Paola Bascón
About
CV
Newsletter
©2024 Paola Bascón
In their absence, together we mourn
2024-2025
Goldsmiths, University of London
Displaced and looted burial vessels have been reclaimed, stolen for a second time as flawed copies. Once passing through the landscapes of extraction, one finds them floating above whispering sounds. Brought together—perhaps against their will—to share stories of forced exhumations. The objects are 3D-scanned copies taken from the British Museum, and no permission has been asked or granted. This space is conceived as a site of transition, as the copies embark on a journey of reburial. Before returning them to the underground, we might imagine landscapes of potential reparation while acknowledging their impossibility.
Installation - ceramics, cotton, natural dyes, copper, steal, wood, sound, wool, sand and spices.
Degree Show 2024 Art & Ecology MA , Goldsmiths
Paola Bascón
and metal shelves.
They are kept on display for thousands of eyes to see,
for thousands of lenses to capture.
They remain abstained from the encounter of touch.
Their surface may eventually
be removed from dust,
but rarely do they recall the contact with human skin,
the grip of fingers and
the motion they enable.
As a distant memory,
the feeling of the breeze of air,
the texture of the earthy ground,
or a wooden table.
Long ago they used to endeavor in long journeys.
Filled and emptied,
again and again.
To the river and back,
to the river and beyond.
When the eyes
of the living were shut,
so did they accompany
the sleep of the gaze
into the comforting darkness of an underground robe.
Today they are within reach
of eyes that look but do not comprehend.
Installation view
To enter the building, one must stand in a queue delimited by temporary metal fences. The queue ends at a white tent, where several guards await. The security procedure does not take long. I open my bag and allow them to look inside with the help of a lamp. Past the tent, a monumental 19th-century Greek Revival style building awaits. Inside, around 80,000 objects are kept for public display, from the 8 million objects comprising the collection. The institution states that the small and large collections were gathered by officials, diplomats, missionaries, and during the time of the empire.
I go inside the building towards the inner courtyard, a huge space covered by a gigantic modern glass and steel roof. The architecture of the courtyard reminds me of what could be the hall of an airport or a shopping mall. This association is triggered by how my body reacts when I find myself in these kinds of spaces. A feeling of slight dizziness and disorientation takes over, perhaps related to the scale of the building, the lighting system, the climatized air, or the pace at which many people are walking. In this sensorially overwhelming courtyard, I remember a vague reference to the term “non-place.” Can museums be ‘non-places’ for objects?
Installation view
Nunhead Cemetery / Project Octagon
Surfacing - curated by Urte Janus
2024
Lecture-performance alongside 3D-scanned burial vessels. Evoking the object’s sensous registers through sound and clay, the reading reflects on archaeological looting and the disruption of the underworld.
Ph: Rosaleigh Harvey-Otway
Forma HQ
Workshop at ‘Where Memory Grows’ - curated by Hazel Yiran Liu & Vanture Wenqiu Zhang
2025
Through speculative, sensorial, and hands-on clay tasks, the workshop engaged participants in an intimate exploration of replica burial vessels originally displayed at the British Museum. It invited them to share reflections on the worldliness of objects and on how notions of heritage and colonial dispossession asymmetrically traverse personal and collective memory. The vessels, which had remained buried for several months, were unearthed for this encounter before being reburied.
“Developed in response to Slow Crush, a new sculpture by artist Jala Wahid, ‘Where Memory Grows’ explores the tension between remembrance and erasure. Centring on themes of burial and excavation, it examines how memory, the body, ecology, and colonial legacies resurface across time and space.”
Ph: Xintong Huang