Query: A collective inquiry into museum collections, classifications, and typologies using the British Museum archive.

This year for the editorial design course we teach at Cfp Bauer, we introduced students to digital archives and invite them to create editorial projects based on queries and datasets from the British Museum Online Collection. Here is a little excerpt from the introductory text of the collective project.

"The webpage is dark. A large title reads: Explore the Collection. Below it, a search bar, wide and empty. Below that, a content warning.

The Museum informs me that this is a working database, that it contains information generated over more than 250 years of institutional history, that some of the collection may include culturally sensitive content, or language, practices, or attitudes that the Museum would no longer consider appropriate. That they are committed to addressing these issues.

I type the word chair.

Chair can be an object name. As an object name, it defines 190 items. The word sedan chair appears as well — a type of human-powered transport, for the movement of people. The ones you see in old colonial movies, where a white-dressed man appears to levitate above the ground, thanks to the effort of four indigenous and nameless men. Chair is also the beginning of Chaironeia, a Greek village thirty-five kilometres east of Delphi, and of Chairman Mao Memorial Hall. The suggestions seem endless.

I click on the first suggestion. A Pinterest-like grid of images, each followed by a period, a place of origin, or simply an identifier. A sidebar allows me to filter by ethnic group, material, technique, subject…

A chair from Ghana, nineteenth century. A funerary object in cardboard from Singapore, contemporary. Something from Egypt, Late Period, in stone. It's classified as a chair, but followed by a question mark. Sacred objects beside proto-industrial ones. The list seems endless. So many shapes, materials, places of origin. Who decided to include them in the collection? How did they reach the dark inventory rooms of London? Who decided to call them chairs?".