Fragility

“Fragility” is an installation built around a museum vitrine-table in the late-Classicist style of the 19th century. Inside is a collection of objects, none larger than 20 cm, selected by a single criterion: all of them are bound up with the notion of fragility — in the literal sense and in the figurative one.

The vitrine works here not as a means of display but as a subject of examination in its own right. It sets the mode of handling a thing: whatever is placed inside automatically acquires the status of something valuable, requiring distance, care and preservation. The work appropriates this mechanism and applies it to matters that are not usually museified — to relationships between people, to trust, cultural belonging, attachment.

The objects gathered here are bound up with questions of self-identification, origin and inheritance. Under glass they cease to be private and begin to read as exhibits — testimonies whose value is set by the format of display itself. The installation addresses the way significance is established, and what exactly comes to be recognised as fragile and worth preserving.