In October 2019, I was invited to make a presentation about my work-in-progress, at the Bergen Natural History Museum, as part of its re-opening celebrations. The presentation, entitled The Museum's Wrong Bodies was a survey of my engagement with the museum, since summer 2018. Here recorded and presented in two parts.
In unfolding a narrative about the Museum's "wrong bodies", I was able to draw on a range of artefacts from the collection itself, to illustrate the ordinarily undisclosed presence of the infestations which exist within the museum; collected, and classified with Natural History's characteristic rigour; creating in the process a curious counterpart to the museum's formal, publicly avowed collection of specimens.
My presentation explored the process my work had followed in disclosing this "shadow colleciton" and I described the role of Natural History in demarcating the status of a body within the collection as either pest or specimen (or indeed "tool") and how this classification can become problematised in practice; with a single body coming to occupy different positions within the institution.
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