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- Convenors:
-
Andrew Jones
(Stockholm University)
Louisa Minkin (Central Saint Martins, UAL)
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- Format:
- Roundtable
- Location:
- G16
- Sessions:
- Friday 28 June, -
Time zone: Europe/London
Short Abstract:
The idea of objects as a curriculum has informed our work on Blackfoot items in UK museum contexts in which digital imaging was employed to aid in the revitalization of knowledge renewal for Blackfoot makers and has framed continued work in ethnographic collections both in the UK and in Sweden.
Long Abstract:
The Blackfoot Elder Frank Weasel Head observed that for members of the Blackfoot community the objects held in UK museums were a curriculum. This insight informed our work on Blackfoot items in UK museum contexts in which digital imaging methods were employed to aid in the revitalization of craft making practices and knowledge renewal for Blackfoot makers. This insight has also framed our continued work in ethnographic collections both in the UK at the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford and in Sweden at the Ethnografiska Museet, Stockholm.
The idea of objects as curricula was intended to underscore the importance of Blackfoot items held in distant museums for Blackfoot people, but over time the concept has gained a new momentum offering us a sense in which all museum items have the potential to teach. Coupled with this, our work on Blackfoot material adopted a series of innovative art/archaeology practices beginning with utilising digital imaging methods commonly used in archaeological fieldwork to developing remote-viewing sessions using these technologies informed by inclusive and open-ended art practice. In a dual sense then the museum archive collection was both a carceral container of of Indigenous teaching, and a site to be opened for innovation and learning: what was learnt very much depended on how we approached and intra-acted with the archive. This session will present a round table panel with a series of papers from members of the teams involved in a series of ongoing and interconnected projects.
Accepted contributions:
Session 1 Friday 28 June, 2024, -Erik Solfeldt (Stockholm University) Anna Naglaya
Contribution short abstract:
By analysing Siberian idols, focusing on non-human souls in combination with digital imaging methods we suggest that a reanimation is possible which makes the idols a curriculum for rethinking their definition and consider their former animist contexts and not viewing them as passive objects of art.
Contribution long abstract:
Animism(s) and shamanism(s) along with its material culture have since the early days of Siberian ethnography been one of the ethnographers’ main focuses. In 1878 professor Nordenskiöld collected a number of Nenets idols from the now abandoned missionary village of Chabarova and the sacred island of Vaygach in north-western Siberia. These idols were brought out of their animist context to the ethnographic museum in Stockholm, Sweden, where they have ever since have been regarded as static objects of art. By analysing these idols based on a new animist theoretical framework, focusing on personhood and non-human souls, in combination with digital imaging methods we suggest that a form of reanimation is possible which makes the idols a curriculum for rethinking their definition and consider their former animist contexts and to learn from them rather than viewing them as passive objects of art.
Keywords: Material culture, Nenets culture and religion, Siberia ethnography, new animism.
Ian Dawson (University of Southampton)
Contribution short abstract:
Narrating through Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI).
Contribution long abstract:
Reflectance Transformation Imaging is a digital imaging method that has been adopted into cultural heritage settings and field archaeology. the process creates intra-active synthetic images whereby the lighting conditions can be altered during subsequent viewings and encounters. Diffraction patterns are often evident in RTI images and a such can be used to explore the 'poetics' of entanglements and the agential cuts.
In a series of unfolding projects situated across museums, archives, studios, classrooms and indigenous territories, RTI was not only used to document objects but as a way to perform diffractively so that the environments where people and digital imaging meet cannot be disjoined from the mediations and the remedations that occur within them.
A basic kit of camera equipment is all that is required to create an RTI data set, providing that a small shiny black hemispherical object is placed inside the 'scene'. Black Ball Ballads will tell the story of RTI in relation to the images, workshops, artworks and exhibitions that have been created through and with it.
Louisa Minkin (Central Saint Martins, UAL) Esi Eshun (Central Saint Martins)
Contribution short abstract:
How might artists work to enliven and renew relations with objectified and sequestered museum items through material, digital, affective and discursive responses? We took from the ethos of Hui’s cosmotechnics to bring transnational artists in connection with past and present material practices.
