Castle

Nestled between the many layers of Fužine Castle’s history, the collection of the Museum of Architecture and Design is an eclectic yet intrinsically coherent body of documents and objects related to space and materiality. Drawing on the idea of a transhistorical museum, the exhibition Castle → Concepts, Objects, Spaces recognizes history as a stratified amalgamation of narrative strands between which it seeks intersections, concentrations of meaning, reflections, and echoes.

The confrontation between the castle and museum objects does not put a spotlight on the building’s history but focuses in the first place on the life that transpired there, the shifts it provoked, and the new mindset, knowledge, and innovations it has bred through centuries in cahoots with the surrounding nature. This trans-historicity can also be understood as a quest for the timelessness of museum artefacts and the castle’s walls that nevertheless does not seek to deny the material nature of their becoming. Through understanding of the collection, and of the castle as its current location, as an open and fluid time-space entity, the current moment is embedded in the continuity of history, thus becoming empowered and eager to ascertain the inevitable: how to go on from here?

The exhibition layout conforms to the elements of the space. The moat, field, room, tower, river, and courtyard are not mere anonymous venues, but actively co-create the experience of the exhibition. Museum objects, especially the lesser known ones, speak of the concepts shaped by the life in the castle and its spatial presence, but are nevertheless universal, omnipresent and always relevant. In the exhibition, they are communicated through the themes of occupations and liberations, strategies of self-sufficiency, an uncanny domesticity, knowledge production, materiality in motion, and intersections of public and private.

The presented concepts, objects, and spaces derive from their time, but are not defined by it; their juxtaposition inspires new relationships and dialogues between objects, architecture, individuals, and the public. New reading reactivates these objects and introduces a certain tension between them: in new spatial constellations, torn out of their original context and function, they open as yet unexplored meanings that are inherent and topical to our times. More than a static site of the past, the museum and its location stand and serve as active agents in the production of contemporary creativity and culture.