TO SEE IS TO TOUCH

It’s the blanks and gaps that to me actually represent what poetry is – the connections between seemingly unconnected things – as if there is a place and might be a map to thought, when we know there is not.
– Susan Howe, Pierce-Arrow 



Welcome to Museum Vindianum at HEIRLOOM center for art and archives. 



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There’s not much left of Bishop Münter’s Münterianum at the bishop’s residence on Nørregade in Copenhagen. You can still see the lid of an Etruscan urn set into the entrance gate, next to a fragment of a runestone found in a dry stone wall in Lund and one of the cannonballs that followed along with the incendiary rockets in the British bombardment of 1807. But the twelve Egyptian reliefs with hieroglyphs that lined the entranceway have weathered away in the cold and the rain. The magical formulae, protection from sickness and scorpion bites, flaked off; the reliefs were finally removed in 1908.

The Wormianum, a museum which stood on the opposite side of Vor Frue Plads by Kannikestræde, has also gone. After Ole Worm died of plague in 1654, the collection was sold to Frederik III and soon vanished into the massed objects of his kunstkammer. The royal despot was the founder of Danish museum culture: an excessive, manic collector, his collection remains the core of the country’s museums to this day.

While the Enlightenment’s dedicated collections continued to bring the distant near, to reveal to us what was right under our noses, they were scientifically ordered according to new taxonomies, making legible otherwise immeasurable expanses of time. The museums pointed to hidden connections – whether in the people of earlier eras, life in foreign nations, the geological cycle, the evolutionary transformations of zoology, or in art museums ordered according to botanical principles: a picture book of all that is beautiful and strange in human life.



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In the summer of 1888, a woman came to the museum. In the midst of industrialisation, her charred remains had been found buried with an intact belt box beneath a great burial mound that, after standing for 3,000 years high above the fjord near Frederikssund, had now been ploughed under to streamline the workflows of the already time-saving cast-iron swing plough, the better to optimise and future-proof a sustainable agricultural operation.

Hear what was found, saved by time and chance, when the lid of the box, ornamented with a star-sun, held fast by verdigris at its base, was opened: three small stones, some iron pyrite, a sprig of rowan, some charcoal, the ash of the ancestors. Remnants of a weasel, the right and left foot of a hedgehog, vertebrae from a smooth snake, a raven’s windpipe. And see: a split horse’s tooth and a lynx-claw joint, both rubbed until visibly worn – things of ritual, of trance. She was perfectly familiar with the invisible.



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Vindianum is a museum. An heirloom, let’s call it. But is it a witch’s bag and a belt box? Yes; maybe the museum’s objects are instruments of transcendence, too. Its order is associative yet displays the rigour of science, formed through modulations of thought, full of blank pages and empty spaces, like a poem.

Vindianum will, like Münter’s and Worm’s museums, disappear. The objects are so small that they’ll fall into the gaps between everything else in the world and be lost. But until 28 August 2026, a selection will be shown here. So take a seat at the table.


Only three words remain to be said: riddling things, speak.

Christian Vind is a researcher in his own practice, travel writer and museum founder. 

Notes: 
Howe, S. (1999). Pierce-Arrow. New York: New Directions Publishing.

Schmidt, V., Prof. Dr. Phil. (1908). Tillæg. Fortegnelse over Den Bispegaarden tilhørende af Biskop, Dr.Theol. Fr. Münter til Sjællands stifts biskoppers embedsbolig testamenterede i Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek opbevarede samling af ægyptiske indskrifttavler. Copenhagen.

Schepelern, H.D. (1971). Museum Wormianum. Dets forudsætninger og tilblivelse. Odense: Wormianum.

Varberg, J. (2015). “Kvinden i dyreham”, Skalk, nr. 5, October 2015, pp. 3–6. Højbjerg.