The Memory of Space

I am a museum professional. Most of my work is spent examining spaces and objects that have been kept for centuries. I try to find out what the story is. I think about the interaction between the object and the visitor, and I turn that into meaningful stories inside a network of relations. Within this network, knowledge is concealed in symbols. Let me put it this way: spaces have memory.

When I say spaces have memory, I do not mean it metaphysically. I mean that space is cognitive. It has to do with experience. And it also produces a division that is at once cultural and one of class.

I know it sounds meaningless to say that objects could form a consciousness — but allow me to try to explain it.

People do not begin their lives as equals. A family's economic power, its social circle and its cultural background seriously affect a person's educational accumulation, their success at school, their career and their position in society.

We are born, that is, with economic, social and cultural capital.

Everything we are exposed to at an early age comes back to us in adulthood as longing. Sometimes we miss a dish our mother used to make. Or we remember, with longing, a happy moment spent with our family.

Spaces have their place in our memory too. When you see again, as an adult, a shop, a cinema or a street you went to as a child, it affects you. You remember. This is an example of the cognitive effect of space. Underneath it are semantic relations. There is experience. The exact opposite is also possible: in a place where we have no experience, we can feel foreign.

My body is a bridge between the physical world and my mind. The body behaves as an extension of the mind and allows me to "think in motion". It focuses, it remembers, it acts. The mind is not separate from the environment that surrounds it and that it interacts with.

This is why the museum experience is an interaction between mind and object. Experience is also where semantic relations come into the open. The visitor arrives with a stock of general knowledge; we can call these cultural codes. In the archive, on the other hand, those codes are scattered. If the museum is to become an immersive experience, the two sets of codes have to be compatible with each other. What creates feeling is the matching of signs and codes.

A space acquires identity, and becomes visible, through the effect of culture. An exhibition or a museum without a narrative is like a careless theatre: there is a stage, but there is no play.

Museums can offer complex, rich and polyphonic narratives. But if a visitor is seeing this for the first time, they may feel alienated from the setting and withdraw — whereas it ought to invite them to wander and to wonder. It should be immersive, but the visitor should not get lost inside the narrative. It is through narrative that a connection with the object is made. This is what scenography in a museum is. The aim is to be able to offer an immersive experience.

What is not on display

An average museum holds around 10,000 works. In the large ones the number rises to several million. The Istanbul Archaeological Museums hold a million works; the British Museum around eight million. Generally about five per cent of the total is put on display. So there is more in a museum than what is seen. The visitor does not see the underside of the iceberg, but the museum preserves that memory. Conservation means slowing the deterioration of a work without spoiling its nature, or repairing it in keeping with its original state. This is why every timely intervention matters so much. The same holds for all cultural narratives.

The Black Rod

In the Westminster parliament there is a symbolic tradition dating from the seventeenth century. In the Black Rod ceremony a message is delivered by the official walking to the House of Commons. The official is going to close the parliamentary session, but all at once the door is shut in their face. That closing of the door, and the expressions that follow it, are a constitutional symbolism.

The House of Commons — that is, the representatives of the people — symbolically demonstrates its independence from the Crown. The door being closed to Black Rod is, symbolically, the message: we are independent. Afterwards the door is opened and they are admitted. The ritual represents dialogue and balance. The origin of the tradition goes back to the English civil war of the seventeenth century and to what was lived through in a period when the balance of power was shaken. The struggle for authority between Crown and parliament is preserved through this tradition. The ceremony is a cognitive effort that holds symbolism, signs and indications all together.

In the Second World War the Palace of Westminster was badly damaged in German air raids. In the debates after the war about rebuilding, Winston Churchill said: "We shape our buildings, afterwards our buildings shape us." It is a statement showing that a building does not consist only of walls and rooms. Inside a building there are memories. They are passed on to later generations through rituals, through ceremonies, through paintings and sculptures. In time this memory settles into the unconscious.

Yet despite this consciousness, British society is changing. The idea is spreading that in a modern age these rituals are meaningless and unnecessary. While the public is in economic difficulty, what is the need for this display? Seen from outside it is hard to understand, and theatrical.

