Museum Theft

A re-envisioning of the video essay by Jacob Geller

Museum Theft is a 17 minute-long video essay by Jacob Geller about three separate tales of lost pieces of history, and what their impact means for the world we live in today. From endangered bird specimens to a dragon’s hoard of stolen paintings and sculptures to the spoils of British colonialism, Geller impresses the idea of ephermerality, the idea of how once these pieces are lost or destroyed -- that’s it. There is no going back sometimes, no Google search or archival image left to preserve some of these items, they are simply and unchangeably gone. In this day and age of technology, realities like this are often difficult to come to terms with.

I wanted to take this essay and translate it into a printed format of sorts, my first time experimenting with and eventually printing and producing a proper 9x6” saddle-stitch booklet. Everything is hand-cut and bound as well. Geller talks about fire, about smoke, about eyes that search for objects that will never be seen again, eyes that wonder why certain things have been placed in museums so far from their rightful home.

The book is decorated with flowing lines and floating eyes that curl and mix with each other and the text as they trail across the page. These flowing elements occasionally stop to interact with distorted, pixelated images of the discussed subjects, adding emphasis to certain phrases or artworks. I decided to keep everything achromatic save for the image distrotions to add an older, more archival feel to the design.