This museum is no-where … out of place/space. Or empty spaces-abandoned during COVID 19…. public spaces are “dead”
Visit the page about the physical spaces/places where the photographs were taken
“Presence does not die with physicality, but rather, exists to us as various mental and/or emotional specters (a non-presence but certainly not a no presence) “
Maccioni
Threaded within our Covid moment of existential spectrality is the condition of late stage colonial capitalism, the socio-economics of “revenge” (Haiven, 2020) and a bio capitalist agenda. This agenda which has been growing over the course of the last century, is filled with powerful monsters (see Marx’s vampires) who prey like upon the disenfranchised people. As I thought more about haunting I considered how ghost stories are usually about “revenge.” Holding to Haiven’s thesis about revenge and capital, I extended those ideas toward Derrida’s haunting; how Covd19 and revenge capitalism have collided on the precipice of our posthuman condition.
We are haunted by the past like Jacob Marley (of a Christmas Carol) warning of the damage done that still lingers, rattling his chains of bondage forged by greed and regret.
Future haunting invokes spectres of bio capitalism– both the monstrous or wondrous possibilities of a post human imagining. Like Frankenstein s creature our bodies of labor are stitched together technology the instrument of a neocolonial nightmare or a post-colonial dream?
The museum opens spaces to consider how: “the mind vulnerable enough to be haunted opens itself to the ethical possibilities that become available when one abandons the human as a valid ontological construct.”
Vinci, 2019
This site is a visual/textual exploration of what it means to embody this historical moment; a moment of revengeful capital and a global plague, the combination of which can be characterized by Derrida’s notion of “hauntology”
Last March 2020, as we all sheltered in place, I was reminded of the words of Hamlet in the infamous ghost story Hamlet… that “time is out of joint”
Public spaces were now vacant, abandoning our sense of collective engagement. In our isolation we became haunted by our grief of what (and more importantly, who) was being lost, and an anxiety about the future
We are in, and out, (and in-between) a time of profound death, isolation and collective struggle– the monstrous and the ghostly spectres of past present and future haunt our now empty public spaces. In the absence of community and the isolation of quarantine we are left only with the memories of our loved ones, or “visitations” of their disembodied spirits. Covid-19 like a horror story, ravages our communities, our schools and our homes. It is a plague that has highlighted the terrors of racism and growing economic inequalities.
Posthuman Museum of Haunting 