Kelly Spanou

This practice-led PhD draws upon the object, the body and the archive through the notion of repair, to propose a postabyssal curatorial approach. I specifically investigate how the western museum archive as established through practices of collecting, preserving and displaying objects is intertwined with violent acts against communities and bodies to which these objects belong, hence naturalise a division of rights. The British Museum is the case study of this research, wherein I specifically examine how a particular range of subject positions and technoscientific infrastructures have been accounted for the emergence of curatorial practices within a specific geo-historical site.

This project was inspired by the combination of narrative, motion through colour, composition and brush strokes in J. M. W. Turner ’s painting Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going by the Lead. The Author was in this Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich. It recognises landscape as a human construct, whilst aiming to give tangibility to the material appearance of things, in relation with our experience. Extracting components of the landscape in the English seaside town of Margate, and reproducing them with digital and physical fabrication techniques, I question the relationship of physical and virtual in our understanding of our surroundings.