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QaR
September 2007 
Reliquary of Entrapped Mana
Posted on Sep 11th, 2007
by 
火狐 Li
火狐 Li
The ethnographic gallery is a reliquary of entrapped mana.
Powerrful deities, fetishes, and talisman from throughout the world surround me--objects and subjects begrudgingly sold by indigenous peoples in exchange for the other--all-powerful-- and internationally recognized fetish called currency.
The spirits and energies that flow from these objects are not necessarilly positive; the gallery adorned with flowers feels as if it is perpetually mired in the doldrums. The objects--once the proud ritual possessions of indigenous people are now commodities-- the luster they once exuded in ritual context--long lost by those cultures now irreversably altered by the passage of time and the unrelenting waves of globalization.
The frustration the objects must feel, having lost their agency to speak through ritual. The fetishtic thoughts and memories these objects were endowed with are gradually declining as the cultures they come from abandon old ways.
Their mana is forever entrapped in this ethnographic sarcophogus.
The very forces underlying the collection of ethnographic art are undermining the cultures from which they collect, as a growing number of indigenous artists cater to Western tastes and perceptions rather than indigneous aesthetic needs. From the opposite perspective, this incarceration of ethnographic objects points to a repressed, imperialistic, and--some might say--"necrophilic" desire of ours to define ourselves vis-a-vis the Other--collected.
第三天
Powerrful deities, fetishes, and talisman from throughout the world surround me--objects and subjects begrudgingly sold by indigenous peoples in exchange for the other--all-powerful-- and internationally recognized fetish called currency.
The spirits and energies that flow from these objects are not necessarilly positive; the gallery adorned with flowers feels as if it is perpetually mired in the doldrums. The objects--once the proud ritual possessions of indigenous people are now commodities-- the luster they once exuded in ritual context--long lost by those cultures now irreversably altered by the passage of time and the unrelenting waves of globalization.
The frustration the objects must feel, having lost their agency to speak through ritual. The fetishtic thoughts and memories these objects were endowed with are gradually declining as the cultures they come from abandon old ways.
Their mana is forever entrapped in this ethnographic sarcophogus.
The very forces underlying the collection of ethnographic art are undermining the cultures from which they collect, as a growing number of indigenous artists cater to Western tastes and perceptions rather than indigneous aesthetic needs. From the opposite perspective, this incarceration of ethnographic objects points to a repressed, imperialistic, and--some might say--"necrophilic" desire of ours to define ourselves vis-a-vis the Other--collected.
第三天
Access: Public
