Paper short abstract:

Starting with a collaborative research, exhibition and repatriation project from Berlin to Namibia, I argue that radically opening up museums to knowledge formations beyond Western academia enables us to explore the ‘affordances’ (Basu) of collections and implicate visitors in decolonial ways.

Paper long abstract:

The collaborative research, exhibition and repatriation project ‘Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures’ on the collection from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin aimed to challenge persisting forms of coloniality from its very beginning. Key to this process was listening – to the expertise, needs and interests of curators, artists and historians from Namibia, who had been nominated by the Museums Association of Namibia to come to Berlin in summer of 2019 and research the nearly 1400 ‘belongings’ (Gwasira) from Namibia housed there. It also entailed opening up to forms of knowledge formation beyond Western academia, including skills in fashion and design, oral histories, embodied and ‘sensuous knowledge’ (Salami), and create spaces where these different forms of relating to the belongings, the unfolding emotions and visions for the future could be expressed in a safe manner. Finally, the Namibian partners selected belongings to return home not solely based on histories of colonial violence and looting, but rather according their own criteria, including gender, generation, artistry as well as cultural and historical significance, enabling them to rewrite histories from Namibian perspectives.

This paper also discusses how the openness to plurifying the formation of knowledge about and with things left its mark in one of Germany’s most contested heritage sites, the Humboldt Forum. Rather than showing original ‘objects’, the small exhibition on the project focuses on the relationship of people with the belongings, implicating visitors to position themselves with and against histories of colonial contact and genocide, cultural resilience and self-empowerment.