Objects as World-bridging Devices

If pattern, materiality and purpose imbed culture into objects then assumptions about a culture can be fabulated as well as deducted by the objects they offer as traces.

Allistic-white-male-capatalist-colonialism (can someone find a snappy phrase for this?) had a tendency to project its own fairly monodimensional readings onto the artefacts it collected, leading to cultural editing and misunderstanding. The absorbtion of other cultures was therefore done in a way as to prune them of important and valuable nuances. 

The result was a distorted view of the whole; offering a patchwork of inauthenticity and a population of misfits. A tucked and pleated image.

The rupture* of the seams in turn offers a reveal. The ability to see the whole picture rather than a tailored fit around the median form by peeking between the threads at the still-fresh-fabric that completes our various othernesses.

Objects and artefacts re-emerge to match wider ways of being. Still coy, a surface is offered as a “scrying table”. Maybe it is or isn’t. It is not certain. The statement is ready to recoil at an instant behind a title-shell of perhaps-irony. Or to offer a split in the veils for those who know.

*Decolonisation in its broadest meaning has created a cultural rupture.