Despite these criticisms, looked at academically, the Black Rod ceremony preserves institutional memory. It symbolises the continuity of the state. It makes the culture of the separation of powers visible. Although at first glance the scene looks like theatre, it is in fact a symbol that keeps the historical roots of British democracy alive. Perhaps, centuries from now, we will see the staff carried by the Black Rod official in a museum.

What is consciousness?

When we spoke of the consciousness of the individual, we said that a consciousness can form in a person according to the experiences of their short life, the events that shape their thinking, the family they come from, the region, and the social and economic condition they belong to.

When it comes to societies, no such determination is easily made. A society has, above all, a collective thought, a collective consciousness, that emerges as the product of a long stretch of time. It has a social consciousness.

That consciousness is certainly not the same as the consciousness that varies from one individual to another.

Social consciousness is the totality of values a society gathers and unites around. It is a totality of the way the world is seen. There will always be differences among the individuals and groups that make up a society — but one speaks of a minimum common ground, and in this sense the most important element shaping that social consciousness is the past.

We all know very well that if the human being were to be defined somewhere, it would be possible to define them as the animal that possesses historical consciousness. Among living creatures, the human is the most intelligent: the one that knows its past, that is curious about it, that tries to know it even when it gets it wrong, that ties that past more or less to its present, that carries an anxiety about the future — and that builds predictions, extrapolations and extensions of knowledge and consciousness towards that future.

This intelligence founds states and sends people into space. It also brings states down, blows up dams and builds atomic bombs. None of it is done by a single person. It is a system that human beings have formed.

The United States of America, founded in 1776 by declaring that people are free and equal, was able to drop an atomic bomb on Japan in 1945.

We are inside a world system. And that system is not static; it is changing. There have always been those who say the structure we are in is collapsing, but it is harder to say what will come in its place.

The only thing that does not change is change itself.

History books are full of states founded and destroyed. We are very fortunate, because we are on lands that have lived through empires. Here there are Babylonian, Egyptian, Hittite, Greek and Roman finds. The system closest to us was the Ottoman state system. Mehmed the Conqueror declared himself heir to the Roman Empire. His eye was on Rome. His life was not long enough, but you can see the remains of that structure. Topkapı Palace was the ruler's house and the decision centre of the empire. Inside the palace there was a structure — a civilisation inscribed on the palace walls with its statesmen, its ceremonies, its spaces, its garments. But that system did not last forever either.

It is said that change is itself a structure. A cosmic system. Like a child building a sandcastle on the beach and then, all at once, scattering everything they have made.

What we leave behind

We cannot say the past does not concern us, but neither can we escape what is new. To learn something, instead of going to a museum or reading a boring book, I want to ask artificial intelligence — it holds the information in its memory anyway, and when I ask, it can give me an answer.

Numbers do not lie. Artificial intelligence is used more with each passing day. This world built on algorithms has a beauty to it: a system that does not make the mistakes I make. I want to believe in it. In this virtual world, cleared of human caprice, of interest-driven relations and of intrigue, I feel safe. Perhaps the best thing humankind could do is to leave decisions of governance to an inorganic system. Or is it? Can a computer make better decisions than mine? There is no need to worry. Coming generations will answer that. Let us leave it to them to decide whether computers will become museum pieces.

But this is the inheritance we leave them: a carbon-based cognitive system. Can a machine know what to remember and what to forget? Can I trust artificial intelligence? I have a guess: if you can control time and space, you can bend reality as you wish. If you can bend reality, you can control individuals too. Should artificial intelligence be used to control societies, we will turn into individuals wandering in the desert of the real. This may be what we leave to the generations after us. The desert of the real.

Frankly, I am not against technology. I am against the states, institutions and administrators who would want to use it as an instrument of control. This is why we need institutions and systems that will defend the rights of the individual. We need rules of law that will keep our information protected. We must be conscious that space has memory, and that we have to protect it.

To give an example: when I wake up in the morning there are any number of things on my mind that need doing. Check the e-mails, drop the child at school, check the messages while doing it. There is a payment I have to make, check the meeting time — complete chaos. Yes, I could hand all this over to artificial intelligence. But should I stay permanently connected to that system? My answer is no, and I should do the things that increase my cognitive experience. So let us go to the museum, and let us stay open to new experiences.