Museum in a Suitcase

Museum in a Suitcase is a temporary, site-specific installation I started during an artist residency at Nocefresca in Milis, Sardinia (Oct–Nov 2025).

The work began with a question: what would a museum look like if it could travel? If it refused the permanence of institutional walls? Over several weeks, I gathered objects from local residents. The collection grew through conversation and trust, shaped by what people were willing to share and what stories they chose to tell.

The project explores the nature of collections that refuse to settle. It carries what cannot be held still. It is an archive in motion, belonging everywhere and nowhere.

Museum in a suitcase, Milis, sardinia, 2025

Old lira notes. A drum sieve for separating grain. Religious postcards. Handwoven thread crafts. A worn leather wallet. Stamps that once carried letters across the island. Each object was borrowed from residents of Milis during my weeks there, fragments of memory entrusted to a stranger, arranged against red fabric in a vintage case. A portable archive that could be opened, examined, and closed again.

open studio, milis, sardinia

A visitor holds a photograph from someone else's past, examining faces at a celebration decades ago. This is what I wanted: hands in the archive. Unlike traditional museums where objects sit behind glass, untouchable, Museum in a Suitcase invites contact. The work completes itself only when someone reaches in, picks something up, and asks, or simply wonders, what is this? whose was it? what did it mean?

the exile’s archive, melbourne, australia

Back in Melbourne, I started a new suitcase. This time, the objects are ones I collected in Sardinia and carried home: postcards, ephemera, small things given or found. The first museum dispersed, everything returned to its owners. It holds traces of a place I no longer inhabit, gathered by someone who has spent a lifetime learning what can be carried and what must be left behind. The archive that moves. The museum that never settles.