the DIY ethos or thesis is: stay permanent

Abstract

In this conversation over Google Docs, curator Laura de Jaeger and artist duo Ben Caro and Kat Cutler-MacKenzie meander through the process of creating the artistic commission "the DIY ethos or thesis is: stay permanent" for the first instalment of the experimental exhibition-cycle Rooms in Rhymes (2025) at the Contemporary Art Museum of Estonia (EKKM). The commission took the form of a situated research residency at the museum, on the theme of “waiting”, followed by the development of a dual-channel 35mm analogue slide projection incorporating photographs of and staged within EKKM’s archive. Our dialogue is a reflection on contemporary archival and museological work through a DIY, artist-led lens, as well as an act of archiving in itself. We oscillate towards discussions of collaborative methodologies within artistic and museological practices; the limits and potentials of tactics and strategies developed out of the “punk museum era”; the agency of objects; as well as how creative contamination and activation of archives might be found by employing the embodied research methods of intuition and (object) handling.