Contribution short abstract:

A proposal based on the permanent exhibition Wo ist Afrika? Storytelling a European Collection (Linden-Museum, 2019). Its main thread are human relations activated by museum objects. The curator is also part of the exhibition mise-en-scene and emotions integrated in the “cultural” public discourse.

Contribution long abstract:

This proposal is based on the vision and concept of the permanent exhibition Wo ist Afrika? Storytelling a European Collection (Linden-Museum, Stuttgart, Germany, 2019), whose main thread are past and present human relationships activated by collection, research, and exhibition-making processes. Such relationships are put on display through the exhibition installations and texts, as a way to inscribe the emotions of the ever-dynamic and mutually transformative human encounters and exchanges that are also at the heart of anthropological fieldwork within the institutional “cultural” or “scientific” public discourse. The author would present and discuss some specific cases of objects/installations (one of which is built around a fragment of a quite “intimate” item belonging to the curator: a healing tool that was given to her during research) as a way to interrogate the potential of similar strategies as a way towards the “re-humanization” of the s(o)bjects of “ethnological collections on display” and the creation of anthropological museum spaces within which the publics’ relationships among themselves may also (re)acquire the depth and collective agency potential of those that the historical objects on display once activated.