Mets vastab, allikas kõnetab

Two contributions to a substantial museum exhibition, each of them a piece of de-sign work in its own right.

Curatorial selection from the archive. Kärt and I worked through the Estonian National Museum’s archived jewelry collection looking for pieces that would carry the exhibition’s argument. The method was dialogical and interpretive rather than typological. For each candidate piece, we read the object together (the small maker’s markings, the technique signatures, the details that revealed how a particular crafter had used time, energy, and skill on a particular day) looking for the connection back to the artist whose hands had made it. The criterion that mattered most was singularity: the qualities that made each individual piece distinctive within its category, rather than the qualities that made it a representative example of its type. Between roughly 150 and 300 pieces were ultimately selected, from small hand-forged clasps and metal fittings to detailed artistic pieces approximately the size of a watermelon. Most were hand-forged iron and other metalwork with traditional ornate features, but the selection also included leather, wood, and items woven from human hair: the last a tradition that itself argues the exhibition’s premise, that an object can carry meaning far beyond its material.

English-language wall texts. The second contribution was the exhibition’s English wall texts, so that the storytelling could carry across languages without losing the meaning the Estonian held. The translation problem in a museum is rarely lexical; it is almost always that an Estonian wall text and an English wall text are read by visitors inhabiting different cultural semiospheres. A literal translation that preserves the words sometimes loses the argument the words are making. The work was to keep the argument intact, to let an English-speaking visitor encounter the same exhibition that an Estonian-speaking visitor does.