The Museum of Microaggressions

The Museum of Microaggressions(1)  is a project by Pedro Gomes that merges the concept of a museum — or an institutional system for presenting content — with a nostalgic view of 1970s decorative arts.
Understanding the museum as a living space of interaction and cultural community building, Pedro Gomes explores the idea of a mechanism that welcomes, operates, and validates societal or collective expression. In a personal — though not biographical — way, the artist pays homage to some of the classic exhibition display devices (citing Carlo Scarpa’s pedestals, among others), while simultaneously invoking the popular culture of the 1970s and the aesthetics of bad taste design, with its pronounced celebration of ornament, excess, and artifice. One might say that the glorification of density, which defined that era, still stands today as a synonym for prohibition, failure, and a rejection of the logic of the controlled environment that the museum institution tends to enforce.
The modernist perception, which viewed ornament as a crime (as Adolf Loos proclaimed in 1910(2)), led, decades later, to experimentation, exuberance, density, and exaggeration, assuming a significant role in the proposal of a new society. Inheriting the transformative spirit of the late 1960s, the belief in new communities —freed from the stifling constraints of modernist norms — never, however, fully materialised. Running up against the socioeconomic context ushered in by the conservatism of the 1980s, the formally lush, eclectic, popular, and disruptive experimentation of the 1970s saw its ambitions bitterly fail, becoming associated with experiences deemed too intense, decorative, and unsettling.
Pedro Gomes revisits this period and focuses on the disappointment of a missed transformation. For the artist, the clash of unfulfilled expectations serves as the engine for a poetic parallel between a universe of collective belief — the modernist paradigm that still governs our understanding of exhibition spaces today(3) — and the individual realm of whims and faded illusions.
Gomes orchestrates the paintings, reimagines their supports, and reconceives the space, transforming the entire installation into a unified artwork. By merging foreground expression with the interpretation of a backdrop, the works elevate a group of textiles and wallpapers adorned with antique floral motifs — reminiscent of a domestic environment destined for disposal or neglect. Confined within a narrow field by layers of disparate particles, these elements accentuate the conflict between their inherent exuberance and the rigid vertical stripe imposed upon them.
Likewise, in a gesture that both conforms to and challenges boundaries, the canvases are mounted on a series of placards fashioned from wood scraps and discarded fabric remnants. These structures become intricate and expressive, acquiring three - dimensionality through the deliberate disjunction of surfaces and the elements they bear. Amid roughly painted frames, assorted waste linings, lavish wallpapers, vintage ties, and aged tablecloths, these assemblages assert a powerfully tactile presence, blurring the lines between canvas and support, object and space, to form an immersive whole.
Through this physical — and sociocultural — dramatization of limits, Pedro Gomes unsettles the modernist paradigm’s consensus by invoking the enchanted memory of a vanished time.
Once more, it is essential to highlight that the artist’s motivation extends beyond mere nostalgia for a bygone childhood — it is, rather, a critical reading of an era’s spirit which, despite its forced and fantastical exuberance, ultimately fell short of its aspirations. Within the celebratory embrace of novelty, the intensity of saturation, and the deliberate use of impurity and artifice, we still detect the rigid grid that imposes order on the pattern. However lavish the expression may become, the repetitive structure underlying it persists beneath its surface excess —precisely why the dense floral profusion of the wallpaper never truly transforms the room into an idyllic garden.
The belief in modernism’s revision — which is predicated on an aspirational form of individual freedom — crumbles when confronted with something fundamentally illusory. It relies on a performative enactment of social logic, where the mask or ornament remains superficial and contrived, while the foundational structure persists in its rigidity. Pedro Gomes is particularly interested in the failure of this belief and the disenchantment it continues to evoke today.
Thus, through a mature lens that adopts a Camp(4)  sensibility toward a Kitsch - infused world, his works summon both the resonance of childhood and the insight of considered reflection. They present a critical, conscious, and nostalgic perspective on both the individual and the collective — bearing witness to the divergence between cherished expectations and reality, not in condemnation, but in melancholic celebration.

Sérgio Fazenda Rodrigues


(1)  Microaggression is a clinical term referring to subtle, often brief or routine remarks, questions, or actions—whether deliberate or unintentional—that communicate hostility, prejudice, or disrespect toward marginalized groups on the basis of race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or other identities. While these behaviors may appear innocuous on the surface, they carry a profound psychological weight, contributing over time to anxiety, depression, and diminished self-worth through their cumulative effect.

(2) Ornament and Crime is a seminal work by the Viennese architect Adolf Loos, who argued in 1910 that ornamentation represented a culture of waste and superficiality. The book became a cornerstone of modernist ideology, which championed a social revision rooted in the primacy of functionality. Modernism, guided by principles of efficiency, purity, order, and progress, embraced a mechanistic worldview — even a kind of reverence for the machine—amid the prevailing belief that a new world urgently needed to be envisioned and constructed.

(3) Consider, for instance, the enduring dominance of the White Cube model, which is still regarded today as a benchmark of quality in exhibition design. Repeated ad nauseam, often arbitrarily and inconsistently, this theater of supposed neutrality creates an uncritical, sterile, and timeless pedestal for the alleged glorification of the artworks it houses. Today, far removed from the historical realities that originally shaped it, its widespread adoption amounts to little more than a conceptually hollow commercial strategy.

(4) Consider what Susan Sontag notes in her 1961 book Against Interpretation, where she identifies Camp as an aestheticized way of viewing the world—expressed not in terms of beauty, but rather in terms of the degree of artifice. In her understanding, the Camp sensibility is rooted in a kind of failed seriousness, achieved through an intensified blend of excess, the fantastical, passion, and naiveté.