Paper short abstract:

This paper takes a collaborative research project on collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin as a starting point to argue for postcolonial provenance research as a continual and decolonizing process of translation.

Paper long abstract:

In 2019, historians, curators, artists and cultural experts from Namibia visited the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin to study the museum’s Namibian collections. The goal was to confront and work through the colonial and often extremely violent contexts in which the objects had been taken and to openly discuss the future of the objects and their probable return to Namibia. It was an emotionally and intellectually intense process in which the German and Namibian research partners had to negotiate various ways of engaging with and caring for objects and to translate between different forms of knowledge about the past(s) and, consequently, the present(s) and possible futures. In this paper, I will take my role as provenance researcher and curator in the project as a starting point to reflect on these processes of transcultural and transmedial translation. Is it possible to translate the findings of research in colonial archives without perpetuating the racist and one-sided worldview inherent in the archival records? How can we create a space in which embodied and performative forms of knowledge can be expressed on equal terms and enter in dialogue with textual forms of knowledge? In this paper, I will discuss the strategies that we, in the Namibian-German team, developed to respond to our various forms of relating to pasts, presents and futures through things, to co-produce knowledge and, ultimately, to translate our collaborative research in the form of an experimental exhibition for a broader audience.