the museum as palimpsest: a reflection on david sequeira’s grainger museum residency 2021-22

Dr David Sequeira’s Creative Researcher in Residence period in the Grainger Museum is nearly over, as we are in the culminating week of public programming that showcases his research and the many rich perspectives he has brought to the Museum and its Collection through his practice.

David is an artist/curator, and Director of the Fiona and Sidney Myer Gallery at the University of Melbourne. David has undertaken a ‘deep dive into the history and expanse of the collection and the building, exploring issues around high and low art, personal and shared histories, banality and profundity and the persisting impact of incomplete histories’. He titled the Residency #brownmaninawhitemuseum, and has shared his very personal and deeply impassioned process through multiple conversations and performances in the past 2 weeks, with the final one on 26th February.

David began his Residency – the inaugural Creative Researcher in Residence within the new Grainger Museum strategy Radically reimagined – in 2021. Stops and starts to David’s access to the Grainger Museum building through COVID challenges extended the Residency period, such that the public outcomes, including programming and installations, were scheduled for February 2022.

A key aspect of David’s Residency was handing over an almost empty building at the beginning of the Residency (with collections moved offsite to the Museum Store for a period of deepened research and exhibition renewal). This move provided David with something akin to a palimpsest: a museum laid bare. David speaks of how, despite the emptying of the Grainger building, Percy still was immanently present.

Throughout his Residency, David had access to the Archive and Collection (albeit in a reduced capacity because of COVID) and to the knowledge base of the Museums & Collections Team to help him navigate the large collection and its overarching themes and ‘quirks’.

Posting every day of the Residency to his instagram account, David has generated an ongoing virtual conversation over the months about his explorations and radical interventions in Museum and into Percy Grainger’s complex and often deeply problematic legacy.

I personally have felt a huge weight lifted through David’s Residency, and his approach to the collection and themes. As the Curator and Collection Manager of the Grainger Museum from 2017-2020, and the instigator of the tertiary academic programming for the Museum through that time and through to the present, I feel a deep ethical and concurrent professional responsibility that was often difficult to carry with positivity. There is so much about Percy Grainger’s legacy – from his musical compositions, the architecture of the building, and much of the diverse collections, to the powerful incentive and example for democratic and experimental music compositional and performance practice – that is rightly to be celebrated. And yet the undeniable racism that emerges in some of his writing must be addressed. David’s call to attention: #brownmaninawhitemuseum lets us peel back the history and look under the lid, in an entirely liberating and exciting creative move. Most importantly for me, there was a tangible sense of ‘sharing the load’ when David stepped up to tackle this very challenging Residency. There were more voices in there, talking about the hard stuff, calling out the impossible stuff. It is a powerful strategy, that seems both necessary and joyful: opening up, exploding outwards, with a multivocal conversation about complex and problematic legacies and how we can make them work for us in the best sense, today.

Experiencing the Grainger Museum anew through David’s ‘lens’ – one which goes far beyond the visual, and embraces sound and music, dance and movement, robust dialogue and receptive contemplation – I have immensely enjoyed the journey that the Residency has taken me on. As the instigator of this pilot programme, I felt responsibility to ensure that our aspirations were realised, particularly in the realm of the academic and student engagement that we hoped would be triggered and experienced through David’s Creative Research. As the Residency moved into ‘virtual’ mode in the 2nd half of 2021, I was deeply concerned about the loss of opportunity for people to actively experience it… My fears were completely allayed, however, as David jumped enthusiastically into the many conversations with academics and hundreds of tertiary students, through curriculum delivered online. Through talks to a huge range of subjects, from Exhibition Management, to Critical and Curatorial Practices in Design, through to Digital Dance and A History of Sexualities, University of Melbourne students were introduced to David’s powerful ‘pushback’ of the Percy Grainger narrative (or rather, the multiple Percy Grainger narratives), and to pose their own questions and challenges in this liberating context.

Bravo, David!

VCA Digital Dance students (academic lead Megan Beckwith) in the Grainger Museum at the start of Semester 2 2021: the last class to experience the museum f2f before a COVID lockdown reshaped the semester to being fully virtual. These dance students were able to present their creative responses to the Grainger Museum at the very end of 2021.

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