Candelabrum: slip-gridded crypt of the flickering idea

22.1 barbican 

This project comprises a pavilion, a museum and a reading room, split by an internal street. The reading room features a small library, four seats and a void, which envelops the crown of a silver birch.

The museum seeks to foreground the uncanny and the uncertain, and aims to subordinate the object in favour of the subject. Its only exhibits are two candelabra. They span its basement and ground-floor levels, and are fixed to the roof and floor structure.

Visitors, or subjects, are invited to contemplate the perennial flames, and to engage whatever psychic exhibition their minds produce in response. In doing so, the museum hopes they might conduct a transient, internalised curatorship of their own subjectivity, cast somewhat askew – i.e. displaced or decentred – by the museum’s design.

Felix Garner-Davis