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- Convenors:
-
Andrea Scholz
(Ethnological Museum Berlin)
Roman Singendonk (University of Osnabrueck)
Mariam Bachich (Ethnological Museum Berlin)
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- Format:
- Panels
- Location:
- SO-D315
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 15 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Stockholm
Short Abstract:
Relationships between European museums with non-European collections and migrants as heritage communities form part of the postcolonial turn that encompasses primarily ethnological museums. The panel focuses on the chances and challenges of such relations and their social and political implications.
Long Abstract:
European museums host plenty of involuntary migrants: objects that were collected during the last centuries in non-European countries, many of them were acquired in the context of colonialism. The critical wave of asking for the provenance and future of this legacy particularly hit the ethnological museums, to a lesser extent the archaeological and art museums. Collaborations with source resp. heritage communities are supposed to be part of a reflexive and postcolonial museum practice. In many cases this practice concentrates on assumed traditional communities still living in the countries of origin, besides the fact that many members of heritage communities nowadays form part of European societies, not only since the recent so called refugee crisis. In our panel, we would like to focus on the challenges and chances for museums and migrant communities to engage with each other. We welcome all cases and case studies where migrants act as stakeholders and active partners of museums, e.g. as employees, research fellows or advisory councils. Topics to discuss are the significance and the benefits for museums, migrants, and hosting community; the objects' power of linking places and people; the possibilities to transfer these links into exhibition displays; the role of personal contacts and networks and last but not least the possibilities for the museums to represent a ground for more than research, like for creative ideas or projects that directly benefit the locals back home, or as a platform for dialogue and discussion of various topics.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 15 August, 2018, -Paper short abstract:
The cooperative project Congo Gaze - People, Encounters and Artifacts emerged from a lasting relationship between Congolese diaspora and the museum. The paper explores how to engage colleagues, communities and collections in ways that facilitate for cooperation based on "radical trust".
Paper long abstract:
With Bernadette Lynch's concept "radical trust" in mind this paper briefly describes the project idea and organization of the project Congo Gaze - People, Encounters and Artifacts, a collaboration between employees at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo and members of the Congolese milieu in Norway. The aim is to explore how and to what extent this particular project developed in terms of "radical trust". What kind of obstacles arose during the process and how could these be understood in terms of trust or also mistrust.
The project idea was actuated when a group of people from the Congolese milieu in Norway, expressed their interest for the ethnographic Congo collection at the Museum. The group was invited to examine and discuss the significance, usage and plausible provenance of objects and to identify those which their views would be meaningful in the perspective of cultural heritage. In the end, in collaboration with museum employees the group should produce an exhibition.
Based on this experience, questions to be addressed involve: how to best design a project process which ensure that museum employees and in this case, groups from minority communities hold a common understanding of what collaboration involving "radical trust", actually should imply? In what manner could the idea of "radical trust" be implemented within the framework of existing institutional structures of a Museum and within the frames of current public administration?
Paper short abstract:
This paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological relevance of a collaborative research, acquisition, and networking project focused on the Linden-Museum's Cameroonian collections.
Paper long abstract:
For the past year and a half, I have been sharing the process of getting acquainted with the histories of the African collections of the Linden-Museum and the path leading to a new concept for their permanent exhibition with the ten representatives of the African diaspora in Germany who give life to the ABRAC (Advisory Board for the Representation of African Collections). Our dialogue is a means for us to regularly share activities, knowledges, experiences, concerns, and perspectives with the common view to enhance the social relevance of African heritages in Europe. This paper focuses on the theoretical and methodological relevance of a collaborative research, acquisition, and networking project focused on the Linden-Museum's Cameroonian collections. The project entailed a journey to Cameroon aimed to explore Hans-Joachim Koloß's (curator for the Africa collections at the Linden-Museum Stuttgart between 1973 and 1985) research relations with the Oku Kingdom in Northwest Cameroon. Koloß's collections from the region are a relevant focus of the museum's permanent exhibition, and they have been especially occasioned by his membership in the kwifon, Oku's most important male secret society. Travelling back to Oku together with Stone Karim Mohamad, one of the Cameroonian members of the ABRAC, meant breaking a long-standing vision of the curator as the sole protagonist of the interpretation and selection processes that lead to the creation of museum collections and their exhibition, and experimenting a methodology which grants the members of heritage communities access and participation in the same processes.
Paper short abstract:
Yugoslavia's non-aligned policy enabled a variety of connections and exchanges with other non-aligned countries. Slovene Ethnographic Museum staged an exhibition presenting Slovene museum African collections and personal objects of migrants from African countries from that time.
Paper long abstract:
Slovene Ethnographic Museum in Ljubljana did a research about various contacts and exchange between Slovenia and several African countries taking place between 1960 and 1990. At the time Slovenia was one of the six republics of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and contacts with other continents increased due to Yugoslavia's non-aligned policy. In addition to collaboration in economic field and within development projects Yugoslavia enabled students from other non-aligned countries to study at its universities. With the research, the museum wanted to tackle on the one hand, the African collections in the care of museum collected by Slovenes who lived in different African countries, and on the other, personal objects revealing memories, personal experiences and transnational identities of African Slovenes, who came as students and stayed in Slovenia after graduating.
