I’m Glenn Adamson, former Head of Research at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and I sat on the panel that commissioned this artwork, ‘The Globe’, by Los Carpinteros, two Cuban artists now working in Madrid.

For me, ‘The Globe’ is a kind of metaphorical object, most obviously a globe of the earth with lines of latitude and longitude curving across its surface, but you could also see the structure as a bookshelf, a place to store knowledge. You might imagine it as the dome of an observatory, a place for looking out at the stars. Or, perhaps, and this is maybe the most important reference for the artists – you could think of it as a prison. And in fact, it refers, specifically, to a prison design that was invented by a man named Jeremy Bentham during the Enlightenment, which was called the Panopticon: a big prison with hundreds of people in cells all around its edges and only a single guard, a single warden, sitting in the middle looking out at all these prisoners. And the reason it’s a powerful idea is that all of those prisoners need to think that at any moment they might be observed, so they need to behave. So, the Panopticon is a structure that imposes discipline or control on a large number of people from one central position, and this is a powerful idea because it connects to the idea of the Enlightenment itself.

We think of the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement that sought to illuminate the entire world, and it involved a kind of intellectual effort to collect information and knowledge from every possible source, and also to organise it into a rational and rigorous system: languages, religions, history, politics. All those things could be understood and managed. So the idea here is that the Enlightenment is both a move to understand things but also an attempt to control them, and therefore, there is a negative side, which is that Europe is trying to exert its control through the forces of empire on places like Latin America and the Caribbean where the artists are from.

So, what ‘The Globe’ then is, is a space in which to reflect on this history, and to think about the good and bad things that the Enlightenment has handed down to us. It is a place where one can sit and think about the 18th century, the 21st century, what these two times have to do with one another.

Marjorie Trusted, Senior Curator of Sculpture at the V&A.

Well this is a really remarkable sculpture. He’s got a very strange expression, I think most people would wonder who was being portrayed. Why has he scrunched up his face like this? This is actually one of a series of heads, 69 altogether were made in the 1770s, more or less.

They were made by a very unusual sculptor called Franz Xaver Messerschmidt; he was Austrian and he trained fairly traditionally. In the beginning he actually had commissions from the Austrian court, the court of the Empress Maria Theresa, but then something happened in the early 1770s. He seems to have undergone some kind of crisis and he ended up making these so-called character heads. They were called character heads after his death in fact.

We don’t know if they were meant to be partly self-portraits, because one of the contemporary accounts – somebody who visited him – says that he felt he was possessed by spirits or demons and that he made these heads to, in a way, exorcise these demons.

These busts were almost done privately. They were never sold, they were never part of the commissioning process that you would associate with works of art in the 18th century.