Contribution long abstract:
The 2022-24 project, Prisoners of Love: Affect, Containment and Alternative Futures (PoL) aimed to connect material lodged in UK museums with dispersed home peoples, enabling artists, curators and researchers, from UK based diasporic communities, First Nations, Canada, Ghana and India, among others, to respond to complex histories, cosmological ideas, and material practices linking Europe, the Americas, Africa and Asia.
Framing our methodology around ‘virtual visits’, we aimed to bring participants into museum collection stores, to develop techniques to improve the experience of virtual interactions, and to facilitate the sharing of knowledge, data and distributed art practices through conversation, research, reflection, and responses in the form of artworks, story and theory. By digitising, 3D printing and working with augmented reality as well as more traditional making processes, we sought to position archival material within contemporary technological frameworks that would also be reflective of the complexity of the thinking and practices enshrined in older approaches.
Highlighting our commitment to collaborative working, we brought together Hastings Museum & the Blackfoot Nation Mootookakio’ssin Project, Canada; Horniman Museum & Compound 13 Lab in Dharavi, India; Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford & The University of Ghana Archaeology Department. At the Economic Botany Collection at Kew, we demonstrated computational photography techniques and visited with material from Zimbabwe in order to facilitate future networks that might enable us to further develop the four process based exhibitions we curated in the UK and Canada during the project period.
Maria Costanza Trento (Università degli Studi di Palermo)
Contribution short abstract:
Explore Sicilian heritage through the Regional Ethnographic Museum, a testament to Giuseppe Pitrè's vision. This contribution highlights the significance of artifacts as guardians of collective memory, resisting cultural neglect and preserving the traditions of less privileged classes.
Contribution long abstract:
The Sicilian Regional Ethnographic Museum, founded in 1910 by Giuseppe Pitrè, stands as a testament to his two-decade-long exploration and collection of artifacts, utensils, and ornaments reflecting the material and moral life of the Sicilian people. Pitrè's foresight, driven by the awareness that modernity's progress could irreversibly alter Sicilian traditions, led to the establishment of the museum. He recognized that the inevitable transformation in customs and institutions posed a threat to the preservation of collective memory.
The significance of safeguarding items such as ox horn glasses, strummuli (traditional toys), ovu di magaria (magical tool), purcidduzzi dimari, petri di lu purpu (pottery), and agrarian tools from the turn of the century is twofold. Beyond serving as evocative historical documentation in ethnographic museums, these artifacts play a crucial role in preventing the potential erasure of historical memory. Giuseppe Pitrè's vision was rooted not only in the inherent value of the items themselves but also in the imperative to resist the cultural hegemony that could lead to the neglect of the traditions of the less privileged classes.
The artefacts housed in ethnographic museums, particularly the Sicilian Ethnographic Museum, carry a unique cultural heritage, representing a tangible legacy of recent history that demands study and remembrance. Gesualdo Bufalino aptly described objects as the best allies of memory—shadows of the past that evoke memories and emotions. In this way, the museum stands as a guardian of Sicilian heritage, ensuring that the rich tapestry of its traditions remains a living part of our collective consciousness.
Lennon Mhishi (University of Oxford)
Contribution short abstract:
What does it mean to encounter materials that have been objectified, museumised and contained often outside the contexts of their production, circulation and use? This encounter, especially with material from colonial contexts, is infused with the colonial violence and extraction.
Contribution long abstract:
What does it mean to encounter materials that have been objectified, museumised and contained often multiply dislocated and decontextualised, outside the contexts of their production, circulation and re-use? This encounter, especially with material from colonial contexts, is infused with the colonial violence and extraction attendant to their journeys into the museum. Borrowing from Clapperton Chakanetsa Mavhunga’s ideas, especially on being human, chivanhu, from a Zimbabwean cosmology-especially thinking through “mobile workshops and transient workspaces”, I am keen to explore how reactivating the ‘object,’ through art practices and other forms of communion, as well as locating the ‘object’ as part of indigenous forms of technology and knowledge, alerts us to the possibilities of knowing that are not present within the carceral histories and institutional practices that accompany ethnographic collections in museums. To learn from this material differently also demands a relinquishing and disinvestment from the modes of epistemic and institutional authority (racialised, gendered, oppressive in a myriad ways) through which the material arrives to us clothed in the garments of the ethnographic object. If the ‘objects’, to use Harry Garuba’s thought, are to be “teacherly texts”, then we must learn from them, in addition to many other things, the arts of transgressing the museum as carceral space and container.