Paper short abstract:

This paper introduces how the Egypt's Dispersed Heritage project used comics as a counter archive to the absences of Egyptians in the archaeological record and current debates. I argue that museums need to first look inward and resolve their colonial organisational models then attempt decolonisation

Paper long abstract:

Museums and archaeological practices are increasingly acknowledging the conscious absence of local indigenous contribution to knowledge production in African and other previously colonised context. Yet, to what extent are these acknowledgements replicating the same colonial model they aim to revoke? How is focusing solely on past bias obscuring persistent present absences in archaeological and museum documentation? And for who is all of this truly for?

Using UCL’s AHRC’s Egypt’s Dispersed Heritage project as a case study, I will introduce how we used comics to produce a counter archive to the absences of Egyptians in not only the archaeological record but also current debates. While the comics attempted to offer meaningful people centred responses to past and present colonial archaeological practices, the extent to which such responses could be acted upon by museums and academic institutions remain doubtful. This raises the question of how meaningful or ethical are current decolonisation models. I argue that museums need to initially look inward and dissolve its current colonial organisational structure models. Unless this is achieved, any attempt to repair or even repatriate will remain a self-serving conscious clearance exercise rather than a true commitment to social justice.

Paper short abstract:

Discussion of a collaboration with West African story-tellers to ‘presence’ absent voices in the colonial anthropological archive. What are the decolonial ethics of such speculative approaches? Is such ‘archival ventriloquism’ appropriate? Should absences remain absent?

Paper long abstract:

I discuss an audio-visual installation, which involved collaboration with West African story-tellers to ‘presence’ absent voices in the archives of Northcote Thomas’s early 20th-century anthropological surveys of Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The installation, which was part of the [Re:]Entanglements project and exhibition (https://re-entanglements.net), provides an opportunity to reflect on the fragmentary nature of the archive and the use of speculative methodologies as a decolonial strategy for addressing its silences. The initiative forces us to address different ‘regimes of historicity’ represented by the archival document and storytelling, recalling that storytelling has a much longer genealogy in the history of history-making. In the Eurocentric tradition, they continue to have very different evidentiary status. If we accept the legitimacy of storytelling as a technique for ‘giving voice’ to those silenced in the colonial archive, however, whose speculative fictions are legitimate and whose are not? What are the ethics of such ‘archival ventriloquism’? Should absences remain absent?

In my presentation, I will show excerpts from ‘Unspoken stories: Five archival monologues’. The full series on monologues and a description of our methodology are available at https://re-entanglements.net/unspoken-stories/, including an interview with Usifu Jalloh, the Sierra Leonean storyteller with whom we collaborated closely on the project.

Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses methodologies for community-based consultations used to determine the use and significance of African objects in museums that have no archival record. It questions the approaches for balancing dissenting voices and how we utilize the new narratives moving forward.

Paper long abstract:

African works now in European and American museums too often lack documentation about their original use or significance. One method to address this archival absence is to consult with community informants. But what do we do when these voices dissent from one another? How do we balance many interpretations as we move forward?

This paper focuses on our experience at the Fowler Museum at the University of California Los Angeles working with community collaborators to address a single example of a carved wooden mask, likely from Nigeria. We have no archives documenting the work’s departure from Africa. While we have been able to determine a likely provenance, in speaking with many informants, we have sought to understand the mask’s original use and significance in Nigeria and to determine future paths forward for the work. These consultations have provided a myriad of interpretations with no single consensus, particularly in regards to determining the mask’s original purpose.

In the absence of both archival material and community agreement, this paper considers ways forward that balance the many possible meaning in our future interpretations (and in our internal database). In terms of care of the object, how do we balance recommendations or prescriptions for the object (some informants have indicated no women should see the mask)? And in terms of our records and interpretations, how do we acknowledge the archival absence and provide space for many possibilities?

Paper short abstract:

Traditional methods of collecting and keeping objects is increasingly being questioned across museums in the West as a move towards ‘decolonising’ increases. Beyond questioning the absences in historical records, what tools can artists provide to interrogate the role of museums?

