CRATE FEVER
CRITIC
Eduardo Rega Calvo
TEAM
Reem Abi Samra, Umar Mahmood, Tingdong Xiong, Shifei Xu
AXONOMETRIC VIEWS
Artifacts collected from around the world are currently held hostage by the Penn Museum. While the privileged 1% of the objects are clustered on pedestals trapped within sleek and elegant vitrines, thousands of these hostages are also kept in storage as stockpiles. These objects are portrayed as pieces of western exploration and acquisition, and little to no information is available to understand them within their cultural contexts.
The shipping crate has acted as a vehicle of theft and cultural appropriation, bringing in objects that once had meaning and function within a society to become decorative trophies. Our project is a blatant critique about:
- The intentions of the west in acquiring foreign artifacts
- The unapproachable nature of these objects, and
- The constructed identities of objects that are strategically curated by the museum’s oversimplified descriptions and violent western language.
Remaining unapproachable and lost in their reflections, our crate cabinet now traps 3d printed replicas of these objects in reflective dioramas that introduce some of the hard truths of colonialism and propagate complicated and disorienting narratives and experiences around the objects.
CONCEPT
FABRICATION
DRAWINGS
IN SITE