Introduction

While practical and technical guides for museum storage have been published for decades, studies that explicitly examine museum storage through an analytical - theoretical, philosophical, ethical - lens are still rare, if not absent. Museums are a product of the forces of democracy: they take treasures that had once been available exclusively to political or intellectual elites, and make them accessible to all. Since the museum effects a symbolic redistribution of treasure by making it visible to the people, the act of display becomes a powerful political gesture. In the popular imagination, it is only the objects in the galleries that have a 'life': objects in the store lie entombed, inert and disregarded. But museum spaces have always had been organised along gradations that are more complex than the simple binary of display versus the store. Museums and archives are not interchangeable and the differences between the institutions should not be underestimated when drawing a comparison between them.