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Miami Pier Museum
"An excess of history has attacked life's formative power; it no longer knows how to use the past as a source of nourishing food."
- Fredrich Nietzsche The museum The function of the museum to exhibit culture in its
physical expressions. As it collects, preserves and displays artefacts as
discrete collections removed from the stream of History; The museum becomes a
prison where History is dissected as distinct epochs and periods. This proposal
aims to allow the living history of immigrants to flow into the museum in
actively telling the ongoing narratives of emigration and its effects on
culture and society, rather than petrifying and exhibiting artefacts of its
unfolding. The pier museum Akin to Michel Foucault's idea of Heterotopia, the pier, by
nature, belongs to neither land nor sea
and spans the border between the two. Foucault describes Heterotopia as “spaces
of otherness, which are neither here nor there, that are simultaneously
physical and mental, such as the space of a phone call or the moment when you
see yourself in the mirror." The pier embodies the space of the arriving
emigrés, straddling the cultural, political, economic, societal and language
boarders of their country of origin and new home. The proposal takes on the idea of Heterotopia (non-place) as
a heuristic device in defining the museum as a pier that traverses the boundary
conditions of the terrain and culminating at sea with a viewing platform. The
spaces of the museum hinge off the axis of the main corridor as a series of points
of exchange.
The Promenade.
The Commons As a means of telling the unfolding narratives of the
emigrés and successive generations, the cultural commons hosts a broad range of
events and activities to work in conjunction with the periodical exhibitions in
the museum. Through art, dance, markets, etc., and its intimate scale, the
commons dissolve the monumentality of the museum's form through everyday use. The commons, populated sporadically by user communities
associated with specific forms of production as diverse as sewing, painting,
design, carpentry etc., will create a field of objects and events that take on
equal status as spectacle. Crowds will flock to the commons daily to consume
and participate in cultural events - film screenings, dramatic performances,
concerts, markets...
The Commons
The Entrance/Multi-use room
The Exhibition space If the traditional museum operates on principles of
preservation and permanence, then the pier museum celebrates the transient
nature of the borrowed artefacts and the history the embody . Apart from displaying collections, the exhibition space
takes on a second function as a temporary receptacle. As opposed to the
traditional museum, all artefacts are only temporarily stored before they are
assembled as formal displays. On submitting artefacts to the cataloguing station, the
participants digitally tag artefacts with descriptive keywords. The data
accumulates as artefacts are lent to the museum to be logged and displayed.
Through a self-organizing algorithm, the data emerges into increasingly ordered
states according to similarities defined by the participants’ semantic
descriptions. The artefact archive is digitally displayed in the exhibition and
library spaces showing the artefacts positioned in a 2 dimensional matrix,
their movement over time and textual descriptions. Through the internet,
visitors can interact with the data accompanying the artefact, to add to
descriptions of the objects and to contribute comments. As the links between disparate artefacts emerge, they become
the backbone for organising formal exhibits and guiding the activities of the
commons. Immigrants to Miami thus, constantly engage in telling their
individual stories and experiences in the context of the unfolding narrative of
the Diaspora.
The Exhibition space
View to street level.
The Library/Database
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