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- Convenors:
-
Rodrigo Lacerda
(CRIA NOVA FCSH)
Renato Athias (NEPE at Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil))
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Thursday 23 July, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
The panel aims to discuss methodological, ethical and cosmological questions related to the restitution of visual archives held in the West to their source communities.
Long Abstract:
The repatriation of colonial objects has recently entered the public sphere in Europe, while settler societies, such as the USA and Australia, have been developing restitution protocols for a long time now, due to their proximity to the heritage stakeholders. Concomitantly, the archives of anthropologists, photographers and even missionaries are being revisited by the source communities they studied and are being reappropriated, reactivated and reauthored through different media or included in indigenous and local museums.The archive, lest we forget, is knowledge and power. Artifacts in museums and other institutions are "sites of intersecting histories" (Edwards 2001, 2) that embody both local knowledge and the epistemological, gaze and power inequalities which resulted in their collection and display in the West. Photos and film footage are special artifacts because of their indexical quality as signs that makes them both illusorily transparent and full of details which resist signification and provide new ways of thinking about and accessing the past. Some study cases indicate that visual restitution challenges the old structures of oppression and is a source of knowledge, power and healing for the heritage stakeholders as well as a catalyst for new relationships, both within communities and between these and institutions and states.
The panel wishes to discuss a range of questions related to visual restitution:
- the role of European museums and archives;
- collaborative methodologies;
- case studies of visual restitution;
- virtual restitution;
- re-assemblage of visual archives by the source communities through different media;
- other ontologies, subjectivities and histories of the visual images.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Thursday 23 July, 2020, -Paper short abstract:
Online archives have become a means of visual return. But postcolonial software and persistent relationships don't suffice to foster encounters, it needs emotional involvement. Applying this successfully, alternative archives from India challenge understandings of 'postcolonial archives'.
Paper long abstract:
Digital archives have by now become a common phenomenon, allowing a visual 'return' of photographs and museum collections and a breakup of visual economies. Based on long term field research, I argue that it is especially community-based archives that successfully generate online encounters on the basis of historic photographs. This 'success' does not come about easily, as there is archiving software available but no manual for creating an engaged audience. Postcolonial database architecture and persistent social relationships - online or offline - are relevant factors, but they do not suffice to foster online encounters. Digital archivists rather need to emotionally involve the prosumers in order to create empathy at a distance.
Ground-breaking digitization projects in former settler colonies sometimes obstruct the view of digital archives in the postcolony. To change this, this paper focuses on online archives with Indian cultural heritage. The Indian way of scrutinizing established institutions and norms challenges visual economies, yet reinstalls them. Alternative, community-based digital archives rest on the internet as a democratic vehicle, yet restore social stratification and cultural norms. They refuse numerically counting impact, but need to constantly add new data and display information in order to generate attention. Disentangling these interrelated internal conflicts also leads to rethinking what the postcolonial idea purports for archives. It shifts the focus - often promoted from a Western perspective - away from institutions in the Global North, and rather conceptualises postcolonial archival work as national or subcontinental concerns.
Paper short abstract:
By using performing art as a visual representation, life can be created by a human to embody the spirit of a missing artifact. The Parthenon Marbles act as a case study for how performing art could serve as a living alternative to traditional visual representations of missing cultural artifacts.
Paper long abstract:
Archival evidence such as film or photos have served as "replacements" for the loss of cultural artifacts. There is debate as to if these visual representations can equal the loss of the original object. As museum objects have been removed from their original cultural context, it seems that the museum functions as a tomb where the life of the cultural object has come to an end. Theodor Adorno stated that museums functioned as a mausoleum for dead artifacts. (Adorno 2006) As such, how can an object be represented in such a way that it gains a second life when the artifact itself is not physically present? How do you relate the history of the artifact along with modern history of its continued absence due to colonialist conquests? By bringing in an aspect of performing art as a visual representation, life can be created by a human to embody the spirit of the missing object. In the 1800s, Emma Hamilton's performance of The Attitudes were revolutionary as they embodied the spirit of ancient Greek artifacts.(Fothergill 1969) She used theatrical movement and dance to recreate scenes from Greek vases.(Good 2018) Can this same idea be applied in a modern setting and what historical inspirations can we draw from to create an alternative living representation? Using the Parthenon Marbles as a case study for how performance art could be incorporated, this paper examines the possibilities of using performance art as a living alternative to traditional visual representations of missing cultural artifacts.
Paper short abstract:
I will reflect here on my footage made with the Makonde in Mozambique, a response to Margot Dias 1950's ethnographic footage. In this elicitation, sounds and images provoked a sensorial response, as an embodied cinema invested, by the actual process of seeing, by ideas of belonging.
Paper long abstract:
Visual archives carry the indelible stamp of the original encounter and the decisions made at the time of shooting. Margot Dias, ethnologist Jorge Dias wife, filmed between 1958 and 1961 among the Makonde people in North Mozambique. I have been working with her 16mm visual material, and also a huge amount of sounds. She recorded hundreds of songs and musical instruments. In 1995, I videotaped, in her house, a long conversation about her past and her African experience. From this material, from photographs, sounds, her books and the reports sent to the government I started a film that could unveil stories and encounters. In 2018 I went to Maputo to find the young Makonde artists and musicians in order to understand how film archives restitution and elicitation provokes narratives behind the scenes, taking us to specific places and situations. Margot's archival images helped, then, to look at a contemporary country with rooted traditions. I will relate this experience with the ideas of dislocation as method. Cameras impose special ways of engaging with the world and these often force filmmakers to step outside themselves and adopt intermediate positions, not knowing the outcome. These changes in behavior produce changes in perception, and sometimes new kinds of knowledge. (MacDougall, 2019) There are two searches in my project: the invisible, the out of frame, and on the other hand the inadvertently in the field, the periphery of the image. The camera is both an instrument and an instigator of dislocation: it changed both Margot's and my visual and social perspective.
Paper short abstract:
It is a presentation that aims to discuss the issues and problems about the restitution and repatriation of photographs and indigenous objects that are heritage in museums in Europe and the United States.
Paper long abstract:
Since the 19th century, many objects and photographs of the indigenous peoples of the Upper Rio Negro (Brazil) have been taken abroad by missionaries or travelers. Hundreds of these objects and photographs are now in the museums archives, in Europe and the USA, many others in private museums of religious congregations also in Europe. Some exposed to the public and most of them kept in reserves. From an investigation in these museums, I can see some important issues related to the cosmological understandings of the indigenous peoples in question and their relationship with such objects today. this presentation aims to discuss the issues, ethical and ethnological problems regarding the restitution and repatriation of photographs and indigenous objects that belong to the ritualistic and shamanic world of the indigenous peoples of that particular region.
Paper short abstract:
Prompted by a public screening of historical footages in an Asmat village, this essay explores the double role of nostalgia, both in recalling memories but also in manifesting a moral critique of the modern state.
Paper long abstract:
This essay explores the double role of nostalgia, both in recalling memories but also in manifesting a moral critique of the modern state. Prompted by a public screening of historical footages in the Asmat village of Amanamkai (West Papua, Indonesia), I focus on the widespread sense of nostalgia for their mytho-historical pasts in which their ancestors were stronger, bigger, healthier, and braver, "kinds of Goliaths" (wosten). I will discuss local desires for accessing visual memories of their community to recall and find evidence of mythical times. At the same time, I will examine the tension between pasts that are perceived to become more remote and pasts that are necessary to envision future scenarios. I will eventually shed light on local envisioned attempts to counter a seemingly relentless entropic decline, which, I argue, is the main cause for the current escalation of nostalgia for past times in this community.