PIN UP: Mariam Issoufou and Adam Caruso on museums

The latest issue of PIN-UP Magazine focusses on museums, posing two essential questions: is the museum a space that can nurture and inspire the imagination or is it a place of ruin where objects go to die? The editors interview Mariam Issoufou, professor of Architecture Heritage and Sustainability at ETH Zurich and her colleague, Adam Caruso, professor of Architecture and Construction. Some of the topics they discuss include the accumulative acquisition policies in museums as well as the capitalistic, colonial implications that are embedded in the DNA of many museums. In discussing a recent studio she taught, At The End Of The World: Museums, Mariam Issoufou said: “Museums aren’t necessarily a core topic of mine in teaching. But, in practice the subject preoccupies me a lot. As an architect, I work mostly in West Africa, but I teach in Europe, where there’s a lot of talk about museums, their successes and failures, and the way they need to reinvent themselves. At the same time, we’re actively exporting that typology to other parts of the world, telling them they should do something that we’re questioning in Europe. This is kind of odd. I’ve long felt an ambivalence and discomfort toward the idea of the museum.”

Read the rest of the conversation.