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- Convenors:
-
Martin Zillinger
(University of Cologne)
Ciraj Rassool (University of the Western Cape)
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- Format:
- Panel
- Streams:
- Anthropology (x) History (x) Decoloniality & Knowledge Production (y)
- Location:
- Philosophikum, S66
- Sessions:
- Friday 2 June, -
Time zone: Europe/Berlin
Short Abstract:
This panel will address the challenges museums face when they engage with different actors and communities across post/colonial social formations. It ask how persisting forms of coloniality can be overcome and whether or not different forms of co-operation can incite a new transnational public
Long Abstract:
In the past, in Europa as much as in Africa, many museums and their exhibitions were catering European publics. In the globalized and postmigrant societies of today the colonial collections, with their painful histories and controversial present, draw together actors and groups that are affected in different ways by their sheer presence in the museums, the histories they embody, and the controversies that unfold around them. Museums thus not only bring about new »communities of implication« (Lehrer) they also »spark new publics into being« (Marres), that often operate across borders. The shift from "serving" to "creating publics" is a radical one and has to take place across national, cultural and social boundaries. It demands to go beyond hegemonic notions of inclusion and asks to transform the museum into a space of new epistemic and ontological happenings (Verran). This panel will address the challenges museums in post/colonial societies face when they engage in transforming the museum radically. How can persisting forms of coloniality be overcome? How can different publics and their demands be addressed and met, be it local publics and stakeholders on site, so called source communities around the world, or African diasporic communities in Europe and the States? Can issue publics and "communities of implication" be transnationalized - and can one avoid power asymmetries the be re-instantiated?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 2 June, 2023, -Paper short abstract:
Le musée des civilisations d'Abidjan, à l'instar de bien d'autres institutions muséales n'échappe pas à la problématique de la fréquentation de ses espaces. Cet article offre l'heureuse opportunité d'explorer cette équation à travers des approches afin de dégager les perspectives.
Paper long abstract:
Le musée, lieu par excellence de rassemblement et de préservation du patrimoine, assure la protection de ses collections contre le vol et contre les dégradations qui peuvent altérer l'intégrité ou le bon état des objets. Aussi, le musée n'est plus seulement le gardien des collections, il est un espace où doivent converger des discours scientifiques, la préservation des artefacts, et surtout l'éducation d’un public. Mais ce lieu de mémoire reste en Afrique et particulièrement en Côte d’Ivoire, non ou peu fréquenté bien que des programmes de médiation culturelle soient périodiquement lancés. Le public africain ou national ivoirien continue-t-il de percevoir les collections muséales comme un héritage de l’administration coloniale ? Cet article se fonde sur une analyse critique pour examiner la réalité de la fréquentation des musées en général et du Musée des Civilisations d’Abidjan en particulier. Il explore à partir de plusieurs approches, les formes émergentes de médiation des savoirs et présente les grands défis dont devra faire face pour « vivre et continuer à être » tout musée ou toute institution patrimoniale.
Mots clés : musée, collection, fréquentation, Musée des Civilisations, médiation culturelle, public.
Paper short abstract:
To what extent have museum-community collaborations fostered change in museum collections and practice? What are their limits and potentialities in overcoming the coloniality embedded in ethnographic museums’ practices, and re-imagining collections with colonial, troubling legacies?
Paper long abstract:
In the past several years, debates around the colonial legacies of museums and especially ethnographic museums, have intensified. Given these museums’ colonial and problematic legacies, scholars have questioned the future of these museums, as they were created within hegemonic contexts of white supremacy, racialising disciplines and colonialism. In Europe, Africa and elsewhere, museums with these troubling origins have taken steps to rethink their collections and exhibitions. For example, in Zambia, at the Moto Moto Museum, the major project to redo “old, colonial exhibitions” was undertaken between 2007 and 2013. As part of these processes of “undoing”, the museum engaged different stakeholders, including members of the communities where the missionary and founder of the museum Fr Jean Jacques Corbeil (1913-1990), made the collections. In this paper, I explore the experiences in the museum/community collaborations during this major project of attempting to transform the museum. To what extent did it successfully foster the envisaged change in the museum’s permanent exhibition? What were the expectations of the different stakeholders in these collaborations, and were these resolved? What are the limits and potentialities of these museum-community relations in overcoming the coloniality embedded in ethnographic museums’ practices, fostering change, and thus re-imagining collections with colonial legacies?
Paper short abstract:
In many post/colonial settings the demand for restitution and the building of museums is part of a broader demand for 'restitutive work'. Exploring museum spaces in a Moroccan landscape of accumulated violence, we argue that research on restitution dynamics and its publics has yet to begin
Paper long abstract:
The Rif has long been perceived as a dissident territory; at the same time marginalized and having undergone unprecedented colonial violence. Exploited and literally poisoned by the Spanish colonialists, after independence the Moroccan state has been blamed for neglect and violent oppression. The memorization of social and political histories in the Rif is entangled in competing narratives of belonging and resistance extending across communities in Morocco, Spain, and the Rifian Diaspora. Memories of the anti-colonial fighter Abdelkrim el-Kattabi go along with the construction of a Mediterranean past and a pre-colonial liberal culture of co-existence. In a contested museum landscape, ranging from local history museums in the Spanish enclave of Melilla through governmental museums dedicated to the national history of anti-colonial struggle to private museums dedicated to locally contested war leaders, the creation of a new regional museum has been turned into a battleground for different factions of local and transnational publics. Promoted as part of the community reparation program that addresses systematic violations of human rights until the end of the reign of king Hassan II (1999), the demands for a new museum and restitution extend well beyond the repatriation of colonial collections. While most of them remain outside of Morocco, the few objects that were repatriated are withhold by the authorities from the designated museum space. This presentation explores how the 'restitutive work' (Rassool) that has been projected onto the re-building of museums and the restitution of objects, comes into conflict with fragmented publics and the recalcitrant pasts they inhabit
Paper short abstract:
Starting with a collaborative research, exhibition and repatriation project from Berlin to Namibia, I argue that radically opening up museums to knowledge formations beyond Western academia enables us to explore the ‘affordances’ (Basu) of collections and implicate visitors in decolonial ways.
