Paper short abstract:

The paper examines the photographic archives of two Lutheran hospitals in the south of Madagascar and explores the interplay of scattered temporalities and contrasted moralities in the evocation of the past of Christian care as it collides with the imagination of its future.

Paper long abstract:

The presentation meditates on the photographic archives of two Lutheran hospitals in the south of Madagascar - Manambaro on the east coast and Ejeda in the western hinterland. The hospitals were established by an American mission between the mid-50s and 60s and were later integrated into SALFA, the healthcare department of the Malagasy Lutheran Church - one of the largest private healthcare providers in contemporary Madagascar. In the USA, the photographic archives of the hospitals are prized possessions of the former missionaries, the Church or its libraries. In Madagascar, photographs are displayed in the homes of those who built the hospitals or worked in them. Their existence materialises diverging individuals trajectories, various collective projects, and occasionaly conflicting teleologies. In both contexts however, those visual remnants inspire a nostalgia for the future that enchanted their past. In the first decades of their existence, the Lutheran hospitals represented a medical and technological tour de force, an ideal of service and the hope of a moral salvation. The paper explores the interplay of scattered temporalities and contrasted moralities in the evocation of the past of Christian care as it collides with the imagination of its future.