This week, I began to think about my project from a different perspective. What will happen after the exhibition ends? Since this is a temporary project taking place in a public space, it will not remain in the city permanently. I hope it will have a lasting influence and research value, so this project not only requires a curatorial structure focused on the “present”, but also a structure focused on its “continued existence”.
Looking back at our collective exhibition, I saw many traces of its existence. A short exhibition does not completely disappear after the setup is removed. The remaining posters, printed materials, installation photos, site traces, and the memories generated by the collective’s work are all proof that the exhibition existed. However, these things do not automatically become meaningful archives. Only when these records are consciously selected, organized, and structured can people continue to understand their structure, exhibition logic, and public experience after the exhibition ends. Therefore, from the perspective of the curator, I realized that the afterlife of an exhibition also requires planning.
This also changed my understanding of my curatorial project. I don’t want this project to exist merely as the moment when an audience happens to encounter one of the six exhibition points. Instead, I hope it can leave a trace that can be continued to be read, allowing people to still understand how “invisible boundaries” shape the daily life of Edinburgh after the exhibition is over. Therefore, I have now decided to incorporate documentation into the design at the very beginning of the project, rather than adding it later at the end. I need to plan in advance to keep the project map, site text, and visual cues as part of the final record. Record the relationship between each site, the audience, the works, and the surrounding urban environment with images and words.
This also made me think about legacy. The course toolkit clearly states that publications or legacy items can become part of the final design of the project, even if they do not need to be fully produced. Therefore, instead of imagining a large publication, I now prefer to design a more lightweight legacy form for this project. Establish a small digital archive to preserve the visual records of the six exhibition points and embed the electronic versions of the works in the visual materials of AR, allowing the audience to experience the route and this exhibition point as a visual tool even without the physical works. In this way, this project will not only exist as a brief public event but also as a continuous record, preserving how this city is organized through movement, exclusion, and uneven accessibility.
For me, an enlightening precedent is Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller’s “Night Walk for Edinburgh”. Its significance lies not only in the fact that the work takes place in a city, but also in the temporary and temporal viewing experience it offers. Through the guide and subsequent archival materials, this experience can still be read in the app even after the event has ended. This also helped me think more clearly about my own project: if my exhibition is temporary and distributed, then its continued existence cannot rely solely on memory, but must rely on the materials that allow the project to be re-entered and read again.
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.”
