“The Made-up histories have long lives exhibition is a history of histories. The visitor is encouraged to experience it as a visual essay with corresponding stations, each station being a point of view, an intersection, an affective transmission, an invented history. The exhibition expands the definition of “classical ethnographies” by questioning how humanity constructs and canonizes its own histories: which fragments of history are considered more worthy of research, study and discovery? Which groups become more attractive than others, which artistic acts enter history, and which aspects of histories end up having a “long life”? Could histories be nothing more than made-up stories?

The title of the exhibition itself is a play on the words of scholar Ida Susser in reference to ethnographer Thomas Belmonte’s famous work Broken Fountain: ‘good ethnographies have a long life’.

Good ethnographies are usually systematizations of rigorously documented histories, and histories, in turn, are invented stories, a place where the real and the imagined become intertwined, and memory and subjectivity become inseparable components of human experience.

In postmodern theory, philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari have advanced the idea of the rhizome as a process of existence and growth that has neither a single point of origin nor a clearly defined end; it grows and spreads from everywhere, without a clearly defined center. A rhizome reorients thinking towards a network of interconnected, decentralized and non-hierarchical relationships and ideas that form assemblages.

 In sociology, Pierre Bourdieu developed the concept of fields, understood as areas of production, circulation and exchange of goods, services, ideas or status, each field having its own specificity and influence. The intention of the exhibition is to be read as a rhizome that interconnects multiple fields of inquiry in history and human existence, whether they function as definitions-illustrations of imagined subjects, traumatic histories, personal histories, glimpses of the Anthropocene, paranormal or affective experiences. The works of the nine invited artists colonize the gallery space and intersect with each other, sometimes obviously, sometimes conceptually. An investigative mind can draw lines of conversion and intersection between different elements, similar to connecting lines” – Iris Ordean.