Clémentine Deliss. Clémentine Deliss

I could make out, the division between museum and university centered around two main issues. Firstly, the decolonial developments of numerous countries in the early sixties that brought with them a necessary critical shift in social anthropology from its earlier twentieth-century focus on ethnographic artifacts to more immaterial subject matters. Research collections, once avidly gathered to elucidate non-European cultures, became less central as heuristic tools of scientific speculation. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow describes the situation in the nineteen-twenties as follows: “the museum’s scientific role consisted of promoting technical and sociological studies of objects and peoples cast broadly within a Maussian fait total (total fact) perspective in which each object was illuminated by—and metonymic of—a whole society.”³⁰ For Marcel Griaule, the leader of the French Mission Dakar–Djibouti (1931–33), to understand the background to the 3,500 material artifacts forcefully removed from the African continent was to come one step closer to mapping the indigenous mind.³¹

      It was not until the advent of Structuralism that Claude Lévi-Strauss could shift the debate onto immaterial fields of knowledge. As he stated in a lecture presented to unesco in 1954, it was now more relevant and far easier to study the languages, belief systems, attitudes, and personalities of other cultures than to acquire their bows and arrows, drums, necklaces, or figurines. A second reason for the division between the museum and the university was more mundane—the occupational status of anthropologists in ethnographic museums in Germany was traditionally that of a functionary or civil servant and not a university professor. Even if the museum staff harbored ambitions in the arts and humanities, this situated condition of employment promoted an uncomfortable hierarchical and disciplinary division that I wished to address. Like a muscle that had lost its traction, I hoped to revitalize the research arm of the museum, adding value to the museum’s output beyond the required quota of public footfall.

      To an outside observer, the Weltkulturen Museum was dormant. Most citizens had visited it only once, as children. This stagnant condition was not a special case, but the reflection of a systemic institutional and political condition that I found in equal measure in the twenty or more Völkerkunde (ethnological) museums in Germany’s provincial cities. Their respective holdings referenced families of artifacts sourced in inordinate quantity on expeditions and then swapped between museums to fill any gaps in their encyclopedic collections. Together with the restorers and conservators, the custodians demonstrated an affective connection to artifacts that lay within their area of cultivation. They had favorite objects, beloved villages or regions, and preferred certain cultures and practices to others. They chose to speak on behalf of these, using a language derived from their studies at one of the many institutes of ethnology in Marburg, Mainz, Göttingen, Cologne, Frankfurt, or elsewhere in Germany. Evidenced by a feeble level of postcolonial reflexivity or readiness to engage in transdisciplinary inquiry, the monoculture of ethnological museums began to resemble intellectual plantations.

      Coming from the outside as I did, these schools of museum ethnology constituted a tight network of colleagues and peer groups that was remarkably resistant to external communities of researchers, and particularly to artists. As the first weeks passed, I began to sense the complexity of my position within the museum. If I felt legitimate as the elected director, I could tell that my intellectual and academic identity was foreign matter. Within a short space of time, the partition of competence became clear. I pointed out that I would not compete with the curators’ regional and contextual knowledge of the objects in the museum’s stores, but like all previous directors, I staked a claim to another know-how, in this case curatorial practice and contemporary art. Every time I took an artist through the depots, I could be sure that they would identify something unresolved. Out of the corner of their eye they would spy an object lying on the top of a shelf, locked away and ignored. The presupposition of exoticism was actually alive in the stores of the ethnographic museum. You only needed someone from the outside to activate a search. Later, when we undertook fieldwork in the museum with guest artists and writers, artifacts that had been neglected by custodians for years were seen, touched, and gradually inserted into a critical and experimental process of remediation.

      At times, I thought about the death of the ethnographer, as if the departure of this expert on other cultures might constitute the breakdown of this institution. If one museum ethnographer passed on, then so too would their simulacra of voices, ventriloquating on behalf of others. I wondered whether it was just I, as a professional, who was so resistant to the authoritarian discourse of the ethnological museum? What emotions did lay visitors encounter when they entered a museum of mankind? How did they come to terms with the affects generated by this artificial procedure of squeezing every dimension of another life into units and comparatives? Displays were intended to make the public feel transported to an originatory space and time, and the visitors’ book was full of comments along the lines of “Where are the Red Indians?” or “My daughter misses the exhibit on the Pygmies.” Grotesque as these inscriptions appear today, such preconceptions are harbored by the genre of the ethnographic museum, whose role has been to enlighten, enchant, and mystify at the same time.

      In 1992, while he was president of the International Council of Museums, the former president of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konaré, valiantly suggested that all museums in Africa be “killed” in order for a new approach to culture and heritage to flourish.³² Can one ever succeed in revalidating an institution that has colluded with the violence of colonialism? Might this be achieved by reevaluating research collections, and insisting on their access and visibility? To this purpose, I changed the designation of the museum’s staff from that of curator to research curator in the hope of motivating a new era of conceptual inquiry and collection-centric prototyping. I would apply the concept of remediation, developed by Paul Rabinow, in a humble, reflexive attempt to heal the injuries and occlusions of the past.³³ This methodology, recognized within advanced anthropological circles, would require the introduction of alternative media and modes of representation in order to activate a process of regeneration and redesign. “The core idea,” writes Rabinow, “is that concepts arose from and were designed to address specific problems in distinctive historical, cultural, and political settings. When the settings change, and as the problems differ, one cannot take these things up once again or simply reuse them without changing their meaning and efficacy.” This procedure, which necessitates teamwork, is a dialogic and recursive condition through which certain practices are “reconfigured, modified, rectified, and adjusted.” However, such remediation is necessarily hostile to the “nostalgia (or worse) of an unconditional allegiance to tradition.” It focuses instead on the reformulation of the contemporary, “an orientation that seeks out and takes up practices, terms, concepts, forms and the like from traditional sources but seeks to do different things with them from the things they were forged to do originally or how they have been understood more recently.”³⁴

      By gathering artifacts into new assemblages, one would activate taxonomic transgressions, clashing entrenched identifications and highlighting the underlying structures of power generated by listings, narratives, visualizations, and omissions, dating from different periods and authors. Earlier monographs drafted by anthropologists and experts from area studies would still be central to contextualization. Testimonials from the original producers and users of these artifacts so rarely recorded or documented, would remain paramount. However, all these interpretations would need to be expanded with contemporary readings that crossed disciplines and instituted a new constellatory mapping, or object atlas. Extending Aby Warburg’s system of the Mnemosyne Atlas onto three-dimensional phenomena was a way to disconnect existing denominational and classificatory systems, or at least to place them into jeopardy. To articulate the complexity of the museum through its collections would necessitate a curatorial methodology that explored different propositions, be they aesthetic, art critical, cultural, historical, scientific or personalized. One approach to this decolonial dialogue would be through experimental exercises between artworks with recognized makers and artifacts with undocumented authors, both being subject to discursive procedures of allocation, evaluation, and marketability.

      In 1990, I had curated an exhibition for the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, which included selected works by neoconceptual artists alongside various items purchased in markets in West Africa.³⁵ Lotte or the transformation of the object was a response to the formalist anachronism of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition