Entering the Parlour room from 11 Henrietta Street in the Victoria and Albert Museum was like entering a different world frozen in time. The room seemed like the perfect stage for the dystopian world without sun I imagined in my previous essay about an everyday object. The windows that project a dim fake sunlight inside the room, the curtains which no more function rather than to be a mere decoration, the two chairs waiting for a person to sit down that is never going to arrive; all of this catch my attention and as time passed by, more intrigued and confused I felt sitting in that room.
In the beginning, the fake sunlight in the room was what captivated me. I guess it was to make this dining room more realistic, to help the visitors understand how it must felt standing in this room in the XVIII century. The curator does not want us to just observe, but to get immersed in the space. However, I felt that the experience they want us to have was as fake as the sunlight coming from the windows. The fact that we can contemplate ‘the object’ from the inside rather than the outside does not mean that we are closer, on the contrary, I felt distant and lonely confronting the scene in front of me. No one is going to be able to sit in the chairs to have dinner, no one is going to light up the fireplace, no one is going to use the curtains to gain more privacy. Whatever the role of the parlour used to be, it is not anymore, now is just an object of contemplation, not different from the rest of the objects exhibited in the museum, the only thing that changes are the point of view from where you are observing it. I left there with a feeling that the museum was trying to sell me an unreal experience that I would never be able to fulfill.
Another intriguing fact about the parlour are
the blue painted walls: as it is in a museum, you think that is faithful recreation
of the original room. Nevertheless, the curators and designers did not know
which colour were the walls painted, so they speculated that it must be blue,
as it was “a fashionable colour in that period” (1). That make you think what
else might the museum have speculated about, and how easily we take for granted
everything a museum show us as a universal truth. Dunne and Raby theorize about
“the idea of possible futures and using them as
tools to better understand the present” (2), but what if by speculating about
our past the V&A was reflecting about our present and how our present
institution work as well?
The Parlour is a beautiful room, but is also a controlled environment, a place where time stops, past is speculated and the sunlight is coming in all the time. A dining room where nobody eats. The background of a scene never played.
(1) Extract from the audio in the Parlour, from Henrietta 11 street, London of the V&A museum.
(2) Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (2013) Speculative everything. Cambridge: The MIT Press. Pg. 2-3
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