Museu Infinito at MUDE
Museum in the museum
The base reference employed by Miguel Vieira Baptista to develop the “Museu Infinito” - Endless Museum exhibition is directly linked to the brief existence of Oporto ́s Industrial Museum.
Museum in the museum
The base reference employed by Miguel Vieira Baptista to develop the “Museu Infinito” - Endless Museum exhibition is directly linked to the brief existence of Oporto ́s Industrial Museum.
Created in 1889 by the dynamic Joaquim de Vasconcelos, the museum emerged with the combined goals of promoting the work produced by artists and craftsmen in association with industry to advance the country ́s industrial development.
Other European museums, such as the Museum of Manufactures now known as Victoria & Albert Museum, soon realized the importance of museums in helping to improve industrial production as well as its fundamental role in shaping cultural. This wasn’t so much of concern in Portugal and in 1898 Oporto ́s Industrial Museum is shuttered by shortsighted political decisions.
On entering the exhibition, we’re confronted with a sequence of coloured boxes placed on the floor so as to guide visitors along an intuitive path.
The chromatic progression of the display modules takes us on a temporal journey, of beginning and ending, which Miguel Vieira Baptista wanted to reinforce.
Starting with a red colour contaminated by the adjoining white wall, announcing the exhibition name, the displayed colours steadily intensify towards the middle of the room at which point they darken and proceed to end up in black. The last module with its dramatic colour makes a formal and direct reference to the previous museum’s plans and its location in Oporto.
The museum ́s nine years of existence is organized within nine exhibition modules. Where we can discover the every day objects which formed part of the original museum ́s collection, and which are presently housed in several Portuguese museums.
The objects on exhibit, for security reasons, had to be glass enclosed. A technical requirement that emerged midway through the project that resulted in dimensional variation and fit between the display boxes and glass panels intentionally recycled from previous exhibitions.
This irregularity is reinforced by the use of dissimilar interior and exterior module dimensions required to accommodate the varying contents. As a result we are able to assign to the objects the perception of a programmed collection, which confronts itself and enters into a dialogue with the MUDE ́s demolished state. Poetically, we are tempted to think that the museum goes back to the museum, which makes it an endless museum.
Exhibition: “Museu Infinito”
Location and year: MUDE - Museu do Design e da Moda, Lisboa, 2016
Exhibition Design: Miguel Vieira Baptista
Assistant Designers: Ivo Oliveira Rodrigues e Joana Soda
Graphic Design: Diogo Potes
Curatorship: Sandra Leandro Construction and lighting / Expocena
Built area: 450m2
