Fifteenth International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

The Lichen Museum is an inside-out institution vastly distributed across diverse surfaces of the earth, locally experienced and multiply constituted. This museum project is motivated by the potential to consider watching as a practice of reciprocity and exchange with the material world, and to open up a space for imagining the re-distribution of agency between humans and what has been considered passive matter. The project aims to expand our understandings and experiences of time, to think more broadly about our relational selves, about privatization and collectivity, about hierarchies of value and visibility, and to counter rhetorics of scarcity, fear, and competition with a visceral sense of potentiality and possibilities for change. This introduction to The Lichen Museum contextualizes its framing within histories of museum cultures while inviting visitors to enter at any time, free of charge.