“I am a collector of moments”
Opinions of a clown. Heinrich Böll

“his absolute singularity […] is something that has as its field being possessed by me; which allows me to recognize myself in it as an absolutely singular being. Majestic tautology, but which constitutes all the density of the relationship with objects, their laughable ease, their illusory but intense gratification.”

The system of objects. Jean Baudrillard

We accumulate. We simply keep things without using them again, with the hope of one day reconstructing the route that connected us to them. Postcards from a teenage trip, love letters, pre-Hispanic figurines, photos, or souvenirs, even that napkin where they wrote down a phone number that changed our lives, we treasure these objects believing that each one can maintain the reflection of the moment that gave it meaning, delay its forgetting, contain time, or safeguard the secret that gave it origin. We accumulate. When we keep things, we imply future or retrospective journeys through substitute realms: butterflies, porcelain frogs, works of art, books, documents. With this, we create mental cartographies that we call collections. 

Collecting is naming. Creating a topography of objects that can only be traversed through a preconceived map. Naming is to classify which is to hierarchize which is to colonize. We create a nomenclature, a system, not free from absurdities. And suddenly, we confuse the system with the world. Our archive is the world. 

The museum is a building and the narrative of its collections. Its collection is its reason for being. The documentation center archive of MUCA Roma, in particular, was created in response to the need to generate a memory of what  was happening within the Museum. Marianna Dellekamp decided to investigate it based on the definition of collection from the dictionary: “an ordered set of things, usually of the same class and brought together for their special interest or value,” but she found above all an arbitrary accumulation of documents. The real collection did not possess many materials produced for the space, lacking a thematic structure or an operational classification. More than an archive, it is an inventory of heterogeneous items. MUCA also did not offer a special place to safeguard or consult this archive, it is piled up in the same office where the institution's curator works. Finally, Dellekamp noted that, up until the time of her research, the documentation center had not been visited by anyone. A museum without memory and a documentation center without lemmatizing?

The body of work by Marianna scrutinizes the artwork, from its production, dissemination, and reception, to its insertion into collections or archives. The book and the bookshelf, as objects, have been frequent in her pieces at the discursive level. Her project Architect and The Library of the Earth are the precursors to the piece with which Dellekamp participates in this exhibition. 

Her intervention at the MUCA Roma Documentation Center consists of removing all the material from the archive furniture to replace it with blocks of white sheets that saturate the furniture. The inventory created by the artist will be printed on the exposed side of the sheets in white ink. In turn, the walls of the Documentation Center, painted white, will have vinyls of the same color where the text of the original Executive Project of the Center will be reproduced, that is, the justifications and the budget for its creation. In both cases, the sense of writing in white on white is to make the information illegible.

 As the room where the collection is located functions as the curator's “office,” the intervention will somehow freeze its functions; since the desk and the objects of this character will be left in the state they are in on the day the intervention begins, until the time the exhibition lasts. Thus, the space will continue functioning and being an object of analysis at the same time.

As a result of this process, Dellekamp will reflect on the enunciation that governs the venue (University Museum of Sciences and Arts), inevitably attributing a series of expectations probably unfulfilled. The artist will work with the semiotician José Raúl Pérez with the intention of renaming the space, conducting an analysis of the chains of semiosis that arise from each of the words that compose the current name of the Museum, thus analyzing the intertextual relationships engaged by the combination of the terms. At the same time, they will document the non-public areas of the property, for example, the storage room, in order to document the intratextual relationships that arise from the institution's activities. The images, conceptual maps, constellations of attributes and images generated during this process will be incorporated as an integral part of the piece.

If the document is the museum and the museum is the world, here the artwork is the catalog as value in itself. In the manner of a self-referential narrative, impenetrable like a book that can only be leafed through, Dellekamp's catalog does not allow us to reach the objects because it is the object itself, formal, finished, closed upon itself, canceling its probable potential for generating knowledge. Instead, it will only be the trace of the trace of an expectation. It transitions from the obsession with mere accumulation to discursive systematization as value, where the collection is the foundational fiction of the Museum.