LIFE OF THE SKUŠEK COLLECTION

The history of the Skušek Collection is quite unusual. It was acquired by Ivan Skušek Jr, a Slovene officer of the Austrian-Hungarian fleet during his time as prisoner of war in China under circumstances not yet fully revealed. The collection included a great number of valuable items such as furniture, architectural ceramic objects as well as a scaled wooden model of a Chinese pavilion, porcelain, items of daily life such as pipes and other smoking equipment. The provenance is not completely clear, but the imperial court has been suggested. In China still, Ivan Skušek met his wife Tsuneko Kondo Kawase/Marija Skušek. They left China soon after his release and arrived in Ljubljana and the collection they brought with them. The following years the couple lived in different flats. The collection became part of their life, living room and representational stage at the same time. Photographs tell the stories of prominent visitors and receptions. Attempts to have a museum built to present their collection permanently however, failed. Thus, the flats where Skušek lived became lived-in museums. The history of the collection invites a wide range of research questions: What was the significance of collections of Asian art? How were they presented and how were they received? What was the role of women who often acted in the background as collectors and curators? How did the superimposition of private room and public representation actually take place in our specific case? The project aims a complete reconstruction of the history of the Skušek Collection. It begins with the acquiring in China, continues with the shipping and the events in Ljubljana. There, the focus will be on the different locations and the architectural setting for their presentation. We will search private and municipal archives for plans, then survey still existing architectural objects and compare the results with photographic material from image archives. Based on the results of this research we will create 3D-models of the respective architectural settings. In a parallel process the object from the collection will be digitised. Most of the items are in the store room of the Slovene Ethnographic Museum (SEM). Some sets of furniture or porcelain has been scattered to various museums and collections. Digitisation will allow to re-unite these sets through the virtual. In a final step the digitised objects and the digitally reconstructed architectural settings will be united. The living spaces where the Skušek couple practically acted like members of the collection like actors on a stage, will be transferred into an Augmented (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) environment. This final step however, is more than just a reconstruction of a collection in an architectural environment. It is about the reconstruction of the historical environment, the Zeitgeist which manifested in architectural context.