52 Stones is an installation of photographs and sound by visual artist Selena Kimball and social anthropologist Alyssa Grossman. The work emerged from their exploration of a peculiar ethnographic collection: hundreds of ordinary rocks taken from South American Indigenous territories in the early 1900s by the anthropologist Erland Nordenskiöld. With no obvious ethnographic function or value, these artifacts were catalogued and tucked away in the archives of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden. After discovering a scientific article by Nordenskiöld in a 1929 issue of the French Surrealists' radical art journal Documents, Kimball and Grossman revisited these stones, examining them as conduits for dormant memories and emergent desires. Building on the French Surrealists' ideas that undervalued and discarded commodities carry traces of the unconscious, the installation challenges deep-rooted imperial taxonomies long used to appropriate the cultural ‘other’, forging an alternative critical-creative framework for decolonising ethnographic museums and archives.
General Assn. is the collaborative duo Alyssa Grossman and Selena Kimball, who for over two decades have been working within, between and beyond art and anthropology. Exploring cultural narratives, site-based histories and their everyday material traces, our work can be viewed as a contemporary form of Surrealist ethnography. Through montage, the cut-up, epistolary dialogue, flânerie, interviews, archival research, auto-ethnography and participant observation, our practice draws upon empirical science and absurd play, scholarly reflection, and the intuitive twists of our own longstanding friendship.
