Museum of Impossible Forms: Voicing the Margins

“The margins cannot be understood as a linear or spatial distance from a location that is assigned as being the ‘center’. For instance, geographically speaking, suburbs are margins vis. downtown areas, downtown areas are margins vis. the city center, gated communities enjoy aspirational value and become centers of posh living, and ghettos and slum areas become abject spaces, supermarkets and malls become centers of commerce, while an arcade-style mall like the one where the Museum of Impossible Forms is located has become relegated to curios of a past that governments and bureaucracies wish to redevelop. If the center-margins relationship is a cascading series of hierarchies rather than an absolute binary, where any location’s marginality is contingent upon another, perceivably more central location, then the relationship is not only spatially and temporally configured as a passive ‘being in’ the margins, but an actives process of marginalization. It must be re-conceived as a complex network of power relations, across lines of system infrastructures, data protocols, architectures of control and structural discriminations, of individual and collective bodies themselves in flux.”

The article is published in ‘Marginaaleista museoihin’. (From Margins to Museums), (eds.) Rastas, Anna & Koivunen, Leila. (trans.) Nurmenniemi, Ki. Tampere: Vastapaino, FI