Serrano Rivas, Leonor; (2025) How We May See in a Chamber Things That Are Not. Exhibitions as Instruments for Imagination. Doctoral thesis (Ph.D), UCL (University College London).

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Abstract

The starting point of the project was an attempt to define how far a visual work’s parameters change if it uses atypical auxiliary sources—such as magic or beliefs, experimental film and light projection—or refers to and draws on experience that belongs to another time in our history, in the face of modern and widely explored ways of constructing its contextual content. The idea was to go beyond the epistemological rules of the visual work and to extract from it—or build into its structure— other factors that together would create a new quality and a new genre of artistic creation, beyond the passive, static form of a museum presentation. A conscious revision of reality and its means occurs when we impersonate the procedures that brought the dogmas and assumptions we use when looking at the world around us. In order to challenge these methods, this hybrid thesis examines the ways in which knowledge was produced and presented before de advent of scientific and academic practices. Based on the assumption that we may find new realities underneath if we change the scope, this work analyses both mechanisms of assimilation and production of meaning in the period of Magia Naturalis, mainly because at that time artisans, craftsmen, herbalists, augurs and astrologers still fed into philosophers and scientists alike. But how is this making still connected to our time and thinking? Disguised beneath the structure of a play, this report conceals a magic trick within—as the title suggests—and places the spectator, reader or beholder at its centre. It requires the reader to look into past and future with eyes closed while the theatrical set merges, populated with artworks, into a pre-scientific methodology to produce new knowledge amidst disorientation and new convictions amidst doubt in times of quick change. It might take time and effort to understand that this is a critique of the Enlightenment and the forms of knowledge produced during this time. But given that its shape follows that of artistic production, the act of translating, copying and referencing permeates everything, creating a sense of familiar repetition. To what extent can the work of art still change how we perceive reality?

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