This week I began to look back at the whole project as a complete structure, rather than simply continuing to add new elements. After constant adjustments to routes, sites, artists, permissions, promotion, and maintenance over the previous weeks, I became more aware that the focus of the project is not how much can be included in the exhibition, but whether these parts can form a curatorial proposal that is internally coherent, accessible, and sustainable.
Looking back at the collective exhibition, I could see many traces of having existed. A short exhibition does not disappear entirely after deinstallation. However, those traces do not automatically become meaningful archives. Only when such records are consciously selected, arranged, and organised can people continue, after the event, to understand the exhibition’s structure, display logic, and public experience. From the curatorial point of view, I therefore came to realise that the afterlife of an exhibition also has to be curated.
This also changed how I understood my own project. I want people to continue to understand how invisible boundaries shape everyday life in Edinburgh even after the exhibition has ended. Because the project takes place in public space and is temporary, it has a strong sense of ephemerality. I therefore treat publication and archive as clearly defined parts of the project’s structure. Their purpose is to ensure that, even after the distributed project has ended, it still retains a form that can be revisited, re-entered, and reinterpreted. I am inclined to design a lighter form of legacy: a small digital archive containing visual records of the six sites, together with electronic content and AR-based visual material, so that viewers can still encounter the route and the sites as visual tools even without the physical works being present.
For me, one very inspiring precedent is Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s Night Walk for Edinburgh. What matters is not only that the work takes place in the city, but that this temporary, time-based viewing experience can continue to be read after the event through its guide and archival materials in the app. This helped me think more clearly about my own project: if my exhibition is temporary and distributed, then its continued existence cannot depend only on memory. It has to depend on those materials that allow the project to be re-entered and reread.
References
Art Fund. “Night Walk for Edinburgh.” 2019.
Fruitmarket. “Night Walk for Edinburgh: Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller.” 2019.
The Museum of Modern Art Archives. “Archives Exhibitions.”
The Museum of Modern Art Archives. “The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 1960–1969.”
