Meanings and Materialities
Meanings and Materialities
Exhibition 6–15 June
Open every day 12:00-18:00Francisco Martinez
This paper discusses a series of delayed gifts in Eastern Estonia, presents not necessarily meant to be compensated. In this sense, it problematises the strict Maussian sense of what a gift is and does, since the presents under examination were given without any guarantee of reciprocation and following an excessively belated exchange. According to Mauss (1925), a gift creates a bond between the different agents involved, they all institutionally involved by relations of reciprocity. Despite the highly influential legacy of these ideas, little attention has been paid to delayed presents, to gifts that were stored in the dark and which were designed to never be reciprocated. Hence, this paper contributes to ongoing discussions revising the connection –or possible gap– between the gift and exchange (Pyyhtinen 2014: 21-22).
The research is based on the experience of curating three exhibitions in that liminal region, though it will focus on the latest art project, Asemic Library (2024), a site-specific show comprising six new artworks inspired the library left behind in the former School n. 1 of Sillamäe. Besides stepping into unexplored territories of gift-giving, the paper also reconsiders the intersections between contemporary art and anthropology (Sansi 2015), the potential (and limitations) of parasitical conditions for knowledge-making (Serres 1982), the legacy of Soviet infrastructural projects (Ssorin-Chaikov 2017), and the semiotic estrangement happening in the process of becoming waste.
Francisco Martínez is an anthropologist dealing with contemporary issues of material culture through ethnographic experiments. In 2018, he was awarded with the Early Career Prize of the European Association of Social Anthropologists. Currently, he works at Tampere University as part of the WasteMatters ERC project. Also, he convenes the Collaboratory for Ethnographic Experimentation (EASA Network). Martínez has published several books, including Ethnographic Experiments with Artists, Designers and Boundary Objects (UCL Press, 2021); Remains of the Soviet Past in Estonia (UCL Press, 2018); and Repair, Brokenness, Breakthrough (Berghahn, 2019). Also, he has curated different exhibitions.