A Museum about a Book about a Museum: The “Museum of Innocence” of Orhan Pamuk at the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum of Milan
Kemal Bay would take any opportunity to go to Milan to “experience” (as he put it) the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, which he esteemed “one of the five most important museums in my life” (by the time of his death he had visited 5723 museums) (O.Pamuk, The Museum of Innocence)
In the XIX century two wealthy Milanese brothers, the Bagatti Valsecchi, were so in love with the Renaissance that they built a perfectly Renaissance-style mansion for them, a sort of time-capsule where they could pretend to live into another era.
One day, the Nobel-prize writer Ohman Pamuk discovers the Bagatti Valsecchi museum and falls in love with it.
Inspired by it and by a few other house museums in the world, he conceives a beautiful idea: to collect small objects as if they were poetic remains of the unhappy love-story of an imaginary person, Kemal Bay, and to create at the same time a novel and a real museum, to exhibit those imaginary objects.
The novel is “The Museum of Innocence”, published in 2008, and the museum is the “Museum of Innocence”, opened in 2012 in Istanbul.
Finally, the loop is completed: 29 showcases from the Museum of Innocence are being exhibited at the Bagatti Valsecchi Museum, from January to June 2018.
The imaginary objects return where they were first conceived. The short circuit between the objects, the story and the environment is Escheresque and absolutely fascinating.
It forces us to carefully consider the essence of the museum. The objects are everyday vintage objects, but they are given a new layer of meaning and a new life by the story attached to them and by the fact that they are shown in the museum.
This wonderful exhibition tells us a lot about poetry, storytelling, museums and the power of love to create new truths.
