Catastrophic Snow Globes as Oneiric and Mnemonic Gadgets (original) (raw)

While at first glance, snow globes might seem trite or trivial objects, on closer reflection, they are revealed to be symbolic realms that provide clues to the desires, dreams, nightmares, and memories of the cultures that produce them. When we consider snow globes as products and reflections of the social world and the individual's place within it, it is not surprising that some artists and designers use these objects to depict some of the darker sides of contemporary life. Considered in this essay are snow globes of catastrophe, representing loss and malevolence, which trouble the notion of snow globes as comforting keepsakes. Here, I argue for a reading of snow globes as oneiric and mnemonic gadgets that magnify our human dramas and disasters, induce memory, melancholy, and nostalgia, and allow us to see our fears and our nightmares more clearly, exposing the relationships between matter and memory, objects and persons. Everything is strange. Things are huge and very small. .. We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver. —Virginia Woolf, The Waves (2000). When the gigantic is ignored, fails to mesmerize, or threatens to overwhelm us completely, we turn to miniature. This turn provides on the one hand, for a jolt in perception that allows us to feel large and in control, in order to become temporary tyrants, to be gentle, or to mock. On the other hand, on encountering a miniature (Figure 1), it is impossible not to mentally shrink your own body and to place this abbreviated version of yourself in its landscape. There is something appealing in this shift in experience—vertigo of time and space—but also something frightening. When we encounter worlds in miniature, we become simultaneously aware of our strength and our vulnerability, and the ease with which we can pass between the two states. Recently, there has been a new wave of artists and designers who have begun to experiment with the creation of miniature disasters to heighten these sensibilities. They do so by creating a certain type of tiny catastrophe, those captured inside of snow globes. These projects attempt to play on but also to remove the kitsch from their choice of material; these are works of sincerity. If winks are made in their designs, they are conspiratorial winks, not idle gestures.