Wandering

They never imagined it happening—the technologies of production, put to work for over 170 years, paused…

The Museum closes to visitors. Indefinitely. Peace. Quiet. Save for the background hum of air conditioning units, building management systems, data servers; occasional essential maintenance staff passing through the twilight of empty galleries, studios, corridors, and offices, the quiet pierced by intermittent crackle, fragments of conversation from the security teams' two-way radios; the regular low rumble of underground trains' mostly empty carriages, passing beneath the Museum's quietened Cast Court galleries. Not business as usual. Rather, a museum stilled, idling. In absentia—a parasympathetic hiatus.

With the institutional noise filtered out—the visitor footfall, the meetings, the performance metrics—what remained were the sounds that had always been there: the building's mechanical systems, the radios' intermittent crackle, the underground trains. Like the acoustic emissions equipment distinguishing micro-cracks from background din, the pause allowed different signals to surface. What the institution typically produced as its dominant frequency—productivity, throughput, the relentless forward motion—suddenly fell silent, revealing the subtler cadences beneath: the material conditions, the rhythms of care work, the possibilities for attention that 'business as usual' systematically drowns out.

This unprecedented pause—this parasympathetic hiatus—creates conditions for what Isabelle Stengers might recognise as a profound reconfiguration of institutional practice. With the conservation department emptied and the executive elsewhere, counter-factual conservation emerges not as theoretical proposition but as a material and social possibility.

The pandemic produced a rupture in the museum's fabric, its temporal and spatial logics suddenly suspended. This opening created conditions for dishabituation, for pause. During this pause, the museum became alive to possibility—not the fevered productivity that preceded it, but a space of play, imagination, and care? The virus revealed the fragility of the museum's existence, but also opened pathways for institutional imagination that 'business as usual' typically forecloses.

Back

I imagine a museum at work (not in the strict sense). The technologies of production, the means of capture, retention, and dissemination—re-attuning, after years of continuous habitual use. Assembling otherwise. The apparatus forging new alliances, playfully re-staging use and value. Attuning otherwise. In the emptied museum, wandering becomes practice—improvised meanders through not just public galleries but back-of-house spaces, cutting across and through institutional borders. The same doors I'd held open for processions of objects now opening to something else: time spent otherwise, attention growing wild in the openings. Or perhaps this is simply fevered imagination, lockdown's gift. The break, the opening, has always been here—it is not a new thing-real or imagined. The modern project alive with the possibilities of transformation. The pandemic didn't create the crisis; it revealed what was already present, allowed what was suppressed to bloom.

In the fringing effects of the virus, the museum's Henry Cole Wing reverberates; laughter, voices, and footsteps echoing through vacant corridors—sound wandering through an institution in suspension; the opening refrain from Marvin Gaye's 'What's Going On' from a studio radio, a joyous looping of a gathering already underway; the rise and fall of street sounds, traffic, voices, drifting with the breeze from a window, open to Exhibition Road; mingling with the scanning camera's intense pitch and the intermittent staccato popping of flashlights from the open darkroom studio door; the faint sounds of water, the subterranean passage of a tributary of the river Westbourne, heading to meet the Thames. This concatenation of sound fills the Grand Staircase—the incorporeal instantiation of Henry Cole, the architect of the modern museum project, overflowing with the publics he sought to welcome. The technologies of capture, already at work in the museum, making themselves felt. The absence of the executive—the keepers of the modern museum project elsewhere—prompting a cacophonous intramural sociality.

Or is this just memory? Reconstruction? Here the *unreliable conservator* surfaces, working in the uncertain terrain between what happened and what might have been. Haunting the imaginary, the sounds mixing, real and dreamt, in the fringing effects of the virus. The fevered museum conjuring what might have been, what the pause might have allowed. Not preservation but transformation. Not the museum's habitual processions but attention turned fugitive, institutional possibilities growing wild. Preciado's question haunts this re-wilding of conservation: what forms of institutional life might have emerged if we had truly inhabited the pause, rather than rushing to 'recover'?