Paper short abstract

Drawing on a Maasai–museum collaboration in Berlin, this paper examines how filmic mediation shapes affective and legal atmospheres of governance. It shows how consent regimes, visibility, and affect regulate collaboration, revealing asymmetries of power and narrative authority.

Paper long abstract

This paper examines how filmic mediation participates in the production of affective atmospheres that govern political and legal relations within a “collaborative” project in a museum context. Drawing on ethnographic engagement during the June 2025 visit of eight Maasai delegates to the Ethnological Museum and the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, I analyse how the camera functioned not merely as a tool of documentation, but as a central actor shaping atmospheres of collaboration, and contestation.

For the Maasai delegates, the ancestral belongings encountered in the museum were not objects but extensions of collective bodies. Filming the encounter in its entirety was understood as a necessary practice of remembering, evidence-making, and accountability—an affective obligation toward communities in Tanzania who could not be physically present. For the museum, by contrast, filming generated atmospheres of anxiety, exposure, and institutional vulnerability. These concerns materialised through tightly regulated consent forms, copyright protocols, and restrictions on visibility, revealing how legal infrastructures actively shape affective climates within collaborative spaces.

I argue that these divergent orientations toward filming produced competing atmospheres of governance: one grounded in ancestral continuity; the other in risk management and bureaucratic control. Filmic mediation crystallised these ontological and political tensions, making visible how affective atmospheres govern what forms of collaboration become possible, and for whom.

Methodologically, the paper foregrounds the question, “Who is this collaboration for?” By tracing how affective labour, translation work, and emotional risk were unevenly distributed, I show how collaboration becomes fragile when atmospheric governance disproportionately burdens those with less institutional power.