Réserve de Suisses morts, 1991
This sculpture is comprised of metal boxes that imitate aged, archival storage containers, stacked to form a narrow corridor topped by office lamps. Each box bears a photograph depicting a man or woman, assembled by the artist from obituaries in Swiss newspapers. Boltanski has frequently created structures of near identical repeated elements to suggest an almost infinite archive of the dead. The sculpture evokes the mundane bureaucracies of mortality, the contrast between the institutional and personal, between memory and forgetting. Boltanski has remarked: ‘There is nothing more normal than a Swiss person… so all these dead people are only all the more terrifying. They are us.’
‘Death has obviously always been one of our great human questions, and one of the great subjects of reflection for artists. It is strange to die, particularly if, like me, one does not have a religious faith. In traditional societies, death was a little less problematic because the idea of progress did not have the same weight, and the survival of the family or group was more important. What has interested me, and what I have tried to talk about is what I call the small memory. This is what differentiates us one from another. The great memory can be found in history books, but the hoard of small bits of knowledge that each one of us has accumulated makes up what we are. I know that I am engaged in a struggle. Someone has said: "nowadays we die twice : first at the time of our death, and again when nobody recognizes us in a photograph any more". I often compile lists of names (dead swiss, workers in a factory in northern England in the XIX century, artists who participated in the Venice Biennale…) because I have the impression that saying or writing a person's names gives them life for a few moments; if one names them, one recognizes their individual existence.’
Christian Boltanski, 1996
Technical details
- Original title:
- Réserve de Suisses morts
- Registration number:
- 0088
- Artist:
- Boltanski, Christian
- Date created:
- 1991
- Date acquired:
- 1992
- Fonds:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
- Object type:
- Installation
- Media:
- Tin boxes, gelatin silver print, cardboard and electric lamps
- Dimensions:
- Total dimensions: 288 x 46 x 238 cm; 2380 boxes: 12.1 x 21.8 x 23. 3 cm each
- Credits:
- MACBA Collection. MACBA Foundation
- Copyright:
- © Christian Boltanski, VEGAP, Barcelona
- It has accessibility resources:
- Yes
The MACBA Collection features Catalan, Spanish and international art and, although it includes works from the 1920s onwards, its primary focus is on the period between the 1960s and the present.
For more information on the work or the artist, please consult MACBA's Library. To request a loan of the work, please write to colleccio [at] macba.cat.
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