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Francis Kéré designs new virtual museum of stolen artifacts for UNESCO

2023-10-17T16:03:00-04:00

Francis Kéré has been announced as the architect of a new virtual museum of stolen cultural artifacts for UNESCO. The project will exhibit 3D versions of the objects while at the same time elevating the voices and narratives of the global communities from which they were taken.

Renderings released along with its announcement show a large transparent dome with gallery spaces lining a Guggenheim-like spiraling central ramp, inspired by the African baobab tree.

Image courtesy of UNESCO/Kéré Architecture

The 52,000 works displayed were digitally rendered using the Stolen Works of Art database of INTERPOL, the international police organization that tracks the trafficking of looted cultural artifacts globally.

Image courtesy of UNESCO/Kéré Architecture

UNESCO says this will become a "tool to raise awareness on the illicit trafficking and the importance of protecting cultural heritage among the relevant authorities, culture professionals, and the general public, notably young generations...

Don't Forget to Thank Your Socks (And Other Organizing Tips)

2014-10-23T18:47:00-04:00

[Marie] Kondo’s decluttering theories are unique, and can be reduced to two basic tenets: Discard everything that does not “spark joy,” after thanking the objects that are getting the heave-ho for their service; and do not buy organizing equipment — your home already has all the storage you need [...] “When we take our clothes in our hands and fold them neatly,” she writes, “we are, I believe, transmitting energy, which has a positive effect on our clothes.”

The article goes on to quote Leonard Koren, a design theorist who has written extensively on Japanese aesthetics: "The idea of non-dualism is a relationship to reality that proposes that everything is inextricably connected and alive, even inanimate objects. If we are compassionate and respectful to everything that exists, then we would have to be compassionate about the socks in the drawer that aren’t folded properly.”

While perhaps laughable to some – particularly within the context of home-organizing –, taking seriously the idea that inanimate objects have a life of their own parallels a lot of emerging thought in contemporary philosophy. In particular, the philosophical school of "Object-Oriented Ontology" (OOO) seeks to destabilize the tradition of Western philosophy since at least Kant that relegates the reality of objects to their conforming to the human subject's perception. Graham Harman, whose doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects" sparked the O...

Exhibition Explores the Design of Protest Movements

2014-08-18T15:26:00-04:00

In late May of 2012, my friends and I travelled up to Montreal from upstate New York for the first time, only vaguely aware of the escalating student demonstrations there. When we arrived, we found ourselves in a sea of red. The students we stayed with all had little red felt squares pinned to their shirts and gave us some. Their apartment overflowed with red pamphlets and posters. Plastered beneath overpasses and on bus stops, Paris ’68-inspired silk-screened posters – some by the collective École de la Montagne Rouge – served as a backdrop for the massive daily protests that shut down major arteries and overpasses. Students in the streets and their parents on porches loudly banged pots and pans, a chaotic orchestra playing the deafening casserole. It felt as if there was not a single square inch of the city that was not red: even the lights of traffic signals took on a revolutionary hue.

The students were protesting a planned gradual tuition raise of over one thousand dollars. As ...