuss

Our guides were very knowledgeable about the collection. They did their best to respond to our most oblique questions. Sometimes these questions seemed to follow a meaningful line of inquiry. At other times, the inquiry got lost in our desire to simply see everything, and to keep moving on to the next new thing.

Deliberation

The sleuths had a hard time choosing objects. Sometimes we asked practical questions, like "can we replicate this?" But other choices seemed to come from a feeling of attraction to an object, or because it seemed to resonate with other objects found.

We arranged the finalists

Then we photographed them, and began to talk about how they might become part of our inquiry.

BaKongo nkisi nkondi

The figurine made it to the final round, even though it was missing its former spear and clothing. Its power seemed to remain, nonetheless. We couldn't help but wonder what was inside its shimmering belly.

Odelay mask

We brought the grand mask down from its cabinet perch to consider how we might carry it forward in our inquiry.

Baule mouse oracle

And we brought the mouse oracle to the finalist table. We just knew that there was something, well, magical about that little pot.

Ngala execution swords

Our final search party selected two ceremonial executioner's swords from the Ngala people of Congo. Thierry told us that one is probably authentic, and the other is a fake. Which is which? We brought them to the finalist table. But they turned out to not be the only execution-related object on the table…

Jacobin Phrygian cap

We also found this linen and wool embroidered cap. It is one of the very few objects in the collection from Europe. It was made to be worn by a member of the Jacobin club, France's most radically left revolutionary party that held power for a short time during the the Reign of Terror. What executions might it have witnessed? Something about it also seemed to resonate with the mouse oracle (for the Baule have a complicated colonial relationship with France).

Returning to the unknown…

Emily and I couldn't forget our test search on March 9. On that day, we found ourselves in the hay loft of the barn, looking at an abandoned stuffed owl that Kevin graciously agreed to test for arsenic with his portable x-ray flourescence spectrometer (XRF).

The owl-XRF assemblage

So we knew we had to bring that unknown owl forward as well. Perhaps it is less the owl that attracts us, though, than the idea of putting the mouse oracle next to the museological oracle that the owl's discovery inspired (through the XRF gun's divination of the dead animal's molecular makeup).

Back to Brown

We still needed to narrow down the list. But we were hungry. Lunch was calling and we had to get back to campus, so we left our decision in limbo.

The searches that we conducted led to the following six object finalists:

1. BaKongo nkisi nkondi figurine
2. Odelay mask
3. Baule mouse oracle
4. Ngala execution swords
5. Jacobin Phrygian cap
6. Owl-x-ray assemblage

Emily and I deliberated over these six finalists and discussed them at length. In our conversations, we kept coming back to the mouse oracle, the Jacobin cap, and the owl-x-ray assemblage. Something about those three encounters seemed to address a number of the ongoing concerns of our inquiry.

The mouse oracle is clearly a favorite of the museum world. It has been the focus of exhibitions and scholarly writing for several decades. I easily gathered up several books, ethnographic accounts, and catalogues related to the oracle, Baule history, life, and material culture. There is also a lot written about the Baule people’s resistance to, and complicity with, French colonial governance. But the mouse oracle also seems to reach beyond its history. It is a kind of object that prompted us to ask more questions about what it can do, rather than what it is, or what it means. It is the one object that seems to be clamoring for scenarios. We could imagine so many ways to approach the act of making it, learning about it, and using it to consult with others about the future. Who doesn’t need an oracle every now and then?

The Jacobin cap attracted us because it is such a strange outlier in the Haffenreffer collection. Not only is it is a very rare and fragile object (apparently only a few exist), but it also comes from a period in European history where the paradoxical relationship between imperialism and democracy rears its tumultuous head. As a wearable marker of one’s political identity, the Phrygian (Jacobin) cap also struck us as something that acts in the symbolic realm of marking a body (or cataloging a crowd of bodies) as either same or different, friend or foe.

As for the owl-x-ray assemblage that we came across in the hay loft, this was the only encounter among our searches in which the museum (or lost museum) materialized in a totally unexpected way. As Kevin told us, the hay loft is a kind of purgatory for objects that have no recorded history. He suspects that the owl might be a remnant of the Jenks Museum, but there is no real way of knowing. As for the introduction of the XLF ray gun, it was the only way for the curator to divine whether or not it was safe to handle the object. Arsenic poisoning is nothing to mess around with, and Kevin’s concern for it brought a technical object into our experiment that would have otherwise remained unseen.

Oracle. Cap. Owl-x-ray.

These are the phenomenal others that seem to have the most to say about the next stages of our inquiry. We think that they are the ones that indicate what direction to travel next (unless someone chooses to speak on behalf of any of the other objects found). And we will decide together what that direction is when we meet this week.

In the meantime, here are some ideas that have been on my mind:

“The rags, the refuse—these I will not inventory but allow, in the only possible way, to come into their own: by making use of them” (Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project).

How does one make a lost museum? Is it something like walking a landscape, collecting vestiges along the way, and putting them together into a montage of contaminated representations?

Or is it to be something more experimentally systematic? Little cycles of abduction and controlled chaos? An assemblage of phenomena and instruments that makes new knowledge through its models?

Or both?

Whichever way it goes, one thing is clear. The scribblings are piling up. They form a new culture, and a history, at the same time that they make phenomena appear on the landscape. The scribblings are already becoming this lost museum’s book.

“Who wrote the lost book? Are there really any laws and systems? Scales, balances? What is the city made of? Sometimes it seems as if the city is the rubble of stories and memories, layers and layers, and the objects, all of the remnants of things are like the city’s skin.” (Jem Cohen, Lost Book Found)…