The lifespan of objects (Julián Roa Triana, Colombia, ITP 2025)

POSTED ON 17/07/2025 IN ITP 2025

Written by Julián Roa Triana, Independent Museum Consultant (Colombia, ITP 2025)

Walking through the Wellcome Trust Gallery at the British Museum, where the exhibition Living and Dying is on display – just behind the world-famous Moai from Rapa Nui Island – there is a long showcase featuring an artwork called Cradle to Grave (2003) by the collective of doctors and artists known as Pharmacopoeia. It consists of an extremely long piece of fabric displaying all the medications a person from Great Britain is likely to consume throughout their lifetime. As one observes the artwork, one begins to notice how documents start to become part of people’s lives: we begin to exist at the very moment someone declares us to be “born alive”, and as life unfolds, we fill it with memories and experiences represented here through photos of parties, travels, family gatherings, rituals, meals, and even a funeral. At its northernmost end, the piece concludes with one of the rites of passage that most human beings on Earth will undergo as a sort of graduation ceremony from life: a document (or ritual object), in this case, a death certificate signed by the attending official.

Written text from the document in the British Museum's archive. Focus of the image is on the word 'British Museum'

The same can be described about the life of the objects that surround us—the ones we make with our hands, acquire or purchase, protect, and collect in the thousands of museums around the world. As one of today’s speakers said, in reference to registration, cataloguing, archives, and libraries at the British Museum: “we are dedicated to covering the full lifespan of the objects and collections under our care.” I can’t help but wonder what would become of the eight million objects housed in this memory institution if it weren’t for the hundreds of museum professionals patiently working on the essential task of documentation, which is crucial for shaping human memory. Each object, each trace left behind by others and by ourselves, each thought and each symbolic action we project onto the things around us, these are what give meaning to the existence of institutions devoted “eternally” to understanding and communicating the millions of human visions of life, our passage through the universe, and death.

International Training Programme standing around a table of archive documents in the British Museum Round Reading Room

The people at the British Museum, who have so generously opened their doors to us for these months, managed to show us today the hundreds of daily actions their team undertakes to keep a vast body of knowledge alive and at everyone’s service. All of us who work in museums pursue a utopia: that our institutions and collections might last forever… something we also know is an impossible dream, since even the most inert of things also die. Yet as long as there are people in the present willing to care for, catalogue, document, and write about the testimonies of the past, those virtuous and wonderfully GLAMorous[1] institutions created by humanity for the benefit of all will continue to exist. I dare speak on behalf of the entire ITP 2025 group in expressing our heartfelt thanks to the Museum staff who shared today’s stories and secrets with us. Not only did we gain valuable technical knowledge, but we also came to understand the spiritual meaning of the work you do each day. Gracias.

ITP participants being shown archive documents in the Round Reading Room
Inside the Prints and Drawings study room at the British Muesum

[1] In the Anglophonic tradition, the acronym “GLAM” refers to Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums, institutions of human memory that interact and intertwine to document and give meaning to reality.