Paper short abstract:

My paper presents a collaborative arts-based research project centred around an overlooked collection of rocks in the Gothenburg Museum of World Culture. Upending traditional approaches to object labelling and classification, the project critically examines the colonial legacies of this collection.

Paper long abstract:

This paper 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 unusual collection of rocks found in the archives of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden. The rocks were gathered in the early 1900s by Erland Nordenskiöld, a well-known Swedish anthropologist who specialised in South American indigenous material culture and history. Kept alongside many other indigenous, colonial-era artefacts (baskets, pottery, tools, carvings), they have been sitting undisturbed in the museum’s storage drawers for over a century.

My paper describes our ongoing 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 and political narratives of so many existing ethnographic collections linking the projects of anthropology and colonialism, connecting the organisation and management of archives to the administration of order in the world.

Our project calls attention to such practices through upending traditional ethnographic approaches to object labelling and classification. We engage with ‘storied’ forms of knowledge that reveal the rocks’ significance not through established taxonomies, but through acknowledging their entangled and shifting relationships and encounters over time. We employ exploratory methods of archival research, use Surrealist practices such as collage, automatic writing and ‘involuntary sculpture’, and playfully experiment with the genre of the exhibition catalogue to both theorise and operationalise decolonising practices within the contemporary ethnographic museum.