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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.