Haunting the Artist's House

Haunting the Artist's House: Sir John Soane's Museum and Isaac Julien's Vagabondia
		Author: Bridget Elliott and Jennifer Kennedy Published: February 2006 Abstract (E): Isaac Julien's Vagabondia continues his post-colonial exploration of the museum as a politically contested site by providing a hauntingly beautiful image of Sir John Soane's Museum and its 'ghostly' inhabitants. With its eclectic collections and eccentric design, Soane's house resists unequivocal interpretations. This essay considers how the architect's house museum complicates the viewer's experience of this film by exploring the ambiguous relationship between material and filmic time and space. keywords: Isaac Julien, Vagabondia , Sir John Soane's Museum, heterotopia, collecting, artist's house, house museum What exactly were you expected to see (or indeed to have become) in the bizarre labyrinth of a place known as Sir John Soane's Museum, a place that seems to bespeak a horror vacui of monumental and encyclopedic proportions and seems obsessed with death and commemoration: a haunted house, teeming with ghosts? - Donald Preziosi, "Seeing Soane Seeing You" (212) A metaphor that runs throughout much of your work is that of a 'haunting', eliciting a preoccupation with questions of history, memory, the phantasmatic and the cinematic ... - Aine O'Brien in conversation with Isaac Julien (49)