beyond words, the language of Pamuk's museum

What I found most enthralling was the way in which objects removed from the kitchens, bedrooms, and dinner tables where they had once been utilized would come together to form a new texture, an unintentionally striking web of relationships. . . . Their ending up in this place after being uprooted from the places they used to belong to and separated from the people whose lives they were once part of — their loneliness, in a word — aroused in me the shamanic belief that objects too have spirits.

The catalogue section of The Innocence of Objects presents the boxes in sequence just as visitors encounter them in the museum. The displays often include old photographs that Pamuk found in flea markets and the book shows many of these pictures as freestanding images for closer examination. There are identity cards, apartment name signs, photographs of ships on the Bosphorus, postcards of the Istanbul Hilton, collectable cards devoted to footballers and film stars, people posing merrily in groups at social occasions, and families standing proudly together in front of their cars — at a time when car ownership was still a privilege and talking point. Throughout the book, Pamuks adds bittersweet reflections and recollections of his early life in Istanbul.

 For six months in 2011, Pamuk gave up being a writer to concentrate on the museum project; the book has several pictures of him with his creative team. “The more I worked on the museum and realized that I could use the objects to bring out themes beyond those of the novel, the freer I felt.” Both the novel and the museum’s displays can be appreciated independently of each other, though clearly, for those who’ve read the book, a visit to the museum will provide the unusual and greatly affecting experience of a literary world extrapolated into three dimensions on a scale that may well be unique. The objects are eloquent in a language beyond words.  

http://observatory.designobserver.com/feature/the-museum-of-communicating-objects/36588/