The World Explained in the Tropenmuseum

Daniël van der Poel, April 2012

After passing through the Tropenmuseum’s teeming Northern Africa exhibit, The World Explained appears as a spacious, unearthly ambulatory. Previously installed at the 27th São Paulo Biennial (2008) and as part of MACBA’s The Malady of Writing (2009), this third and final stage of Erick Beltrán’s project of creating “an encyclopedia of non-specialized knowledge” gains and produces new meaning in its current anthropological setting.

Erick Beltrán, The World Explained, 2008-2012, as exhibited in 2012 in the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. Photo: author

At one end of the exhibition space, a young anthropologist invites visitors to his desk for an interview. Per Beltrán’s instructions, the questions defy straightforward answers: how is the outcome of a war decided? or what is intuition? Visitors’ reactions vary from hunches to wild speculation – one claimed that the human brain can be completely reprogrammed by sheer force of will. Fortunately, Beltrán is not interested in the scientific validity of these responses. Drawing on micro-history, he says such “personal theories” reflect individual and regional mindsets.

Textbook-like diagrams on the walls further explicate how various types of knowledge come together to form complex ideas, which in turn constitute overarching systems of thought. Beltrán wants to demonstrate how these systems relate to (local) culture by comparing interviews conducted in Amsterdam, São Paulo, and Barcelona. Indeed, the interviews reveal striking differences. For instance, people in Amsterdam tend to regard most aspects of life as the outcome of personal choices, whereas São Paulan responses suggest an ongoing class struggle that dominates individuals.

 

Erick Beltrán, The World Explained, 2008-2012, as exhibited in 2012 in the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. Photo: author

Another diagram lays bare the production process of the encyclopedia. Anthropologists working in the exhibition space edit selected interviews into encyclopedic entries. They combine lemmas collected in each of the three sites of exhibition into small chapters and booklets, which are printed in situ and laid out on long tables, free to be taken. Separate chapters are revealing, not to mention amusing. The final, limited-edition encyclopedia will comprise all lemmas and English translations in book format, emphasizing the totality of the encyclopedia and its internal relations.

Page of the São Paulan section of The World Explained. Photo: author

The out-in-the-open interviews and production processes, the explanatory diagrams, and the neutral page layout impart a sense of transparency that sets The World Explained apart from the more opaque displays found elsewhere in the museum. However, its critical potential as a more open and self-reflexive representation of culture is limited by the fact that some underlying decisions remain designedly private. We do not learn how Beltrán determined the sites of investigation or why particular interviews become lemmas and others are discarded. Such obscurity would probably go unnoticed in an institution of contemporary art, but in the Tropenmuseum, it comes off as something of a methodological flaw in an exhibition that otherwise stands out for its transparency.

Even if Beltrán’s exercise of artistic freedom at times appears dubious within this specific project and institutional context, The World Explained does bring into question the validity of the classic, authoritative anthropological mode of presentation. It does so not only because of its relative openness, but also because its textual, yet personal approach proves a viable alternative to the preoccupation with physical objects that informs the neighboring anthropological presentations. Ironically, these presentations tend to surround material culture with rather immaterial and impersonal texts, while in The World Explained, stories are, elegantly and explicitly, the heart of the matter.