Printed Matter

Musée Immédiat
Joao Bolan, Kate Motyleva, Vladimir Rakitsky, Mathilde Vaveau, Donald Weber

In Ukraine, Latvia and Belarus, history is written as it happens. Musée Immédiat deals with the phenomenon of the immediate establishment of critical/transitional cultural situations (constant upheaval of borders, manipulation of the cultural and historical past, artistic waves around wars and destructive conflicts) in the countries of Eastern Europe, such as Ukraine, Belarus and Latvia.

Publication Musée Immédiat
Artists Joao Bolan, Kate Motyleva, Vladimir Rakitsky, Mathilde Vaveau, Donald Weber
Texts Mai Ann Bénédic, Sandra Alek
Publisher ESSARTER Éditions
Dimensions 16,5 x 23,5cm
Pages 132 pages
Available here

The museum is the place where history, a story, is recorded.
But what is history?
Is it a chronology?
Is it a set of events?
Is it a people?
A heritage?
Newspapers?
Books?

History is not a universal truth, history is a subjective interpretation of a current or old event. In other words, history is a sort of individual truth in which everyone has their own ideas. We cannot rewrite history, but it is easy for us to select, shorten, retain or throw elements into the background of contexts, to be influenced or appealed to.

Constructing commemorative objects in public spaces, museums, monuments in memory of the dead, statues, street/place names have become the ways to create both temporal and permanent markers of the ideology of a nation. These markers make up a chronology, a study of time, the memory that each society wishes to safeguard and exploit to the benefit of its interests.

George Orwell wrote in his novel 1984: “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the present controls the past.” Is that not the idea that seizes certain historical museums? Through the historical forms of imagery and writing, this project is an invitation to the appropriation of the concept of history in a civil society whose identity base is destroyed.

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