the lucca annex

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 marble number plates, enamel, the green of pharmacy signs, and blue tile — 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 the practitioner, unable to walk out of it, walked it more thoroughly instead, the walls turning every route back onto streets not yet taken. 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 8s each time — greeted, and not re-entered, each 8 being admitted to the register once — 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 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.

the collection

eight of the annex's 180 works, selected; the rest may be viewed here or on the map