Rituals of care and conservation—and their disclosure of the values placed on material culture— are the focus of Amie Siegel’s Fetish (2016). The work depicts the annual nocturnal cleaning of objects in the Freud Museum in London—the final home of psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud and his daughter, child psychoanalyst Anna Freud.

As curator Helena Reckitt describes: “Gloved hands meticulously remove a year’s worth of dust from the psychoanalyst’s artifacts and furnishings, including his famous couch. The care of objects overlaps with that of the psyche and the legacy of a “great man.” Projected onto a dark grey wall, the film evokes a museum vitrine that has been inserted into the gallery. Intimate views of objects and activities have a fetishistic quality, echoing the film’s title and the centrality of practices of fetishism and voyeurism to Freud’s thought. Familiar activities of dusting, brushing, and vacuuming assume rarefied associations in the context of the museum, raising questions about the high status that is accorded to cultural custodianship versus the low value placed on domestic and janitorial labour.”