Past event

Synthetic Forever: White Suits, Fatbergs, and the Breathing Museum Global Fellow Lecture with Prof Kirsty Robertson

At the Museum of London, a fatberg, pulled from the sewers below Whitechapel, sits in a plexiglass case, off gassing, breathing. Made of congealed masses of flushed fats, polyester wet wipes, desiccated insect and worm carcasses, antibiotics, drugs, and other waste materials, fatbergs are an increasing threat to subterranean sewer systems, made even worse during the pandemic through the incorrect disposal of synthetic medical face masks. But they are also fascinating objects for museums, as evidential representations of human behaviour in the twenty-first century. They present near impossible challenges of preservation for museum conservation departments. Using the 1951 film The Man in the White Suit, which imagines the outfall from the invention of an indestructible synthetic fabric, as guiding voice from the past, this talk positions the Museum of London fatberg as an unruly artefact unsettling the climate control of the museum, intervening in the false yet crucially maintained separation of outdoor and indoor climates in the museum.

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