Paper short abstract:

How might objects of African provenance displayed within European museums offer an archive of and for the understanding of an Afropean future that has, then, always been present in the past?

Paper long abstract:

The sense that objects of African provenance displayed in European museums speak of and to an Afropean future, one that has always been present in the past, remains largely unacknowledged. That people of African heritage (within the societies whose colonial histories these museums typically represent) are themselves no less European than others, for example, are American demonstrates the complexities of "identity" that certain currents of contemporary politics still wish to deny. Museums are a privileged site for unsettling the very "colonial certainties" that they, nonetheless, embody institutionally and, in this presentation, I wish to explore the changing meanings of the famous Benin "bronzes". Such meanings are produced not only by museums in both Europe and Africa, but by the stories told by their visitors, whether as members of so-called "ethnic" minorities or majorities, or as global tourists; especially as these concern narratives of citizenship in relation to objects that are part of the very histories that they symbolise.

Paper short abstract:

This multimedia paper examines the centripetal and centrifugal forces reverberating through the corpus of a Zambian radio archive (recordings collected in 1986-1990) and the remixed and relocated "radio program" based on these materials, and installed as a multi-modal ethnographic exhibit.

Paper long abstract:

The body of "the archive" is never fixed or bounded; it is permanently in process with an agency and materiality that pull towards centralized coherence and de-centered diversity simultaneously. This multimedia paper examines the centripetal and centrifugal forces in archive-making and archive-aspiring as they reverberate through the corpus of material collected in Zambia (1986-1990) and the remixed and relocated "radio program" based on these materials, and installed as a multi-modal ethnographic exhibit. The ethnographic installation "Kabusha Radio Remix," repurposes Bemba language recordings from the archived audio recordings from one of Radio Zambia's most popular programs, Kabusha Takolelwe Bowa (a Bemba proverb meaning "The Person Who Inquires First, Is Not Poisoned by a Mushroom"). Through a reengineered 60-minute Kabusha "radio program," a collaborative work that included Zambian stakeholders, that mimics the program's original talk radio format and that activates the archived voice of the late host David Yumba, we argue that experimental ethnographic installations can be used to foreground complex relations between fieldwork, archives, re/dislocation, and aspiration, through non-linear forms of argumentation and engagement.

Paper short abstract:

This paper presents an anthropological/artistic work-in-progress that involves revisiting an overlooked collection of ordinary rocks in an ethnographic museum archive. The project aims to open up new perspectives on the affective pasts and presents of these 'insignificant' colonial-era artefacts.

Paper long abstract:

In 2018, I began to conduct ethnographic fieldwork in the archives of the Museum of World Culture in Gothenburg, Sweden. As a collaboration with US-based visual artist Selena Kimball, the project focused on a collection of rocks that were stored in these archives. The rocks had been gathered in the early 1900s by Erland Nordenskiold, a Swedish ethnologist studying South American indigenous material culture and history. Ordinary, unremarkable stones, fitting easily into the palm of your hand, they held no self-evident anthropological value or purpose. Catalogued alongside the museum's other South American cultural artefacts (baskets, pottery, tools, carvings), they sat, unattended to, in storage drawers for nearly a century.

As I sifted through remnants of this institution's colonial history, searching files, notebooks, photographs and field notes for references to these rocks, I learned more about Nordenskiold's research and fieldwork, but also about his personal interests, his family, and the people with whom he interacted. I regularly sent Selena batches of my own notes, with detailed written descriptions of particular rocks I had examined, or reflections about my archival encounters. In response, Selena used sculptural and photographic means to re-create her own renderings of the rocks, and through our exchanges, an unusual ethnographic catalogue of artefacts and stories began to take shape.

Utilising exploratory, hands-on, affective approaches to understanding museum collections, our incursions into these overlooked archival strata aim to critique traditional colonial mechanisms of ethnographic classification and interpretation, through uncovering (and recovering) alternative forms of personal narrative and cultural memory.