Image credit: Lim Tze Peng, ‘Trees’, 2014
Diary of an NUS Museum Intern is a series of blog posts written by our interns about their experiences during the course of their internships. Working alongside their mentors, our interns have waded through tons of historical research, assisted in curatorial work, pitched in during exhibition installations and organised outreach events! If you would like to become our next intern, visit NUS Museum’s student development page for more information.
Marcus Yee is a second-year student studying History and Earth Systems Science at the University of Hong Kong (HKU). During his time here as our Curatorial Intern, he assisted our curator Siddharta Perez, working on artist research and looking into notions of art and pedagogy.
A marsh is a museum in that they are both anthromes, or anthropogenic biomes, to different degrees. Community ecologies live in both zones, they ride on the crests of waves, beating along with the rain, following the path of rivers. At intermittent grooves along the stream of life, they find respite, however briefly.
A museum is a marsh since they are both archives for atoms, each saturated with an entangled history, histories that overflow beyond our narrative containers. But these histories are never quite past, they persist quite well into the present, sometimes, on frequencies insensible, inscrutable.
A museum is a marsh where there are leaks beyond categorical boundaries, which provide a domesticized comfort to the untamed substratum of contaminated becomings, mutating shapes, unsettling motions. On the surface, these zones uphold the pristine order of colonial taxonomy, that pasts are relegated into the past, life evacuated from the mausolean museum; but as their custodians are well aware, the bleeds and flows are a continuous, albeit unspectacular rhythm.
A marsh is a museum with their reciprocal demands: they demand our care, curiosity, and patience, as we ask from them nourishment. Meeting these demands extend well beyond the principles of management, but rather, an attentiveness towards maintaining worldly connections, as worlds nested within other worlds, a fragile persistence predicated on such intimate ties.
A marsh is a museum, or a museum is a marsh when the staccato of impending crises knows no disciplinary, epistemological, institutional or geographical boundaries. As urgencies short-circuit habituated scripts and roles, learning is not an uphill curve towards mastery, but a jagged, capricious path with no salvific teleology, except, perhaps more modest horizons, shared and inhabitable.