In the presentation I will focus on collaboration with African Slovenes who participated not only in the research process but also in the creation of the exhibition. I will reflect on the participation with emphasis on concepts like epistemic justice, the shared authority of heritage researchers and bearers, and transparency. Democratization of museum practices is a responsibility of museum curators nowadays which includes also careful reconsideration of dilemmas. I will elaborate on the usage of terms community and diaspora, and present identifications of African Slovenes and their feelings of belonging in a post-migrant society, expressed through their choice of personal objects. I argue that an exhibition is a perfect place to discuss the links between material culture and migration.
Paper short abstract:
In this article the increasing amount of museum exhibitions in Vienna dealing with long neglected (hi)stories of migration, particularly those of former 'guest workers' from Turkey, are revisited in light of the prevalent enemy image of the 'Turk' reverberating in the urban heritage and narratives.
Paper long abstract:
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the recruitment agreement with Turkey as well as former Yugoslavia, Vienna's municipality announced the funding of the project "The Migration Collection" (Migration sammeln) in cooperation with the Wien Museum, a significant place for the city's collective memory. By collecting objects from the migrant communities of former 'guest workers' that can tell their (hi)stories of moving, settling and staying, this project intends to finally acknowledge (symbolically) migrants' constitutive impact on the city.
Simultaneously, Vienna's historicised city centre brims over with Habsburg nostalgia as well as commemorative references to the Siege of Vienna by the Ottoman army in 1529 and 1683. The reductive enemy image of the 'Turk' conveyed through the latter, merging feelings of threat as well as a triumphant superiority, had been flexibly adapted and instrumentalised throughout the centuries, and in recent decades increasingly conflated with migrants from Turkey and Muslims in general (Heiss and Feichtinger 2013).
In this article the (usually temporary) museum exhibitions in Vienna that attempt to tell the long neglected (hi)stories of migration, particularly those of former 'guest workers' from Turkey, are revisited in light of the (usually permanent) exhibitions on the Siege of Vienna and the divergent dynamics emanating from the sustained enemy image of the 'Turk'. Particular attention is paid to the difficulties of the object collection and the tensions arising once they settle into the archive.
Paper short abstract:
In this paper, I draw upon the experience of a one-year collaborative project between the Museum of the Institute of Ethnology (IOE), Academia Sinica, Taiwan and local Atayal communities, which aimed to reconstruct the cultural interpretation of the 'returned' cultural treasures.
Paper long abstract:
Among the most significant cultural objects in the Museum of the Institute of Ethnology (IOE), Academia Sinica, Taiwan are a number of Beaded Shell Clothes, Bamboo Baskets and Wooden Spears which once belonged to Atayal communities in Nan-Ao Township, Northeastern Taiwan. In this paper, I draw upon the experience of a one-year collaborative project between IOE and these Atayal communities, which aimed to reconstruct the cultural interpretation of the 'returned' cultural treasures. The author locates IOE's collaborative project within the framework of Han-Chinese relations with indigenous peoples such as the Atayal. This project involves leveraging a collection of 32 'lent' Atayal materials, which results in a collaborative exhibition involving the old and young generations of local Atayal people and allowing them to reconnect with past times and places—including their earlier migration history, the later stage of the rule of the Qing Dynasty (1683-1895) and the period of Japanese colonisation (1895-1945). The author will demonstrate that this collaborative exhibition project is attracting a number of other indigenous communities across Taiwan, with implications for policy initiatives aimed at promoting 'Bring the Cultural Treasures of Austronesian People in Taiwan Home' as a key subject integrated into the administrative and educational system of Taiwan. The case study is very much a success story.
Paper short abstract:
The mobility of ethnographic photographs and audio recordings of the collection of H Brüning (1848-1928) between places (the original locations in the Peruvian and museums in Germany) and different interpretative regimes (archival objects and identity arguments) is what animates the present research
Paper long abstract:
Research and ethnographic documentation carried out by the German scholar H. Brüning in the northern coast of Peru centuries gave rise to a photographic and sound collection that is now preserved in the Ethnological Museums of Hamburg and Berlin and in the Phonographic Archive of Berlin. In a previous work I explored the paths of Brüning's photographic collection, from its creation to its digital circulation and appropriation in the framework of regional discourses on Muchik identity in the northern coast of Peru. With the aim of introducing a comparative perspective, this paper intends to explore in a similar way the trajectory of Brüning's sound collection, which is less known, less studied, and less accessible. Consideration will be given to the circumstances of the registers, their value as ethnographic material and the forms of dissemination and circulation that they currently have. I will ask: What are the similarities and differences in the conception, fieldwork and technological resources that organized the project of visual and audio documentation of Brüning?; What were the status of the sonorous and the visual in the anthropological epistemologies of the time and? Which are the policies and technological resources museums have today regarding the dissemination of visual and audio ethnographic materials? What are the photographic and audio documents available, and how are they used to organize narratives of revival and make claims of Muchik identity and cultural authenticity? And, in what way do the material particularities of visual and audio documents play a role in this process?