Principal Investigators:
Prof. Bénédicte Savoy (Technische Universität Berlin)
Prof. Dan Hicks (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)
Prof. Ciraj Shahid Rassool (University of the Western Cape)
Prof. Albert Gouaffo (University of Dschang)
Project researcher: Dr Lennon Mhishi (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford)
Funder: Volkswagen Stiftung
Project dates: June 2021 - Dec 2024
In the context of major social and environmental emergencies at a global scale, and amidst civil societies' restitution claims across the world, this project intends to critically interrogate the histories of collections assembled during the colonial time, engage in the re-connection of interrupted chains of knowledge and examine alternative forms of custody, objecthandling and display in African and European museums. For this purpose, the project brings together researchers who will work in close dialogue with artists, museum professionals, students and various stakeholders on both continents. The overarching common endeavor is the creation of two complementary, site-specific research exhibitions held simultaneously in Oxford and Dakar during the 2024 Dak'art Biennale. Epistemic plurality is at the core of this project: all its components are thus designed to allow for the crossfertilization of multiple approaches, to open up the sedimented meanings of objects and to foster learning from practices beyond the museum. To this aim, a digital working tool, the "anticatalogue", will be developed which enables sustainable long-distance collaboration. Drawing relationships between the studied objects and documenting their historical evolution without reifying them, it can both act as a transversal working instrument to be used by all researchers across continents, and form a visual element of the exhibition in its own right.
Infrastructures of Containment: Museums, Beyond and Possibilities into the Future
This project within the Reconnecting "Objects" programme of research, and developed by Dr Lennon Mhishi, experiments and explores how museums develop simultaneously with, or alongside other infrastructures like the border, the reserve, camp, detention centre, the prison, and other technologies of containment. Dr Mhishi will focus on some of the collections at the Pitt Rivers Museum, particularly the African collections. Tracing elements of an enduring coloniality, the work will reveal the functioning of museums as ‘containers’, consisting of colonial collections as products of violence, extraction and dispossession. Whilst the research will also contend with how museums, in these processes claimed as preservation, also contain, through practices of, among other things, narration, display and erasure, the forms of knowledge, the histories and the possibilities in what become stultified objects, acquiring a different set of qualities. Concomitantly, infrastructures of bordering, detention and imprisonment are underpinned by the logics of carcerality that have also shaped museum practice. These infrastructures also ‘contain’ people, and in the frames of biopolitical governance, collapse their subjectivities into objects of risk, surveillance, and expulsion, also in the name of protection and preservation.
The project will explore how we make use of museum infrastructure, space, and contemporary art, to explore and challenge these constraining legacies, and experiment with different possibilities for museum practice, including beyond the museum in questions of knowledge, mobility and planetary futures.
