‘Everything Was Forever, Unitl It Was No More’ challenges the notion of preservation in museums. Preserving is not always the same as caring. Focused on colonial toxicity, the work focusses on the practice by museums to kill certain living things, like insects, in order to preserve objects. Institutions such as museums have applied various preservatives, including DDT (dichlorodiphenyitrichloroethane), from the 1940s to 1970s, to protect artifacts from decay and insects. While DDT ensured the artifacts’ longevity, it also rendered them toxic.
I investigate how conservation practices are based on a hierarchical understanding of living worlds where some lives need to be killed in order to save others. The result of this approach is that some objects cannot be returned to their places of origin: to return them would be the return of the toxic, harmful, white crystallized poisons.
But the use of DDT was not just about preservation in museums. It was also tied to other colonial practices intended to modernize, or supposedly improve, local conditions. Colonial powers frequently assumed their dominance would endure forever, often ignoring local ecologies and traditions. These powers used poison in agriculture but also in warfare. The objects’ prolonged toxicity perpetuates the influence of colonialism far beyond the timeline of direct rule. The title, Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More, captures this paradox: colonial institutions aspired to achieve permanence but in so doing forever altered these objects’ compositions.
Through a microscopic examination of the museum, I discovered the invisible, unrecognized, and unregistered forms of life. In the video, I allow these microbes to work inside diverse bodies including my own as well as the bodies of objects. I imagine intimate contact with these microbes, hosting them and collaborating with them.
On another level, I speculates in this work about the links between the beings that preservation kills and those unseen beings living in the water droplets from the plumbing of Wereldmuseum Amsterdam. It is a search for living things in a space of death. It asks what happens if the museums really embrace and nurture life over death.