Paper long abstract:

Within the growing debates around decolonising collections within museums, a number of scholars, artists and activists are experimenting with participatory-based research methods among other tools in order to build more equitable forms of knowledge exchange and production that embed care into their practice. Could these new ways of working offer a more democratic approach to knowledge production, providing less hierarchical modes of exchange and presentation? What can the absences in historical records provide artists in terms of what Saidiya Hartman describes as ‘critical fabulation’? What role can embodied knowledge play in creating more equitable sites of knowledge exchange and production? What futures can we imagine when the knowledge embedded within our bodies is used to excavate stories and provide new meanings to the spaces that claim to own them?

Paper short abstract:

‘Filling the Gaps in Collecting and Exhibiting African Fashion: A Case Study of the V & A Museum’ will explore how the museum used the ‘Africa Fashion’ exhibition as a turning point in making amends for its failures in collecting and curating African fashion in its existence

Paper long abstract:

In July 2022, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, United Kingdom launched an exhibition titled ‘Africa Fashion’. This blockbuster exhibition (closing April 2023) is the largest and most extensive exhibition dedicated to contemporary African fashion in the United Kingdom.

‘Filling the Gaps in Collecting and Exhibiting African Fashion: A Case Study of the V & A Museum’ will explore how the museum used the ‘Africa Fashion’ exhibition as a turning point in making amends for its failures in collecting and curating African fashion in its existence. This included reaching out to African designers to donate items to the exhibition, purchasing clothing from designers to add to its collection, encouraging members of the public to make donations from the personal archives, and drawing on its own holdings of textiles and photographs. These methods successfully contributed to the exhibition which features 250 objects, the works of 45 designers from 20 African nations.

The paper will conclude by offering best practices for museums that collect and display contemporary African fashion, and highlight museums that have been inspired by the exhibition such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which is preparing to launch more exhibitions on African fashion through its costume institute.

Paper short abstract:

Cette réflexion envisage de questionner la présence de l’absence des archives divers dans les musées publics camerounais, témoins du geste de captation et de déplacement colonial des objets et d’articuler la présence du réel historique dans les communautés d’où ces objets ont été extraits.

Paper long abstract:

Calqués sur le modèle parallèlement expérimental en Europe pendant les XIXe et XXe siècles, les musées publics au Cameroun sont majoritairement des legs coloniaux, où la mise en exergue des valeurs matérielles et des charges immatérielles ou spirituelles des objets est questionnable. Au même titre que certains musées ethnographiques d’occident, ces musées n’ont que rarement des archives factuelles pouvant renseigner convenablement sur les œuvres et leurs responsabilités sociétales où elles ont été extraites. Cette réflexion envisage de questionner la présence de l’absence des archives matérielles et immatérielles dans ces musées publics camerounais, témoins du geste de captation et de déplacement colonial des objets et d’articuler la présence du réel historique et phénoménal dans les communautés d’où ces artefacts ont été extraits. Ainsi qu’est-ce qu’une archive et quel est son rôle ? Qui a la légitimité d’en être auteur ? pour quelle fin doit-on la produire ? ce questionnement permet de repenser la place des communautés d’origines de ces collections muséales qui les ont produites et leur ont donné une identité. À partir d’une approche socioanthropologique et historique, il est important d’associer aux connaissances archivistiques existantes et souvent issues des récits des vainqueurs, une recherche de provenance auprès des communautés d’origines, capables de construire un discours décolonial, réparateur des traumas du passé et theurapeutisant pour un futur partagé.

Paper short abstract:

Mapping Senufo, a collaborative born-digital publication project, aims to highlight ambiguity about African arts rather than attempting to resolve it. Here I focus on the team’s most recent efforts to visualize the reliability of evidence and demonstrate possibilities for attending to uncertainty.

