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Contribution short abstract

This presentation outlines a cross-disciplinary arts-based research project involving a collaboration between myself, a visual anthropologist, and Selena Kimball, a visual artist.

Contribution long abstract

This presentation outlines a cross-disciplinary arts-based research project involving a collaboration between myself, a visual anthropologist, and Selena Kimball, a visual artist. The work centres around an unassuming collection of stones found in the archives of the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture. The rocks were gathered in the early 1900s by Erland Nordenskiöld, a Swedish anthropologist who specialised in South American material culture and history. Kept alongside many other indigenous artefacts (baskets, pottery, tools, carvings), they have been sitting undisturbed in the museum’s storage drawers for over a century.

My paper describes our process of re-engaging with this overlooked collection of rocks. While there is scant information in the museum's archives about their provenance or cultural significance, their history is clearly connected to the larger institutional narratives of so many existing ethnographic collections linking anthropology to colonialism, the organisation and management of archives to the administration of order in the world.

This project (also submitted as an installation proposal for the Out of Focus exhibition) calls attention to such practices through upending traditional ethnographic approaches to object labelling and classification. Our collaboration mobilises intimate, personalised, ‘storied’ exchanges of writing and images that reveal the rocks’ significance not through conventional taxonomies, but through embracing their shifting and entangled relationships and encounters over time. We employ exploratory methods of archival research, use Surrealist- inspired practices of collage, automatic writing and ‘involuntary sculpture’, and playfully experiment with the multi-modal practice of ‘redescription’ to theorise and operationalise decolonising, un/commoning methods within the ethnographic museum.