Museums in Motu in the Anthropocene: From Active Space to Spatial Actions

Abstract In this article I offer an in motu rhetorical analysis of museums in the Anthropocene. Instead of discussing curations inside museums in detail, I examine spatial and rhetorical dialogues between the Jinhuagong National Mine Park, a fifty-year-old coal mine, and the Yungang Grottoes, a Unesco cultural heritage site. Pulling together threads from Heidegger and Chinese environmental philosophies, I redefine museum as spatial action with three entangled lines of action: building, dwelling, and saying. Unlike in previous studies of museum as active space, museum in motu turns museum into museuming—a gerund indicating ongoing actions adapting to contingencies. Through museuming, human beings keep exploring the meaning of building in diverse practices of dwelling and adapting to relational existence with the more-than-human world.