Celestial Emporium of Photographic Knowledge

How do you sort 30,000 books? Alphabetically or thematically, by size or by colour? And how does the sorting of books influence the way we read them? The exhibition Celestial Emporium of Photographic Knowledge is a playful attempt to reorganise the photo library.

In his essay ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’, the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges writes that ‘obviously there is no classification of the universe that is not arbitrary and conjectural’. To illustrate this, he quotes a fictional Chinese encyclopedia titled Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which divides animals into 14 categories, including ‘those that belong to the Emperor’, ‘stray dogs’ or ‘fabulous ones’. His system not only illustrates the problem of ambiguous or blurred categories, but also creates a completely new world in which things that seem incompatible elsewhere stand side by side as a matter of course.

Following Borges, the exhibition playfully experiments with the reorganisation of the photo library according to the 14 categories of the encyclopedia. The presentation is conceived as a journey of discovery through the collection of around 30,000 titles along unconventional paths that reveal special finds and invite visitors to discover them in new ways. At the same time, the show engages with the existing classification system and questions photo-historical and library categories. It sheds light on the fact that the classification system of a library – like any classification system – is never neutral and absolute but represents only one of many possible ways. The exhibition is accompanied by works from the collection of Fotomuseum Winterthur, which deal with processes of organising, sorting or classifying in different ways.

Curated by Gwendolyn Fässler and Sonja Palade.