Fragments of the World Quotes

“Germany, a country with a tradition of strong commitment to public funding for culture, has a statement which clearly refers to non-economic cultural capital: 'Our lives cannot be founded solely on supposed efficiency, as it would then be incomplete in terms of substance. We need the contexts of philosophy, the arts, and spiritual values which provide everyday life with an orientation framework within which practical goals can be pursued.”
― Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World

“Films featuring museums are on the whole, not serious ones. They are mostly comedies, mild thrillers, romances, and horror movies, with a few disaster movies and detective films. Nevertheless, they speak clearly to the popular perception of the museum: a place apart from normal, everyday life; dusty, dark, mysterious, with arcane processes being carried out by strange obsessive curators and naive restorers and scientists. Neither exhibitions nor collections in store are the focus: 'the museum' is a sort of composite of both, and its psychological depiction is of a place where surprising and extraordinary things can happen - a place with hidden depths and many secrets.”
― Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World

“Rather like the precautionary clean underwear one is meant to wear in case one is run down by a bus, we had better make sure our stores look neat in case some passing artist takes a creative fancy to them. Or should we, rather, aim for creative chaos and imaginative juxtapositions?”
― Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World

“Memory acts at various levels: individual and family, social, and nation-state. Memory is not fixed: far from it, at every level memory is shifting, continually revised and reconstructed according to personal, social, and political context. Views of the past change dramatically over time, and written and recorded history is by no means immune to this. Museum collections serve the function of grounding histories and memories in physical objects, but paradoxically, the meaning of the object lies in the changing perception of the viewer.”
― Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World

“Whether individual, collective, or even written history, memory is not a fixed, passive storage system: it is dynamic, changing according to different circumstances. The unconscious is always at play, rearranging conscious memories in time and space, juxtaposing some and splitting or reshaping others, suppressing or recalling. Memory has been likened to stones from antiquity that are re-used to make different, later buildings.”
― Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World

“Even if published in written form, history, it is argued, is not embedded as a memory at an individual level: it has to be brought to life through commemorative events and so on, or, indeed, through museum exhibits. Thus, history might be designated the memory of the nation-state, even though there is no such thing as a universally accepted history.”
― Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World

“Eleven or twelve hundred years ago the poem Beowulf explored the contradictions of treasure: jewels and gold that when they have been hard won turn to things eaten by rust. Finally, Saadi Youssef questions, Who broke these mirrors? (perhaps by snatching objects out of their context and their world) and muddled them up - and who can gather the pieces together to preserve the memory?”
― Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World

“Eleven or twelve hundred years ago the poem Beowulf explored the contradictions of treasure: jewels and gold that when they have been bard won turn to things eaten by rust. Finally, Saadi Youssef questions, Who broke these mirrors? (perhaps by snatching objects out of their context and their world) and muddled them up - and who can gather the pieces together to preserve the memory?”
― Suzanne Keene, Fragments of the World