Gore Museology Manifesto
(March 2026)

(TRANSLATION)
Gore Museology Manifesto

Death is not an event of the past. Yet you believe this to be a closed case, that violence has already passed, and nothing remains here.
You fail to see the time that elapses: the real-time of bodies encased in cylinders, of arms and legs submerged in formalin.

I diagnose this irreparable state.

Contour 　　 Skeleton 　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Hair

[ STRUCTURE 01 : THE VERTICAL AXIS OF POWER ]

The number of incomplete bodies is a record of the violence this place has accumulated.
We demand not an abstract discourse detached from the body, but a discursive corpus formed within the continuity of taxidermied violence.

The museum is a beginning where violence learns to speak as knowledge. What you hear is what remains after violence has been made to make sense.

[ RV-4857-66 ] meisje. zes jaar. schedel. haar. Vlechten. The pain that arrives after irreparable deaths.

“I cannot see.” A headless torso looks toward this place and speaks. A face lost in thought, wearing an empty name tag.

Eyes, shattered thirty-five thousand times, follow another body passing through the depot corridor.

Eyes, fragmented by thirty-five thousand losses, follow another body passing through the depot corridor.

[ REGISTRATION : TM-589-5a ]

sleutelbeenderen. vrouw. human remains. They arrived as if for a moment, but in the end, they could never leave. (Between 2022 and 2025, what I witnessed daily in the depot were sealed boxes containing countless segmented bodies, aligned alongside objects. After that, they could no longer remain mere numbers to me.)

The labor of the body becomes permanent. Glass jars. Shelves. Numbered boxes. Death’s labor continues. Privatized deaths that are never allowed a moment’s rest. The privatized death. These bodies piece together fragments like puzzles in their own corners, pulling in other unregistered bodies. A fragmented gaze; thus, an eye that cannot see its own eye. These fragments reflect and return the living body outside. In this place, nothing can ever belong to itself. Inside the place where today’s tradition—the entry of the body into the institution—began. Deaths are always written in fragments.

53 arms.
　　　 98 left legs.
　　　　　　　　　　　 12 types of skin.
　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　　 Nameless fragments.

These fragments lose their mutual context and are placed within a different order.
Formalin. Glass jars. Metal Shelves. Numbers. Climate control.

This is neither the cannibalistic fantasy of Herschell Gordon Lewis as imagined by the white First World, nor the atmospheric horror of 18th-century Gothic novels. This is not fantasy. This is an existing system. This is an existing system. A body where silence operates. Legs. Arms. A shattered body. Trans-temporal and decontextualized fragments of the body become sophisticated technical prototypes, packaged in beauty and exhibited like goods or services. These fragments, handled by such meticulous technology, are ultimately the accumulation of subaltern bodies. These fragments are evidence. Of extraction. Of accumulation.

This is the barbarism the museum is reluctant to speak of. A reality so old it appears fictional. To expose the gore accumulated in the depot is not an act of revelation. It is an attempt to stop the continuous production of this bloody tradition.
It all renders life and death into a controllable state. Death and fear no longer belong to the individual.

Here, Gore is the state where the internal is exposed to the external.

[ AUDITORY : Body 3 Humming ]

I lost my ticket.
I lost my keys.
I lost the map.

Nameless bodies, damaged long ago, are preserved together. The boundary between object and human does not exist. Within the technologized institution, they are managed in the form of controlled death. Here, gore is neither aesthetics nor fiction.
It is the operating condition of the museum. The museum has long managed the life, death, and material memory of the Other as gore.

You said “Prime technology is a body.”

[RV-1184-204] been. Arm.
[RV-09-677] skeletmateriaal. menselijk of dierlijk. Oceanisch.

[ AMPUTATION : steel hammer ]

I want a pair of sharp scissors so I can cut the river in half.
And I attach numbers to the cut surfaces.

Left.

Right.

The river becomes two specimens. It becomes a line on a map. And the river no longer flows. So the river no longer flows. Death does not disappear. It becomes more distinct. [RV-09-94] haar. oksel. Oceanië. Incapable of decay, Suspended life.

[RV-5675-K2436] skeletresten. soedan. 9kg hammer. Deaths that must labor as if dying. Deaths that must labor as if dying. In the specific context of the European colonial museum, gore is never a metaphor. Violence is an infrastructure, the extraction and reproduction of death never ends. It is continuously reproduced within the living bodies that gaze upon that matter. Death is not a past event; it is a system of recording that is still operating now. And that record is always read again through the fragments of bodies. It is always read again through the fragments of bodies.

The museum is a crime scene. But you never see the crime. Everything has been washed.

Gore Museology reveals the ontological and physical conditions of violence operating in the process where not only the colonial museum but also the institutional structures constituting globalization extract, fragment, stabilize, and separate bodies and matter from their original relationships and contexts—chemically preserving, classifying, converting them into storable matter, paralyzing, and incorporating them into an order.

[EXTRACTION]
[DEFORMATION]
[STABILIZATION]
[SEPARATION]
[PRESERVATION]
[CLASSIFICATION]
[CONVERSION]
[PARALYSIS]

A politics that treats the living as bare life.

Gore is never a metaphor. Gore Museology confronts the gore that forms the foundation of hegemonic history and museum profitability. It is an attempt to reveal the inherent violence through contact and translation between the living body and the fragmented bodies inside the institution, gradually destabilizing that structure. Because the museum preserves the structure of violence.

[844-14a] foetus. Vrouwelijk. in een fles.
[217-2] foetus. Toraja.

To diagnose the body of collected bodies. We understand the internal body of this institution as a place where the remnants of violence continuously circulate and are maintained. The body remembers and resists because it is a body. The body still exists as matter, and that matter leaves vibrations even in silence. In the market, fragments are converted into value, and vibrations are translated into data. The exhibitionism of pains.

Violence does not disappear; it changes form. Technologies for forgetting. Everything returns as fragments. Not by itself. Fragments remain not as memory, but as resources. The body returns, surrounded by unknown sounds.

[295-3b] tweeling. zes months. in een fles.

Gore Museology understands the internal body of such institutions as a place where the remnants of violence continuously circulate and are maintained. We must constantly contemplate the fragments and materiality of this place and devise a new epistemological shift. For the fragment of a separated body can never fully suppress the memory of the body to which it once belonged.

[ CONCLUSION : Muted ]

Finally, recovery is always achieved through Sealing (封印) or Suturing (縫合), but you say to yourself: “Do not lose this unstable state.”

You say:
Let there be a refusal to recover.
Do not fully recover from whatever has just entered the body.
Stay shattered.

Note
What does it mean to narrate the museum through the lens of ‘Gore’? Gore Museology is a conceptual framework I propose, recontextualizing Sayak Valencia’s discourse on Gore Capitalism within the field of museology. While Valencia analyzes a system where death becomes a highly profitable enterprise and the destroyed body is relegated to a commodity, Gore Museology identifies the European colonial museum as the historical prototype of this very system. It asserts that every stage of the process—from the initial collection of objectified bodies to their arrival at the museum—was already executed through gore-centric methods. By exposing the existential conditions and the inherent gore of the bodies accumulated in the Depot, Gore Museology seeks to forge the language necessary to sever the continuity of this bloody tradition.