Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.5673/sip.63.3.5
From Egypt with Love: A Mudbrick, the Ecology of Storage, and the Museum Otherwise
Ana Bezić
; Institute for Contemporary Art, Technical University Graz, Austria
Abstract
The logics of colonial extraction and epistemic control continue to persist in
contemporary museum practices, especially in the spaces of its storage. Focusing on objects
withdrawn from public view, stored in museum storages and closed collections, in this paper, I
argue that storing is not a neutral act of protection, but a continuation of extractive technologies
and an active form of governance that shape relations of value, knowledge, and power.
Through the case of a mudbrick from Egypt, part of the storage collection of the Archaeology
& Coin Cabinet, Scholss Eggenberg, Universalmuseum Joanneum, in Graz, Austria, this paper
examines how the act of storing produces specific temporalities, epistemological absences, and
ontological suspension.
Museum storage practices are often legitimized through discourses of universal care and preservation
“for humanity,” yet they reproduce mechanisms of control and exclusion. Deciding
what is worth saving, exhibited, and repatriated, and what remains invisible and inactive is
inherently about law, authority, and power. Legal and institutional frameworks protect objects
by placing them under regimes of preservation and care, yet this same protection removes them
from circulation, public visibility, and the networks that connects them to living histories,
practices, and societies.
The condition of objects in museum storage resembles what plant biology describes as deep
dormancy, where seeds remain viable yet inactive, awaiting the conditions necessary for germination.
In this framing, stored objects are not merely withheld epistemologically, but ontologically
suspended, held in a state of potentiality. Their removal from circulation reveals an
ambivalent condition: while deeply entangled in broader colonial legacies as well as histories of
violence and inequality (Basu, 2024; Vergès, 2024), these objects may also open latent futures,
allowing us to reimagine storage not as an endpoint, but as a living interface where past extractions
intersect with present urgencies and possible reparative futures.
Keywords
museum storage; isolating; deep dormancy; decolonial museology; museum otherwise
Hrčak ID:
347145
URI
Publication date:
27.1.2026.
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