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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.