Supervisor: Dr Jaspar Joseph Lester 

Institutional email: robin.kirsten@network.rca.ac.uk

The universe contains objects from the beginning of time, stretching to infinity.  So we can call it a museum, specifically considering Nikolai Federov’s (1906) definition of the museum as being ‘an expression of the entire soul’, the ‘higher world’ or an ‘ancestral temple’.  My research will explore ways in which the museum and the universe share structural concepts, cosmological identifies and philosophical constructs.  By analysing and practically exploring ideas generated from five sites – Atelier Brancusi, Flat Time House, Akhzivland, Owl House and Le Palais Ideal – I aim to advance a new model of thinking about a form of museology that embraces the universe.  The primary site is Renzo Piano’s Atelier Bracusi, Paris.  Recreated and housed at the core of Piano’s purpose-built structure is Brancusi’s studio and living quarters, a place Man Ray stated was ‘like entering another world’.  Readable as a model of the universe, a myriad sculptures are scattered through like constellations from endless galaxies.  The transparency of the glass walls suggesting infinite relations to multiple universes, and the worlds of the viewers who circumnavigate the studio via an ambulatory passage.  To address the three cosmologies – material, esoteric and metaphysical – and to locate them within the framework of the museum, further methodological tools employed will be the philosophical concept of Leibniz’s ‘monad’ (singular world extending to infinity) and Heidegger’s ‘world’ (world as origin and boundary).  These will be mediated through Badiou’s thesis on the appearing of worlds in ‘Logics of Worlds’.  This research will be practice based to translate my ideas and findings from the hypothetical to the material, articulated in the universal language of objects.  It will be essentially interdisciplinary, linking architecture, art, philosophy, museology and cosmology.  Responding through contemporary art practice, this research proposes a model of the universe-as-museum, the expansion of museology’s frame and advances world-creation as a genre of praxis.