...The Archaeology of Domestic Life, SMAC - Staatliches Museum für Archäologie Chemnitz, test that theory to extreme levels, and also expand it beyond furniture and furnishings to all aspects of domestic arrangements and domesticity over the past 30,000 years... For all that, certainly for us, there are innumerable excellent reasons for an exhibition exploring domestic arrangements and domesticity, domestic life, over that past 30,000 years, or indeed longer, for the Staatliches Museum für Archäologie Chemnitz, SMAC, there are and were three very specific reasons: on the one hand the questions regularly posed by visitors in context of the models of the earliest houses presented in the permanent exhibition as to how life was lived on a practical, daily basis in such houses, questions models alone can't explain and explanations which a permanent exhibition can't approach rather which must be elucidated alongside that permanent exhibition; and which is also very nice, and very apposite, reminder that a photo of an interior space in a high-gloss magazine, a catalogue or a social media feed transmits absolutely no information as to how well, bad, comfortable, et al, one lives in that space, nor as to the actual relevance, function and value of the various settings and objects, just what objects one has and how they are arranged...
