APSARA DI QUINZIO: 

Here we have The Famous Last Words by Paul Sietsema, a kind of letter that you might find in a lost message in a bottle. 

NARRATOR: 

Curator Apsara Di Qunzio.  

DI QUINZIO: 

He envisioned an individual living on a remote island in the South Pacific. Sietsema essentially rewrote the text from various different texts. Thor Heyerdahl’s travelogue, Fatu-Hiva: Back to Nature; Henri Michaux’s opium diaries; the texts of the art historian Wilhelm Worringer;  

But all of these texts are seamlessly pieced together through his own diaristic account. So the letter is explaining what daily life might have been like on this remote island.  

The people who were living in the South Pacific were not representing themselves to Western cultures; people in Western cultures, such as Thor Heyerdahl, traveled to these distant places, wrote diaries about these people and the customs that they had, and then brought them back. 

And it’s through this Western mediation, that the understanding of these artifacts or these people or this culture gets increasingly distanced and abstracted.