Museum of Modern Art

The Museum of Modern Art appears in a family trip to New York, where Yolandi, her mother Lottie, and Nora visit Will and Zoe. The museum is the setting for a Marina Abramović performance exhibition that leaves its visitors unsure how to proceed through a narrow doorway occupied by two performers.

The Exhibition and Its Bottleneck

The group encounters a room where visitors have gathered and are waiting to move on. The only passage to the next room is a narrow doorway, with two nude performers standing face to face in it. The arrangement makes moving between rooms a public, awkward negotiation: no one has gone through, and the crowd grows restless as it wonders how to pass. The account presents the museum not through its collections or institutional history, but through this charged threshold and the visitors’ response to it.

Lottie Leads the Way

While the others are distracted by the exhibition and by spotting familiar public figures, they lose track of Lottie. Will notices her at the doorway. She turns sideways to pass between the performers, then pauses rather than hurrying through. She looks at each performer in turn, smiling and nodding in greeting, before looking back to the waiting group with an encouraging smile. Her unhurried politeness changes the scene: what had held the crowd in place becomes a passage the others can follow, one by one.

Narrative Significance

The episode makes the Museum of Modern Art a setting for a small but decisive act of example. Lottie does not explain how the group should behave; she demonstrates a way through by meeting the performers as people and treating the passage as traversable. The scene’s comic tension—an entire crowd stalled by a doorway—resolves through her composed attention, and the family follows her into the next room. In the account of the trip, the museum visit thus becomes a moment of shared movement organized by Lottie’s quiet initiative.