Paper short abstract:

A conversation between a senior Indigenous artist and a German anthropologist, this paper explores the histories and futures of a mid-19th-century collection of Indigenous Australian art and material culture at the Ethnological Museum Berlin.

Paper long abstract:

This paper focuses on a small yet highly significant collection of Indigenous Australian art and material culture that was assembled on Gunditjmara Country by the influential colonial landscape painter, Eugene von Guérard. Held at the Ethnological Museum Berlin, the collection embodies an overlooked history of exchanges between Indigenous Australians, and German-speaking artists and anthropologists whose work was profoundly indebted to the environmental theories of Alexander von Humboldt.

The collection's contemporary value and "social life" are owed to the long-standing efforts of Indigenous artists like Maree Clarke and Vicki Couzens. Through community-based arts practice and intercultural knowledge exchange, their work has successfully reclaimed historical Indigenous objects as vital constituents of contemporary culture-making in South-Eastern Australia.

In the spirit of the Living Archive, this paper results from conversations between senior Gunditjmara artist Vicki Couzens and Anna Weinreich, whose doctoral research focuses on Indigenous collections in Germany. Informed by Couzens' deep cultural knowledge of the objects and the Country from which they were taken, our research interrogates von Guérard's archival correspondence, translated and returned to Australia 140 years after the objects were sent to Berlin. At a time when German museums are undergoing highly politicized transformations, we ask: How might we understand the collection's contemporary value, its entangled history, and contested presence in an international institution from an Indigenous perspective? As "digital access" and international collaboration are promising to change the governance of Indigenous collections in Germany, what is the potential of these efforts to shape a "decolonial" future?