Paper long abstract:

Curators and other scholars of African arts have long grappled with incomplete information about objects from Africa in European and North American collections. And yet, for decades, scholars outside the field of African art history have questioned African art specialists’ facile use of sources and evidence to make claims about so-called traditional arts. Often presented as certain in museums, classrooms, and publications, claims built on fragile evidence suggest authoritative information. They may also contribute to expectations for certainty, as museumgoers and students have reported unease at presentations of uncertainty. However, unease may be an appropriate response. As digital humanists and data theorists Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein (2020: 91) assert, “best practices for communicating uncertainty” may result in “the perceptual, intuitive, visceral, and emotional experience of uncertainty.”

While we might long for better and surer details about African arts, the pretension that information is solid does not suffice to make it so. Through development of Mapping Senufo: Art, Evidence, and the Production of Knowledge, an in-progress, born-digital publication project, I am working with a team to find ways to highlight ambiguity rather than attempting to resolve it. We aim to engage readers in confronting varied sources and evidence and to encourage reflection on the reliability of any detail as well as gaps in historical records and narratives. In this presentation, I will focus on the Mapping Senufo team’s most recent efforts to visualize the reliability of evidence in order to demonstrate productive possibilities in attending to uncertainty.

Paper short abstract:

The absences in the archives of Swiss colonial collections are at times louder that the printed words. How can we navigate this? This paper draws on two concrete attempts to do so, and whilst recognising that we are not quite there yet, opens up avenues for dealing with absence.

Paper long abstract:

Switzerland is a colonial power that had no formal colonies, and this particular absence has informed its recent reckoning with its colonial past. A wave of projects, led by researchers, artists, and museums are currently seeking to address the knowledge gaps in museum collections, and like elsewhere, are confronted with their impossible histories.

The authors of this paper, two provenance researchers in Switzerland, compare and discuss the absences they encountered over the course of two such projects: the Swiss Benin Initiative - a network of eight museums addressing the past and future of contested collections in collaboration with Nigerian partners, and a recent investigation into the ethnographic collections of Louis Egger.

Together they explore the question of evidence when researching contested collections. What to do with objects that lack accompanying documents? How to navigate cases of objects “sans-papiers”? Where does the burden of evidence lie, and in the spirit of the Sarr-Savoy report, can it be reversed to instead privilege consent?

The paper argues that however blaring the absence of non-European perspectives it is never a complete blank. Whilst African voices are not quite there, there are traces that can be found in living memory, between the lines or against the grain. This raises two key challenges: how to recognize and honor those whose presence has been silenced - and secondly how to re-embed new voices in our cultural institutions, to regenerate the museum, its collections, and archives.

Paper short abstract:

With specific reference to a collection of late nineteenth-century southern African objects at the Horniman Museum, this paper addresses the production of intimacy through object research, and explores possibilities for alternative ways of ‘knowing’ in the absence of provenance information.

Paper long abstract:

This paper seeks to explore the issue of archival absence in colonial-era collections of African material heritage through a reframing of object research as a labour of intimacy, capable of evoking feelings of frustration, grief, loss and longing. With specific reference to a collection of objects from southern Africa compiled by Henry J. Hodgson in the late-nineteenth century and held at the Horniman Museum in London, I explore the ways in which researchers experience, navigate and produce intimacy, even (and perhaps especially) in cases where there is little provenance data. In the case of the ‘Hodgson collection’, despite containing a number of deeply intimate and personal objects likely chosen for their easy portability, we know little about the collector and even less about the people from whom the objects were sourced. By drawing on Black feminist interventions into the archive, this paper questions whether the multi-sensory work of handling and researching objects is able to provide alternative avenues of ‘knowing’, such as speculative or impossible histories. Furthermore, it questions, what are the pitfalls of inventing intimacy in the spaces left behind by archival omissions, and in which scenarios is it more appropriate to heed calls for “narrative restraint”? Finally, this paper also questions what the future of such objects should be, given that they are so often precluded from debates on restitution by their relative lack of provenance information.