Dr. Kirsty Robertson and the CSC are highlighted in Western News
December 20, 2024Looking closer at Potatotemporal
January 10, 2025Spending more time with The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides – Potato
To start the new year, we’re spending more time with our new research project Objects as Temporal Entities. We begin with The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides.
One: Potato:
1: One of the key points of tension in building a more sustainable institution is that between the duty of care museums have towards artworks, artefacts, and belongings in their collections, and
the energy and materials required to preserve those collections.
2: In 2024, when the Centre for Sustainable Curating and members of the Synthetic Collective were on-site at Atelier LUMA for the Sustainable Institution residency, Agnès Varda’s ‘Patatutopia’ was on display as part of the Hans-Ulrich Obrist Archive – ‘Chapter 3: Agnès Varda A day without seeing a tree is a waste of a day.’
3: At the back of the gallery, a dark room, an earthy smell, 600kg of potatoes spread over the floor. When we first see the work, the potatoes have been in the installation for three weeks and are starting to sprout.
“I celebrate the resistance of this vegetable. I have the utopia of thinking that one can see the beauty of the world in a sprouted potato.” (Varda)
4: Varda is not the only one interested in using potatoes and other edibles in her art. […] if there is a fruit or vegetable, it has almost certainly found its way into the gallery where it immediately becomes a curatorial and conservation conundrum.
But if the goal of the art museum is, as Fernando Domínguez Rubio suggests, to show “infinite pause of objects,” what of the potato?
5: Download the first in The Fiction of Permanence: Materials Guides series: an expandable set of guides, each dedicated to understanding the degradation of a single material through a case study (either from France or the Great Lakes region).
Text: Kirsty Robertson
Design: Liza Eurich
Objects as Temporal Entities is a project developed by the Centre for Sustainable Curating with members of the Synthetic Collective as a part of the Sustainable Institution (TSI). The TSI programme is an artist-in-residence programme by LUMA Arles (Atelier LUMA), the E-WERK Luckenwalde, and Rupert Centre for Art and Education. It is co-funded by the European Union, Teltow Flaming and Lithuanian Culture Council.