Decentering autonomy: towards a phenomenology of vulnerability in museum curatorship

Abstract

Hooper-Greenhill stated that “the balance of power is shifting in museums away those who care for objects, moving toward the inclusion, and often prioritization, of those who care for people” (Hooper-Greenhill, 1994, p. 1). The museum has become  a device that shapes subjectivities through the curation of an aesthetic experience. From this perspective, the question emerges as to what role museums play in subjectivation as well as in the decentering of the human. The article argues that museology is a privileged field for designing experiences that question the human being as the center from a phenomenology of vulnerability. Through the politics of the museological device, we present how a subjective experience can be configured that generates a crisis of its self-consciousness as autonomous, self-sufficient, and detached from otherness and the environment. Taking care itself as a museological principle, the museum space provides an experience of attentiveness, trust and openness to the other (responsiveness to need; Held, 2006, p. 15) that reveals vulnerability at a lived level.   

This experience is characterized at the phenomenological level as an experience oriented towards the other: human, non-human agents and the environment. Faced with unidirectional visions of care (care for; care about - Milligan and Wiles, 2010), a double level of vulnerability then appears, which translates into the decentering of the subject, towards two apperceptions of oneself as affected by care needs. First, I am temporarily capable: the privilege of an autonomous and non-dependent body is always subject to potential disability, illness, pain and deterioration. Second, I am organism and prey (“I am meat and part of the trophic chain like the rest of living beings”; “the climate emergency is not alien to me because I need space and a habitable environment to sustain me”).  Emerging from this phenomenological experience of vulnerability is the possibility - or even more, the need - to imagine sustainable futures that allow human life by recognizing and placing mutual care and vulnerability management at the center. This article presents how museum devices are able to generate this experience of vulnerability through the creation of networks of care characterized by attention, trust, and intimacy in the CRIP TIME collective exhibition.