Beto Shwafaty

Impossible Museum of Living Things – Banhosviertel Collection

Installation, diverse materials and dimensions, 2011.

The project approaches, collects and documents information that surrounds us, by producing evidences of what is there but is not seen, presenting its findings through different lenses and connections. As a kind of anthropological research, taken by an amateur collector, it results in a semi-analytical artistic construction. The idea behind this semi-public/semi-private institution is to assemble as many artifacts and evidences as possible about a specific context, on the basis of an expanded notion of site-specificity, that comprehend photo/drawing/images taken from different sites and views; a reunion of bought, found or gifted small objects; followed by presentation of historical material or analytical descriptions that can portrait some fluxes of the specific locality approached by the project. Each element is catalogued and the museum starts to exist with its first collected element or situation.

Produced in relation to the historical, urban and social contexts of Banhosviertel, Frankfurt am Main, in the occasion of The Office project.