The Lucca Annex — The 8 Museum

established august 2024, inside the walls

coordinates 43°50′35″N, 10°30′11″E

collection 180 works accessioned; a selection of eight exhibited below

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

premises the walled city of Lucca and the four kilometres of rampart around it

hours continuous; the walls are open to bicycles at all hours

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 remains permanently installed where it was found — on marble number plates, enamel, the green of pharmacy signs, and blue tile — and is maintained, without their knowledge, by the residents, the weather, and the municipal services of the city itself.

The Lucca Annex was established in late August 2024, across four days that produced one hundred and eighty works — a rate the committee attributes to the city being entirely enclosed, so that every walk returned, sooner or later, to eights it had already noted and was obliged to pass. The Renaissance walls are the only annex premises the museum holds that can be circumnavigated on foot in an hour; the committee has done so, twice, and reports the same eights each time, which it considers a point in the city's favour. The annex was among the first in Tuscany, ahead of Florence and Siena, whose paperwork was completed the same day as its own. Each of the annex's works was photographed in situ, untouched, under existing conditions, and left exactly as it was. Visitors to Lucca 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 deaccessioned, the museum does not undertake to know.