Paper short abstract:

Between the Biennale of Dakar and the Théodore Monod Museum

Paper long abstract:

In Senegal, the invention of a biennale was an urgent need following the end of the welfare state provided until the 1980s by the political regime of President Léopold Sédar Senghor. The reasons that led to the creation of the Dakar Biennale are multiple, but the main motivation of Dak'Art was to make the Senegalese capital the hub of cultural life in Africa. One can admit that the creation of the Dakar Biennale is a fascination and a nostalgia of the 1966 mega-event by the political and cultural actors. Today, it occupies a major place in African cultural life and resonates with places like the Theodore Monod Museum of African Art. The latter is an old institution that has revived a contemporary dynamic and has become, in recent years, a high place of meeting and exchange.

Paper short abstract:

This paper intends to critically reflect on the International Inventories Programme (IIP), from the point of view of one of its founding members, the art-research collective SHIFT. IIP is an international research and database project that investigated a corpus of Kenyan objects held outside Kenya.

Paper long abstract:

This paper wants to focus, and to critically reflect, on the International Inventories Programme (IIP), an international research and database project that investigated a corpus of Kenyan objects held in cultural institutions outside Kenya. IIP intended to participate in the discussions about the asymmetric distribution of African objects between the North and the South. The project sought to understand what this asymmetry has produced (and continues to produce), to experiment with new kinds of museologies/méthodologies, to involve a critical mass of citizens and to explore the possibility of restitution. Above all it aimed at centering African voices and experiences– here, specifically Kenyan–often excluded or rendered invisible in international discussions around these topics.

IIP is an artist-led initiative which was collectively run from 2018 to 2022 by a constellation of public and private entities in Kenya and Germany. This reflection will be carried from the point(s) of view of the art-research collective SHIFT, one of the co-founders of the project. Drawing upon the intellectual and creative experience of co-producing the project and its various outcomes (three exhibitions, two publications, eight public conversations etc.) we will attempt a critique, or rather, an auto-critique, about its expectations, flaws and future.

Paper short abstract:

The Natural History Museum of Toulouse holds cultural collections from Benin acquired in a context of colonial domination. The challenge for the museum is to present polyphonic voices around the collections and to reflect with colleagues in Benin on a concrete attempt to postcolonize the museum.

Paper long abstract:

The Natural History Museum of Toulouse preserves cultural collections from Benin acquired in a political context of colonial domination. Around forty artifacts are for now identified with fragmentary knowledge: imprecise or non-existent archives, unknown acquisition contexts, and poorly documented uses. The COLL-AB project for « Collaborations - Collections from Abomey and Benin » is currently engaged with academic researchers, museum professionals and associative actors in Benin and in France in order to study the collections together. In this collective project in which nearly forty people in Benin and France are involved, we want to try to postcolonize the museum not only through the theoretical perspective of postcolonial studies but also through a practical methodology that we want to share, put to the test and improve through collective feedback. For us, this practical project is an attempt to face the challenge of colonial legacy in French museums, to consider the transcontinental circulation of these objects for the first time since their arrival in Toulouse and to include the controversial considerations of what should be an African way of exhibiting African collections in an African museum that would not be a simple transposition of an Western model. This approach is in line with the new practices of citizen sciences in the academic field and with the participative and inclusive researches recommended in the lastest ICOM museum definition. The ambition for the museum is no longer to present a univocal discourse on collections but the polyphonic voices of the different holders of knowledge.

Paper short abstract:

Changing the shape of museums through the integration of returned objects is a challenge for national cultural policies in many African countries. How do museum professionals in West Africa imagine a future of their institutions with the returned objects? This paper reports from ongoing research.

Paper long abstract:

The debate on the restitution of ethnographic objects has so far been largely dominated by so-called activists and representatives of local communities of specific places in Africa. What roles do the so-called national museums, established for many decades in most African countries, play in this context? In what way does the return of these objects influence national cultural policy, which in almost all countries is geared towards mainly the formation of a national identity? This paper will provide initial results from a research project currently underway to answer these questions and at the same time discuss a model of how the process of restitution can be organised between the different holders of interests. As we will show in the paper, the role of museums, the form of exhibition and the topics addressed will have to change substantially in order to do justice to the significance of the returning objects. In the context of the return of such objects, museums cannot be conceived simply as containers whose duty lies in custody and display. The plea at the end of our project is rather that museums must see themselves as open forums and networked structures for which lasting cooperation across continents is a fundamental element. Museums of the future, in Africa as elsewhere, will be collaborative places and part of a network. Only in this guise can the ideological limitations of colonial structures be overcome.

Paper short abstract:

Museums in Africa are continuously losing relevance to some of the audiences that they seek to serve. Using data from visitor studies and exploring alternative ways of public access, this presentation discusses influential factors of visitation and enjoyment of the Elmina Castle Museum in Ghana.

