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Afterimages Afterlife - Deaccessioning the British Museum

The project interrogates an anthropological connection between socialization and contextualization, between interactions and the cultural significance of exchange in the marketplace. It attempts to define a speculative architectural result in the antithesis of our existing preconceived notions of the museum, interrogating the value in bringing together people and objects as a step towards restitution and reconstructing memory and place. “The return of objects does not mean restituting them as they once were, but re-investing them with a social function. It’s not about a return of the same, but of a “different same”.” Objects passing through the market undergo a process of resocialization, where issues of access and interpretation are reopened to a wider public. Deaccession is the process by which objects that had been formally accepted into a museum’s collection are actively removed and disposed of legally and permanently. Under the British Museum’s Deaccession Act, the board of trustees is barred from returning any object in the collection unless it is a duplicate, physically damaged, unfit to be retained in the collection and no longer of public interest, or it becomes “useless” for the purposes of the Museum. We make a case that, on the basis of misinterpretation and damage on the part of the British Museum, all artifacts in the collection should be deaccessioned and resocialized as a step towards restitution. All objects within the British Museum’s collection can be deemed “useless” and devalued through a lens of damage. The museum’s process of acquisition and preservation divorces objects from their original context and function.