TRICKS, CRIME AND POSSESSION

THE FOREST IS THE MUSEUM: LOST, FOUND AND INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY

It has been suggested that there are three stages to a magic trick*. The first is to present the object/s and the scene - perhaps a bird in a cage or a watch on a man’s wrist.

The next is the effect; in which the cage might be covered with a cloth that when pulled away reveals the bird has disappeared. Or we are misdirected momentarily - and within the blink of an eye the man’s watch is gone from his wrist. He felt nothing.

In the final stage and with another wave of the cloth, the bird might reappear in its cage. The watch might have reappeared too, but on the wrist of the man’s wife - who is sitting in the audience.

A magician traditionally uses very ordinary objects (cups, coins, balls, scarf, cigarette or hat) and makes them extraordinary by performing such transformations. The object might be exchanged for another during the effect or the same object might return - but something has happened and it now embodies this journey and the wonder of magic.

*

When a crime is committed a process similar to the trick is worked backwards in the attempt to get to the truth. The investigation might start with the disappearance (theft, death, something or someone out of place). The transformative events leading to this situation are then unpicked often leading to incriminating forensic evidence in the form of ordinary objects, documents and marks. In this way some once unassuming possessions are forced to take unexpected starring roles in important narratives and this becomes their sole identity thereafter. Think of the glove in the OJ Simpson murder trial; the convoluted arguments that focused on this mundane object during which the defendant was ordered to try it for size in the courtroom under the glare of the cameras and public attention - and about which his defence lawyer, Johnnie Cochran, repeated several times in his closing speech: "If it doesn't fit, you must acquit”.  

*

In our everyday lives, objects bought, bartered or given become owned. They become property. They are ‘possessions’, ‘belongings’ and a trajectory is set with their owner/s. When property is lost it disappears from that relationship. The objects are in limbo, nomads in no man’s land, sometimes one of a missing pair - sometimes damaged. With their function suspended, they exist but they are invisible.

Like the magic trick, when a lost thing is found - it reappears! And also like the trick it may be returned to it’s old life or it may start anew in a different place and story. An object may be found and recycled by a bird to make it’s nest or acquisitioned by someone who has need for what they have found. It might start a long journey to landfill and burial or it might languish in a lost property box - a kind of camp, waiting to be ‘processed’ like a refugee.

*

By cataloguing the lost property from the forest we have intercepted this process. A sleight of hand has occurred. We have registered and given these objects a strange new existence - not quite returned to the world and yet their presence is now assured, respected and honoured. They are listed, numbered and tagged, photographed and now identified as part of a collective.

They are transformed.

The Forest Is The Museum collection belongs to no one - it is art.  The objects have become the intellectual rather than actual property of Abigail Lane and Lala Meredith -Vula.

ABIGAIL LANE, November 21st 2019

The Forest Is The Museum is a project resulting from the joint residency of Abigail Lane and Lala Meredith-Vula at Fermynwoods Contemporary Art, 2019/2020

Platinum Prints produced by Loughborough Univercity Photographic department.

* ref to text by Marc-Olivier Wahler in conversation withEmile Soulier, Prestige, Palias de Tokyo 2011