As a part of the project “When the Museum is Closed” conceived and initiated by Mårten Spångberg and with cooperation with Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève (MAH), I was invited, alongside other artists, to produce an artwork that operates around the simple idea: what happens when the museum is closed? And, alongside, its regulations, constitutions, paint on canvases, hallways, lost and found clothes, to question its value and potential, now when they are no longer pressured by the human agency, and when, in words of Mårten Spångberg “they can be themselves”.

I decided to work with a doormat of the Museum as a threshold between the public space and the institutional; A painting from the MAH collection made by an unknown author depicting a famous battle / an attempt to enter behind the walls of Geneva known as l’Escalade (1604), and producing a performance which is a staged memory of the whole group having “Good Times” in front the entrance of the museum. The idea was to question what time is in regards to what History remembers, whether there are any other available spatiotemporal dimensions that do not function as an exclusively human flavor of reality, as well as who is allowed to decide who gets to be on which side of the frame when the Good Times come. In other words consider when the museum is closed and utilitarian function is zero, also as a time when we can think of inevitable forms of openness, ones that are prominently open and prepared to stay open regardless of the working hours of the museum. As contingency is not interested in coffee breaks, cleaning schedule, lunchtime, administrative budget cuts, or movement of the earth and sun, therefore allowing for a perspective from which it is possible to genuinely change the power dynamics, and notions of freedom, and to refute retrojective experience of time.

The ending result was a book that represents a collection of all individual attempts to think beyond the usual protocols of time, which became a catalog of the exhibition “When the Musem is Closed”, that remained in the collection of Musée d’Art et d’Histoire de Genève (MAH) accordingly.