Objects and Things

"The testimony of objects, in other words, brings into the present not just what was lost but the tangible presence of loss, loss in the form of a thing. The recovery of history and its evidence is an imaginative and performative act. This is a fact often lost in the empirical presumptions of museums. The objects are not whole ("this is all that's left") and have lost the context in which they were used. Once staged -- in the theater or the museum -- they are no longer identical to themselves."

"Presenting Objects, Presenting Things," Alice Rayner