LIPARI ISLAND

SICILY

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The Non Museum Project stages a series of intimate interventions within the ruins of an abandoned pumice factory in Sicily, operating since 1958 and closed in 2007. Over four days of experimental collaboration, the artists reverse-engineered the concept of a museum, humanising a site marked by the extractive logic of human and non-human exploitation, leading to a social and environmental catastrophe. Here, the ruins of functionality are gently rehumanised through gestures of empathy: homely textiles, colour and objects donated by local families, ornate old machines and fragments of the functional architecture of the factory, imprinting traces of domestic life and collective remembrance whilst borderlining the absurd and the kitsch in a challenge to the logics of mechanisation of human and environmental resources.

 

These acts of insertion bring warmth into the cold logic of the spaces of this industrial archeology, countering histories of extraction with a language of care. Precarious installations invite archetypal female objects and stereotypical Italian homely details to the fabric of the site; fragile installations submitting to their destiny to be destroyed, stolen or demolished in the future when the site is finally to be reused. This body of work operates as a reverse-occupation of the land in an act of humanisation that aims to conceptually give a breathing, home-like space for the invisible labourers who were once embedded in the factory’s operations - but also as a critique of similar conditions of human and environmental exploitation around the world right now.

 

Rejecting the plinth and the white cube, the non-museum dissolves the boundary between art and context. It reflects on how ruins are reclassified as cultural spaces, critiquing both the politics and absurdities of a decades-long battle of interests between governmental and private institutions currently in process. At once contemplative and humorous, the project asks: when does a site become a museum, and who decides what deserves remembrance?