The religion of light

The chemistry exhibition of the Deutsches Museum is a beautiful example in the history of scientific museology. Probably conceived in the late 1960s or at the beginning of the 1970s, it is structured as a travel along the history and the present of chemistry. If the history is represented by the reconstruction of three “spaces of experimentation” (a Paracelsian laboratory and Lavoisier’s and Justus von Liebig’s laboratories reconstructed from etchings appeared in historic sources), the mood changes completely when we enter the “present exhibition”. Any reference to the context of production is crossed out by an unnatural, aseptic white space, where single experiments are arranged in panels covering the whole wall and made visible by a regular and continuous succession of rounded-angle windows. The sense of “walking-through” swiftly changes from a historical perspective to a thematic one. The only interruption of the overwhelming white is a coloured guide-line telling you if experiments are concerned with, say, the atom or biochemistry. It is quite evident that, when planning the exhibition, the curators wanted to play with the eloquence of “walking-through”: in a path made more narrow and consequently constrictive there is no space for evocation. In a space made completely white and regular and suddenly devoid of any human dimension, authority is pretended to be in the order of an “objective structure” and not charismatic. In corridors built with limited visual perspectives and orthogonal curves, objects represented in open spaces (as the models of atom you see in the photo the one of DNA) take advantage of an out-of-time sense of revelation at first suspended and finally made accessible as in an icon.
Light has a special role in the arrangement of the exhibit. From the “dark” of the alchemical laboratory to the supernatural, out-of-history white of the present chemistry, light plays an ambiguous role in establishing relations with historicity of knowledge and grand narratives. We all know that, as a mystical declination of the relationship between man, science, and religion, light was used as a topos by many alchemic writers. If then the exhibit was created after 1968, one could suggest that the “2001: A Space Odyssey”-disturbing-flavour of the present chemistry section is not at all casual, but rather intentional. And one could also suggest that the actual ambiguity of feelings coming from a very simple combination of elements (man-nature; alchemy-chemistry; time-‘out-of-time’; dark-light) was deliberately maximized.