Paper long abstract:
The collaborative research, exhibition and repatriation project ‘Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures’ on the collection from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin aimed to challenge persisting forms of coloniality from its very beginning. Key to this process was listening – to the expertise, needs and interests of curators, artists and historians from Namibia, who had been nominated by the Museums Association of Namibia to come to Berlin in summer of 2019 and research the nearly 1400 ‘belongings’ (Gwasira) from Namibia housed there. It also entailed opening up to forms of knowledge formation beyond Western academia, including skills in fashion and design, oral histories, embodied and ‘sensuous knowledge’ (Salami), and create spaces where these different forms of relating to the belongings, the unfolding emotions and visions for the future could be expressed in a safe manner. Finally, the Namibian partners selected belongings to return home not solely based on histories of colonial violence and looting, but rather according their own criteria, including gender, generation, artistry as well as cultural and historical significance, enabling them to rewrite histories from Namibian perspectives.
This paper also discusses how the openness to plurifying the formation of knowledge about and with things left its mark in one of Germany’s most contested heritage sites, the Humboldt Forum. Rather than showing original ‘objects’, the small exhibition on the project focuses on the relationship of people with the belongings, implicating visitors to position themselves with and against histories of colonial contact and genocide, cultural resilience and self-empowerment.
Paper short abstract:
This paper is based on a strong reading of what constitutes the struggles of museums in Belgium and the DR Congo in the era of the restitution demand. My contribution will analyse how restitution as a struggle for decolonization is managed by museums and different actors in Congo and Belgium.
Paper long abstract:
The restitution of cultural heritage is currently one of the biggest struggles for European and African museums. In Belgium, the process was triggered by two major facts. On the one hand, the French report on restitution which stated that 'more than 90% of African cultural heritage is outside Africa' (Sarr Savoy: 2018) and on the other hand the Black Lives Matter movement after the death of George Floyd. Both events provoked outrage among Afro-descendants, as they saw the possession of colonial collections as a continuation of colonial domination and justification of the systemic racism present in Belgium. The possession of cultural property as political power is not new, it stems from the justification that was constructed around the 1950s during which the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren was a key actor in the justification of the colonial presence in Congo in its role as 'protector of the cultural heritage of Congo' (Sarah Van Beurden: 2015). This continuity is present through the policies of museum reform in Belgium and the museum management structure in the DRCongo. By dialectical approach, I will first start from the intertwined history between the Royal Museum for Central Africa and the Institute of National Museums of Congo. Then I will discuss the struggles of museums in the DR Congo and Belgium according to the restitution of cultural heritage and the quest for the meaning and (re)meaning of museums for Congolese and Afro-descendants. Finally, I will discuss the prospects for cooperation arise from my fieldwork.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores the role of activist actors from 'societies of origin' for establishing new modes of dealing with the coloniality of ethnographic collections in Berlin. It discusses the ambiguity of the emerging configurations as all collaborations depend on institutional resources and goodwill.
Paper long abstract:
Recent public debates on the coloniality of ethnographic collections – and the push for restitution – have had a transformative impact on anthropological museums in Northern Europe. In particular, these dynamics have been aligned with the reformulation of institutional imaginaries which seek to involve 'communities' and 'societies of origin' in exploring the histories and determining the future of ethnographic objects. At the same time, these institutional openings have become a window of opportunity for individual and collective actors from those contexts from which these objects have been taken to shape this process actively – with public pressure ensuring that their concerns and priorities are acknowledged in the resulting political and/or institutional decisions. In this paper, I explore the ambiguous openings that the public push for, and the institutional aspiration toward, transforming museum practices and collaboration in the wake of the promise of decolonization have created in the case of the Ethnological Museum in Berlin. By focusing on recent instances of collaboration with communities and societies of origin, most prominently the campaign for returning the Ngonnso’ statue to Cameroon, I show that activist actors and groups have taken an active role in transforming object-related representations and practices in museums themselves. At the same time, the emerging configurations are shaped by ambiguity, as more consistent ways of dealing with the demands and expectations of the involved persons and groups are being caught up in institutional hierarchies and contradictions as well as the continued dependency of all collaborations on institutional resources and goodwill.
Paper short abstract:
Despite decades of promoting "inclusive" methodologies in cross-cultural heritage management, complaints about their lack of social diversity continue to be voiced. This presentation reflects on some recent efforts in the Netherlands to uncover some of this situation's epistemic conditions.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation reflects on two recently started projects in the Netherlands on colonial collections and the democratization of heritage. They tend to show that discussions on collaborative methodologies used by museums to engage with so-called source communities, but also with diaspora publics, often tend to meet with a range of epistemic conditions that seems difficult to work through even in the current "Age of Restitution": (1) a kind of research fatigue on the part of extra-museal communities, complaining about the continuing emphasis on "taking" rather than giving or actual collaboration; (2) a kind of exhaustion or reluctance to speak out on the part of museum curators who feel that they are not able to escape being on the receiving end of critique; and (3) a form of being locked in the "home and away" ideology that is common to modern nation-states, yet ignores that such dichotomies of being 'native' and being other are impossible to uphold in societies where both museum collections and the people who engage with them are inevitably "diasporicized". I discuss a number of experiences in the Pressing Matter and At Home Otherwise research projects to support that latter conclusion.