Contribution short abstract:

My contribution discusses the parellels between the critical intellectual in the University and the decolonial practitioner in the German museum landscape. I then share my experience and artistic practice of using fabulation to engage otherwise with colonial spaces and museum collections.

Contribution long abstract:

In “The University and the Undercommons” Moten and Harney discuss the importance of being neither for nor against Universitas, but rather of creating alternative modes of engagement that both undermine and supplant it. In this contribution, I trace parallels between their portrayal of the critical intellectual within the University, and the decolonial practitioner within the museum landscape in Germany today: where institutions devoted to displaying colonial-era loot invite-then-coopt critical perspectives as a way to virtue-signal while simultaneously sidestepping calls for reparation, repatriation, etc. Drawing ethnographic insight from my artistic practice— including my own choices about whether and how to accept or refuse such invitations—I reflect on the uses of speculation and "critical fabulation" within my films "Rosenfelde" and "The Memory Guardians," as a means of redirecting institutional resources towards opening up alternative ways of engaging colonial spaces and “toxic monuments” respectively.