JOSÉ RAÚL PÉREZ

…notoriously, there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural. The reason is very simple: we do not know what the universe is.

J.L. Borges

This project consists of a sum of voices that, called and gathered by Marianna Dellekamp, were brought together by the artist herself to establish a personal point of view. It is, thus, a collaborative, ongoing work that only saw its final form after eight weeks, when the exhibition concluded.

Based on a selection of objects present in the storage of the Museum of Medicine —the rejected objects, those that did not complete the journey to the exhibition halls and display cases, those considered, perhaps, as less significant— Dellekamp speculates around the fact that these pieces can only be invested with value and considered part of the collection when they are shown to the public.

 Thus, in the words of the artist, the project, "reflects on the identity of the cultural object, understanding by identity the set of traits or information that individualize and distinguish it."

 As part of the speculation that in recent years Dellekamp has made regarding the art system, particularly about collecting and the public institution, “the project suggests a critical analysis of the collection to review the very act of collecting, understanding collecting as a practice through which multiple statements and meanings are generated and articulated.”

 Think / Classify, declared in the title of one of his books Georges Perec, and in it he states that he suffers from a taxonomic vertigo: “My problem with classifications is that they are not durable; as soon as I impose order, that order becomes obsolete,” he says.

 Collecting / Thinking, asserts Dellekamp, characterizing with this expression the fact that collecting does not only involve the establishment of taxonomies, but their embodiment in material objects that give them form. The collection is an order that also becomes obsolete: it does so every time it is modified, when an element is added, reordered, or removed. A collection finally presented to the public is, thus, a utopia: that a group of objects represents an entire universe.

 But, let us return to Perec: “All utopias are depressing because they leave no room for chance, difference, the diverse. Everything is put in order and order reigns. Behind every utopia is always a great taxonomic design: a place for everything and everything in its place.”  

 Marianna Dellekamp invited a different curator to this project each week —from an art expert to an ordinary, non-specialized person— so that each could perform their own reading of a given set of objects. Each week, the attentive viewer found an exhibition that was the same but different, a display that, like Heraclitus' river, changed incessantly, and in this change found its final identity. The author thus proposes the reconciliation of utopia with chance.