Sound from the Hallways in Ibraaz
HISTORY AS CONCEPT
Lasse Lau in conversation with Amira Gad
AG: Space is approached in an interesting way in your film: it has this picturesque attributes (the windows, the light) and its architectural, focusing on the building itself rather than on the museum’s collection. Given your background on museology, how do you justify this choice? Can we speak of monumental history in this case?
LL: Museums are bricks or buildings of collections and we often tend to forget this. To understand the underlying structures, we must think in Brechtian terms and strip the theatre from its techniques of meaning. When you are not entertained, so to speak, you start noticing the lighting, the doors that are closed, the paint peeling, the repetitions of objects, even the bathroom. You wonder about the admission fee and so on. In this process of stripping bare, the museum becomes apparent to us and the idea of the museum is easily recognised. Here, when I say ‘idea’, I mean the initiators, funders, architects and owners et cetera – those who have an agency in the museum. If you are an Egyptologist you would also notice that I filtered away some of the more unique and important objects of gods and pharaohs in the film to make room for some of the less artistic objects that are no less important: ones portraying the soldier, the housewife, the worker and the slave.
read more at …