Wax Moulages and the Pastpresence Work of the Dead

Abstract

In this article, I use a nineteenth-century anatomical collection of wax moulages, currently off-staged in the storage facilities in the university where I work, to think about the matter of human remains. Rather than seeing the gross pathology moulages as inert teaching resources, I propose they are agential assemblages, entangled in which are human remains, and that they can be included amongst the dead. I consider their capacity to perform pastpresence work, a particular kind of work of the dead that foregrounds erasures, such as the erasure of the many confined women suffering from syphilis whose bodies were used to cast moulages. This article considers how such pastpresence work might help us be response-able for uncared-for remains, such as the remains of “disappeared” women and infants who died in so-called Mother and Baby Homes, which have reappeared at the center of contemporary Irish public life. At a time when moulages are being reexhibited in museums internationally, I speculate about whether and how the collection might be restaged to perform subversive and utopian pastpresence work, destabilizing the erasures of conventional narratives of medicine and contributing to the crafting of a new and more careful order of things.