In its chaotic abstraction the ‘Art of facts’ seems like a minute or so of a random jumble of very old but nice-looking bits and bobs. Like a day in which some old aristocratic family gives us a tour of all the pretty trinkets and souvenirs they’ve acquired or inherited, or maybe even a child’s overturned toy box.

Cut against cracking archive footage, this overwhelming and chaotic style brings attention to the madness that is these grand old museums stuffed to the brim with relics of antiquity. Labyrinths of shelves stacked with sacred objects once worshipped by vast tribes reduced to a couple of sentences, caged behind bulletproof glass for spectators to shuffle and gaup. In a few hours, you can travel through a globe’s worth of ritual and leave knowing little more than where the Rosetta stone was found, who it was ‘rescued’ by, and which Lord or Lady gifted it to the museum. 

The use of still images mimics the experience of the museum, and its empathisis on aesthetics, how we flit from one item to the next like we would in a shop window. Because what more can you really understand from a hundred-year-old artefact displayed in a 20-year-old shiny glass box? For that reason the artefacts seem dormant, like shells of old selves, staring blankly out from their platforms and cages.

In utter silence, blank stares and camera flashes, spectators shuffle, like they themselves were carved from wood and stone. These modern-day explorers are as removed from the displays as the cultures are, thus the halls remain silent and so do the artefacts and their histories. Once these artefacts watched civilisations unfold, now they’re in a national museum, where nothing ever changes. The stagnation is reflected in the continuity of of the video, monotone images attempting to camouflage themselves among archive footage for 1959 as though they were part of it.

Though, at the end of the short, as the cracking audio swells, a glimmer of light appears on screen. A moving sculpture creating for herself an artefact of her own. That may one day appear in a building not so different to this one.