Paper short abstract:

Taking museums as a point of departure, I probe the entanglements of inorganic matter, societal debates about coloniality, and mining for space travel. Through museum ethnography, my research explores the colonial logics permeate relationships between outer and earthbound space.

Paper long abstract:

Belgium’s ‘Africa Museum’ – the natural history and ethnographic museum built by King Leopold the II for propagandist purposes – was refurbished in 2019. The costly renewals wrestled with contemporary conversations about the decolonization of heritage sites and resonated with wider political debates about the country’s colonial past and aspirations for a more just future.

Yet this renovation, and the related conversations about coloniality, eluded the ‘mineral cabinet’ room. Here, stones and ores are displayed in antique curiosity cupboards under a century-old ceiling adorned with depictions of fertile African lands. Next to an imposing piece of Malachite (a mineral form of copper), a newly installed interactive digital map charters the location of contemporary ore mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. It signals that the South-Eastern part of the DRC holds essential minerals for future technologies, including tantalum , a staple resource for the aerospace industry.

Taking the Africa Museum’s mineral cabinet as a point of departure, I probe the entanglements of inorganic matter, political debates about Belgian coloniality, and mining for space travel. Through museum ethnography, and by thinking about rocks as objects that connect intra and extra-terrestrial interests and travels, my research aims to explore how imperial logics permeate relationships between outer and earthbound space. From this vantage point, I explore how the temporalities of change that buttress decolonial calls for more justice relate to futurities that are embroiled in logics of space conquest and mining.