i went to the new V&A East Storehouse

it was pretty cool to see! here's some scattered thoughts:

• the former Olympic zone is a weird place. simultaneously desolate, difficult to navigate, pleasant & full of little bars, and oppressively corporate. people are trying so hard to produce some vibes, but unfortunately half of them are people with too much money drawing up plans in climate controlled offices elsewhere.
• it's cool to see some of the workings of the museum. here's how stuff is packed, here's a forklift, here's someone sorting out some hangers in the conservation room, here's an explanation of the museum's numbering system...

• and also catalog systems are pretty fascinating, just thinking about maintaining a database for 200 years is a big thought to have, even without the worry of having to keep all that metadata connected to a big pile of physical objects. you start to understand why they used to just write the numbers on the object!
• turns out a museum can be a good time even without an exhibition or a narrative or an organising throughline. you can just... look at stuff & go "oh! that's cool!". and if you wanna find out more you can look at the catalog number on the tag & look it up on the website.
• (placeholder for a link to a post about other people visiting the science museum stores, which are even more of this experience, and much less of a place intended primarily for visiting)
• but nevertheless curators can't help themselves, and so there were a number of plaques, explanatory signs, outreach projects, thoughtful juxtapositions, installed galleries with particular things on display, full rooms recreated to understand them in context, etc. i did like how the initial impression was that there was just gonna be stuff, and it was only after you looked at the stuff for a while that the curation started impinging on you.
• but i was reminded of how so much of the learning that is done in these kinds of spaces is done via visitors talking to their friends and family and sharing their experiences with the work. there was a installed instance of the Frankfurt kitchen and seeing it made me talk about how cool it was to see to my friend Arlo... similarly some work by Lee Kang-So which got me to nerd out about pottery sculpture techniques. (this thought also connected to the work thing we had secondarily met up to talk about)

• but maybe i'd learn more from the online catalog if their wifi worked better
• and too, this collective exchange is not just "what this is" but also making sense of it. i appreciated the conversation i overheard about Robin Hood Gardens, talking about how it felt overly voyeuristic. i didn't agree, i think the domestic always feels intimate, and i think there's a lot of value in collecting and treasuring the mundane. mainly watching it i thought about my place, and i thought about all the flats that i had seen when i was attempting to buy it. i thought about the particular style of internal door handle, how i didn't really like it, but that seeing it in this context made me appreciate the heritage it suggests.

• also i collected some funny faces i saw around the place. who's your pal?

• it was pretty busy! we went on a random Tuesday afternoon & had to search for a locker to put our bag in.
• oh yeah, they (reasonably) are stricter than a museum usually is about people taking in bags or food or drink. funny moment passing a member of staff talking into a walkie-talkie: couple standing in the atrium... in the center, on the glass... they have a bag of skittles... they are *eating*... do you copy?
• the cafe: i'm not a big fan of museum cafes, they're generally expensive & loud. i did not find this one an exception. but also it was fine.
• oh! and we played a fun game with the pull out panels of fabric samples near the cafe. pull out one, and try to guess where it was made and how old it is. (the safe answer is : England, 1830s). possibly this game would be less fun if either of us was an expert on fabric history. or even more fun again if both of us were. it's nice to play these kinds of games, i think.