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.