The Florence Annex — The 8 Museum

established august–september 2024

coordinates 43°46′17″N, 11°15′11″E

collection 97 works accessioned; a selection of eight exhibited below

holdings on permanent loan from the built environment of Florence; not one has been moved

premises the city of Florence, on both banks of the Arno

hours continuous; the museum advises against attempting the annex in the hour the tour groups reach the Duomo

admission attention

An annex of The 8 Museum is a city in which encounters have occurred. Unlike the annexes of other institutions, it holds no building, employs no staff, and has acquired nothing. Its collection is held on indefinite loan from the world and remains installed where it was found — on street-number plates in the Florentine style, red enamel, gold on plaster, and chalk — maintained, without their knowledge, by the residents, the weather, and the municipal services of the city itself.

The Florence Annex was established over three days in late August and early September 2024. Ninety-seven works were accessioned in a city where several million photographs are taken each year of other things; the committee records, without complaint, that not one person asked what the practitioner was looking at. Florence contributes the museum's finest holding of the blue-and-white civic number plate, a form the annex shares with Lucca and Siena, its neighbours in the Tuscan paperwork of 2 September 2026. Each of the annex's works was photographed in situ, untouched, under existing conditions, and left exactly as it was. Visitors to Florence are advised that the collection remains on public display. Every work was last verified on the day of its encounter; what the weather, the council, and the ordinary attrition of the world have since done to them, the museum does not undertake to know. The register records the encounter, not the object; an encounter, once entered, is beyond the reach of the weather.