Marisa Karyl Franz, DSR alumna and Clinical Assistant Professor of Museum Studies at New York University, delivered “Edenic Fallout: The Aesthetics of the Atomic Apocalypse” as guest speaker in the DSR Lecture Series. Her lecture considered contemporary art practices related to sites of nuclear contamination, particularly focused on Chornobyl, to explore the aesthetics of post-human rewilding. Previous publications include “Ordinary Hauntings in Irradiated Land,” Apocalyptica Vol. 2 No. 1 (2023): Special Issue: Nuclear Ghosts. Franz’s first book, Near and Desired Things: Shamanism in Late Imperial Local Siberian Museums (forthcoming, Cornell University Press), examines the work of local museums in documenting local life to local people—presenting them their familiar things in an unfamiliar museological and Euro-colonial epistemology. PhD student Madelyn Heise, whose interests lie in the anthropology of religion and who is researching the ritual significance of funeral flowers through a multispecies lens, sat down for a conversation with Professor Franz. This article has been edited for length and clarity.
You completed your BA, MA and PhD in religious studies departments and now you are a professor in NYU’s Program for Museum Studies. How does your training in religious studies influence your approach to museum studies?
Religious studies gives me an appreciation for systems of value. I still work on material religion in museums, but more broadly, the things I look at in museums are often everyday things. They’re personal, intimate, relational things, which create and sustain systems of value that may not be immediately apparent at without being embedded within those networks.
The still-life is a recurrent motif in some of your recent publications. What is the relationship between still-life, your concept of “decay-life,” and the aestheticization of death and decay?
Growing up, I found still life very boring— that’s usually a sign that I need to learn something about it. The more I read, the more I became so interested in the ways in which still life is so entangled in decay.
The perfectly ripe fruit is perfectly ripe at this moment, but we know it's going to rot. The idea of stilled life, or dead nature, brings us into this space where we're having to reflect on the transience of things, ourselves included.
I’m compelled by decay and dying as embodied and durational experiences. Still life art, unexpectedly to me, became a way of thinking about these experiences aesthetically while challenging norms of beauty and permanence.
What led you to pursue professional training as a death doula, and how has it influenced your approach to the study of death and dying?
I started teaching a class in museum studies called “Death, Decay, Destruction”, then the pandemic hit. New York was hit really hard and there was this sort of omnipresence of death. I didn't feel like I had any training on how to speak with people who may be experiencing bereavement simultaneously with this class. I felt like if I wanted to responsibly continue teaching, I needed some kind of training to allow me to navigate the ways in which the course was impacting students personally, rather than just academically.
I had Virginia Chang, a death doula based here in New York, come and guest lecture in my class, and she was amazing. She had graduated from the University of Vermont's end-of-life doula program, so I signed up. It helped me in my teaching and gave me a vocabulary for addressing the slippages that happen between our academic mode and our personal mode. I don't think we should object to them, but I think a lot of times we don't have training for how to be responsive and responsible. There are certainly things that still come up that I feel like I have no training to address. But in the context of this class I teach, I found it really helpful.
It also informed how I think about object care and community care. I think museums are a deathscape. Most of the things in museums are connected and entangled with death, whether that's because they're archaeological materials, posthumous gifts, bequeathments, or historic house museums.
How do we think about our role, working with material objects as entangled in the care work of the dead, and also the descendants and generational future spreading out from them? Any object is rooted in a larger network of people and places and things and plants and animals and ecologies. To me, it makes the stakes of what we're doing much higher.
In museums one of the paramount goals is the material protection of things for the future. Things like death, decay, and destruction have canonically been avoided at all costs. How do we frame them as generative possibilities?
By allowing things to undergo these durational processes, we're actually creating space for new things and alleviating some of the burden of the past.
I'm not anti-preservationist, but I do think there is a real crisis in a lot of museums around storage space, and the capacity of people to responsibly care for the collections they have. We might alleviate some of that burden by embracing a kind of loss-positive approach.
Your research takes hauntology in new and exciting directions. You move beyond Derrida’s original framing (as remnants of the past made present) towards a more affective form of haunting, one which you have called “haunted intimacy”. Where do you hope to see the field of hauntology move in the future?
When we're talking about hauntology in a sort of affective space, which I am, it's often rooted in experiences of trauma and violence. There has been some amazing work on it, but I also think there's a way in which we can think about haunting as an intimacy, as a care practice, as holding on to meaningful relationships. I want there to be more space for that. That’s part of my larger thinking about death care work, that it doesn't only have to be sad and scary. Of course it is those things, but it can also be something connected to the joy and celebration of someone's life, the memory of love and the feeling of kinship that can transcend and be intergenerational.
I think that's also a nice way for us to think about our ethics in museums because so many of the things in museum collections are people's stuff. They were things that they cared about and put in some effort to keep them in good condition. If we open the door to thinking about the ways in which haunting keeps things in relationship with those who valued them, and those who cared for them, we need to be attentive to that affective care that preceded their reframing as museum objects.
Museums, at their best, offer a kind of window, a glance into the life and thinking of somebody else. If we're being attentive to our ethics, that doesn't only stop at the living people we're confronted with, or living beings, or nature. There's never a point where ethics are done.
