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Paper short abstract:

This paper discusses ‘missing’ objects from eastern African collections in Europe, examining how museums and auction houses in manufacturing disappearances of objects into private collections also silence the historical record. Colonialities endure through these profit driven disappearances.

Paper long abstract:

Where do objects collected under conditions of imperial duress go? Current restitution discourse usually focuses on collections with infamous acquisition histories. But not everything collected under such conditions entered museum collections, and not everything that enters museum collections remains there. Objects have a price, something rarely referenced when discussing historical ‘ethnographic’ collections. Imperialists collected objects not just as ‘ethnographic specimens’, but because of their retail value, determined by desires of museums and collectors in the global north. This financial calculation usually lies dormant, to be activated in times of economic pressure. Here enters the auction house, which in selling off collections for museums not only contributes to their ‘unmaking’ but separates objects from their historical record, silencing them in the process. Once in custody of the auction house, paper archives rarely travel with objects to their new owners, who are afforded total anonymity. Museum rhetoric of care affords no space for discussing the loss of objects in their care. This paper follows attempts to trace what was amassed by three nineteenth century imperial collectors in eastern Africa: Count Teleki, Captain Bottego and the James brothers. The remains of these collections are now housed in Hungary, Austria, Italy and the UK. It critiques how auction houses dehistoricize collections from their coercive acquisition conditions, and how museums ‘unmake’ themselves and deny discussion of this history by selling off collections in individual lots to private and inaccessible buyers. Colonialities endure not solely through the museum proper, but its relational institutions and structures.