The Ethics Committee of Dark Conservation
Curated by Dani Admiss and Gillian Russell and featured Professor Ana Sofia Carvalho. The project was part of Fiction Practice curated by Mariana Pestana.
A group of 8 young designers and curators were invited to take part in a weeklong storytelling-for-lesser-known-worlds program that formed part of Fiction Practice: Prototyping the Otherwordly at the Porto Design Biennial, 2019. The project explored the wide potential of fiction and fabulation as tools for social change and involved designers and curators remixing histories and artefacts under the guise of a fictional Collection Committee. Through the project, participants dreamed up stories of the newest acquisition to the Dark Conservation’s Collection: A British National (Overseas) passport. As part of the process the group was introduced to the fundamentals of Forensic mapping, and then heard from experts in research ethics and care, before rethinking their collected artefact through a wide spectrum of imaginations – in terms of a many worlds approach.
In an effort to complicate the single story of the British National (Overseas) passport, the group depicted their various interpretations of the passport through a collection of conservation reports that embodied different value systems expressed as a pluriverse of fictional worlds. The term pluriverse has been taken from Mario Blaser and Marisol de la Cadena and can be defined as the existence of many co-existing worlds, against the practice of one world that dominates over all others. The project used the imaginary as a tool to not only to visualize alternatives—that is itself an initial step towards social change—but, crucially, as a vehicle to author collectively new stories to provoke into being an environment where there are many truths of equal standing. In this way, the work actively sought to be in opposition to the singular truths that dominate society and that often go unseen and unchallenged. To put it differently, the Ethics Committee of Dark Conservation used fiction as a route towards the public prioritisation of other ways of knowing.
The project culminated in a group exhibition of fictional museum conservation reports that troubled the predictable ‘neutrality’ of traditional curatorial storytelling, while uncovering multiple realities of the BN(O) passport. The aim of the exhibition was to engage the community in a new conversation about the power of representation and the possibility of knowing and being otherwise.