Dane Mitchell

Unknown Affinities might be considered the first wing of The Museum of Without — a museum of proxies and gaps, an unhinged museum held together by its hermeneutical framing practices alone. This enormous and ambitious project directly displays techniques of enclosure and addresses the museum's grasp of its artefacts, actively asking: what might a museum without artefacts be? What might a collection of losses hold and what might hold it?

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The installation presents a sketch of such absences. It is a scattered monument of mounts, or armatures, each made to scale to grasp every known extinct Aotearoa New Zealand bird species: holotype, fossil, and full skeletal remains alike.

 

Through this apparatus, which underwrites containment and reveals the museum as a place that presupposes the absence of what it aims to hold, keep, and 'safeguard', we might imagine the potentiality in something being full of things at the same time as it is emptied.

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Unknown Affinities is made up of two distinct elements: one is part of an ongoing investigation into things that contain—such as museums, encyclopaedias, and lists—and that which cannot be contained—such as vapours, spirit, contagions and, in this instance, transmissions (of archival recordings of birdsong of now extinct species across FM bandwidth) and eradications (scaffold mounts to grasp that which is gone).

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Occupying the entire gallery floor space, Unknown Affinities presents itself to us in a full state of absent-hood and reminds us that all things are in constant movement, that all things are migratory and transitory, leaving nothing left to grasp.