REFRAMED: Archiving Primary Emotions

An ongoing research into the emotional foundations of trust —
where decorative objects become evidence of what we once knew instinctively.

The Reframed series functions as a field of inquiry within the Wunder Kammer.
Where traditional museum classifications are concerned with style, period, or technique, this collection focuses on the emotional origins of objects.
Each piece is read as a residue of an early stage of human consciousness — a moment in which trust, dependency, and tenderness had not yet been corrected by the logic of adulthood.

The recontextualisation of these objects — vases, ceramic animals, domestic ornaments — serves as a method for tracing primary emotions before socialisation.
Not as nostalgia, but as fieldwork.
The aesthetics of the everyday are reconsidered as an archive of pre-rational affective structures: traces of how human beings once looked, felt, and believed that the world was inherently good.

Reframed is therefore not a collection of objects, but an exercise in perception —
an inquiry into how beauty, vulnerability, and trust intersect at the point where culture ends and humanity begins.

Context and Position within Contemporary Research

The Reframed collection situates itself within a broader lineage of artists who have examined the affective and domestic dimensions of material culture.
From Annette Messager and Mary Kelly, who redefined the private sphere as a site of female knowledge, to Niki de Saint Phalle and Joana Vasconcelos, who reappropriated ornament and kitsch as expressions of autonomy — all explored the emotional and political charge of the everyday object.

While these predecessors politicised intimacy and care, Reframed returns to a more fundamental level: the pre-social origin of emotion.
It does not analyse how feelings are expressed, but how they existed before language — before the codification of trust, shame, and self-control.
In this sense, the project departs from the ironic strategies of Pop and Camp and introduces a post-ironic framework, in which tenderness, dependency, and vulnerability are not viewed as sentiment, but as forms of knowledge.

The collection reads decorative objects — vases, figurines, domestic ornaments — as archaeological traces of affect.
Each object is reframed as an index of an early human condition: the ability to trust before distrust, to feel before reflection, to belong before separation.

This approach distinguishes Reframed within current artistic discourse by merging curatorial research with phenomenological fieldwork.
Collecting becomes a method for reconstructing the lost architectures of feeling — transforming the Wunder Kammer from a cabinet of curiosities into a laboratory for emotional archaeology.

Distinct Position

What distinguishes Reframed within this field is its shift from representation to origin.
Rather than engaging with feminist domesticity in the tradition of Messager or Kelly, the project investigates pre-social emotion — the stage in which trust, dependency, and surrender existed before cultural regulation.
It operates beyond irony: neither nostalgic nor detached.
Archiving here becomes a method of inquiry, not preservation — a way to reconstruct emotion as a form of knowledge.
In doing so, the Wunder Kammer evolves from a collection into a knowledge instrument, systematically uncovering the lost architectures of feeling.