Paper long abstract:

Elmina is the earliest Trans-Atlantic trade settlement in present day Ghana. However, its history and culture as presented in the Elmina Castle Museum exhibition seems unattractive and inaccessible to a relatively large group of the targeted audience. The presentation explores factors hindering this museum in Ghana from effectively serving its audiences as it was originally established to do. This is approached from an audience-centered perspective which seeks to avoid privileging authoritative views and interests over that of other stakeholders. This presentation discusses the current exhibition at the museum and provides preliminary insights into factors that influence its visitation and enjoyment. It will also attempt to show how digital media innovation can contribute to re-presenting Elmina and its history from an alternative perspective.

Paper short abstract:

Through an ethnographic study of certain South African "epistemic actors" (researchers, museum ethics committees, and professional associations), I propose to trace the history of the first provenance research projects initiated by the staff of Iziko Museums of South Africa.

Paper long abstract:

"Presidents need to speak less, and to give the floor to specialists for once," said to me a Congolese anthropologist during the conference “From the Shadows to the Light. For a policy with regard to the management of colonial collections of human remains”, which was held in Brussels in 2019. For several decades now, museums have been confronted with requests for the restitution of cultural property, often formulated by politicians or pro-restitution activists. While these highly politicised statements often make the headlines, less is known about how museum professionals deal on a daily basis with the historical and ethical questions related to the history of colonial collections.

Through an ethnographic study of certain South African "epistemic actors" (researchers, museum ethics committees, and professional associations), I propose to trace the history of the first provenance research projects initiated by the staff of Iziko Museums of South Africa. Iziko is a network of 12 national museums located in or near Cape Town that initiated complex provenance research on physical anthropology collections, long before the issue was put on the public and political agenda. As a result of this research, not only have the collections been inventoried and certain elements of the collection have changed their legal and even ontological status, but the whole normative framework on which the management of South African museum collections is based has been modified.

This paper proposal is based on approximately 18 months of anthropological fieldwork conducted in South Africa, starting in 2014.

Paper short abstract:

The paper discusses the Picha Biennals strategies to oppose extractivist economic and artistic global structures from Lubumbashi, RDC.

Paper long abstract:

For more than a decade the association Picha organizes an art biennale in the Eastern Congolese city Lubumbashi. It works with local and international artists and curators, and bridges manyfold structural challenges. With the focus on toxicity, this year’s biennale addressed as much the heavy burdens of the extractivist history of the ‘Copperbelt’ than the strong economic asymmetries that artists working in the Congo have to face. By choosing the National Museum of Lubumbashi as one of its venues, the biennale enters in exchange with the collections of this formerly colonial institution.

The paper discusses how this year's edition of the Biennale positions itself in and against historical and contemporary extractivism. It draws a connection between the history of the collection that is tied to the mining industry in many regards with the heavy prevalence of toxic compounds in the environment of the city of Lubumbashi. How does chemical history take part in making land and its inhabitants economically and culturally extractable and expose them in unequal manners to pollution? What structures does the Picha association develop to resist the constantly lurking extraversion, that suggests an orientation towards the global art world and its financial possibilities (however precarious they may be)? How do the participating artists address the double reading of the title ToxiCity?

Paper short abstract:

How can independence and nation-building processes reflect the museum as institution or as a scientific space of narration? The 40 years gap of these two museums, and the historical processes that separate them such as the liberation war, was it enough to dismantle the colonial legacy of the museum?

Paper long abstract:

The Dundo Museum in Angola was created as a scientific space to gather information on population and culture and to preserve the artifacts considered to be endangered by colonization. 40 years later the national anthropology museum was founded to celebrate a year of independence and the cultural diversity of the country. Although immersed in a nation-building narrative the NMA carries the same concerns of preservation and of the other replacing the neutral colonial for a new neutral citizen that has the power to preserve, to gaze, to expose and collect. The process maintains the museum as a space of othering and of building belonging and citizenship in the new nation. Looking at this two museums in this paper I will interrogate the museum as institution and its role in the nation-building process of independent Angola.

Paper short abstract:

Based on field research, my paper revisits the exhibitions in the Women’s Jail on Constitution Hill to examine how the curators position the visitor as a witness to traumatic experiences. What are the possibilities for alternative futures as visitors engage with experiences of racialized violence?

Paper long abstract:

Museums are increasingly envisioning themselves as “democratizing, inclusive and polyphonic spaces for critical dialogue about the pasts and the futures.” These intentions by the International Council of Museums to redesign museums so that they “contribute to human dignity and social justice, global equality and planetary wellbeing” need to be linked to the specific efforts of memorial museums where curatorial practices have shifted from ‘authentic’ objects to autobiographical storytelling and multimedia installations in order to educate and emotionally engage the visitor.

Located in the center of Johannesburg, Constitution Hill represents a unique memorial site that, to this day, remains South Africa’s only museum specifically dedicated to the commemoration of women's experiences during apartheid (and beyond). Based on extensive archival and field research, my paper revisits the exhibitions in the former Women’s Jail to examine how the curators position the visitor as an active witness to traumatic experiences and aim to elicit an empathic response with a commitment to social and political change. What, then, are the possibilities for alternative futures emerging from feminist relations of care and empathy as visitors engage with past experiences of racialized violence? How do we need to rethink the ambiguous terms “empathy” and “witness” if harnessed for meaningful societal change and for questioning the visitor’s position as an “implicated subject”?