Life of the Skušek collection: from the living room to the virtual museum

Skušek East Asian collection is remarkable for its size and the quality of objects it contains. Among its several hundred objects, a majority of which are today kept by the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, there are many of imperial quality, exquisite craftmanship and high artistic value. Several individual objects have been studied in detail as part the previous research project East Asian Collections in Slovenian Museums. Aside from the importance of individual objects, the collection itself has an outstanding history, spanning over a century of private and public ownership, being transported and rearranged repeatedly, while being displayed in private living spaces for the largest part of that time. In the lived space of its owners, the Skušek couple, it functioned as a setting, a stage, for intellectual, cultural and artistic exchanges between any number of individuals in the couple’s vast social network (as diverse as the architect Jože Plečnik and the general Rudolf Maister), besides providing a key source of information about East Asian art and cultures to several consecutive generations of Slovenes. Ivan Skušek Jr’s Japanese wife, Tsuneko Kondo Kawase, played a crucial role in this vibrant social life of the collection. A recent discovery of a large, as yet unexamined, archive of Skušeks’ documents, photographs and various archival material in the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, is what has spurned the proposed project, as it will enable us for the first time to reconstruct the history of the Skušek collection in unprecedented detail as well as explore its complex life and biography. The proposed study’s aim is to use the newly found archival materials, subject them to new methodological approaches and present the biography of the Skušek collection as an organic whole. It will analyse not only the objects that ended up in the Slovenian Ethnographic Museum, but also what we call “the stray objects”, those that were gifted away, inherited, taken or lost. By identifying the entirety of the collection and using oral history approaches and interviews, we will also strive to reconstruct the social network around the Skušek collection to assess its importance for the intellectual and artistic dialogue with East Asian cultures at the time. In addition, we will analyse the implications of the unique setting of the collection inside the living spaces of its owners – thereby exploring the intricate interweaving of private and public spaces and the relationship between the collection and its owners in the setting of a lived-in museum. In addition to these, we will focus on the previously underrepresented role of Tsuneko Kondo Kawase as a curator, presenter and interpreter of the collection. Theoretically the study will draw on and contribute to the conceptual framework of a biographical approach, analyses of hidden histories of women in collecting practices, as well as provide an entirely new model to study the lived-in collections. Outcomes of the research will be presented in cooperation with the Austrian partner, the Institute for Architecture and Media (IAM) of the Graz University of Technology, who will use the augmented reality (AR) and virtual reality (VR) approaches to construct and set the individual 3D models of the collection objects in a virtual lived-in museum modelled on the real setting of a former Skušeks’ apartment. The virtual presentation of the biography of the Skušek collection will ensure dissemination beyond the limitations set by the private/public divide as well as of the need of individual objects to travel, while giving the user an unprecedented interactive experience of the actual visit to the Skušek lived-in museum.