reconnecting

18—28.02.2023 Exhibition and Workshop Program : RECONNECTING 0BJECTS WITH KNOWLEDGE AND SUBJECTS 

During ten intense days, local actors develop their proposals on questions of restitution of the material components of their culture, currently kept in museums in the West, and potential uses of them "beyond the museum". 

Date: 18 to 28 February 2023

Venues: Alliance franco-camerounaise and Musée des civilisations, Dschang, Cameroon

Curated by:

Dr. Lucie Mbogni Nankeng, in collaboration and with the scientific advice by Prof. Albert Gouaffo

With:

The Reconnecting "Objects" Research Team 

Invited artists: 

Sidoine Yonta, Stevie Douanla, Ines Kendjo, André Takou Sa'a, Hervé Youmbi, Marios Kenfack, Emile Youmbi

 

read more

01.02.2023 Museums & Social Issues: Contested Conservation

Call for Papers

On 01.02.2023 Prof. Dr. Noémie Etienne (Professor at the University of Vienna) and Dr. Lotte Arndt (Researcher at the Technical University of Berlin) publish a Call for Papers on the topic "Museums & Social Issues".

Museum conservation in the West has long focused on the physical preservation of objects. Today, the heritage regime is being questioned and challenged in many ways. If collecting, storing, and exhibiting have participated as epistemological tools in the classification of the world, can artifacts be reconnected to living practices? What changes are needed for concerned communities to take agency in storage? How can we rethink cultural transmission and reconceive the role of collections without reconducting the cultural hegemonies inscribed in their history? 

read more

24—27.01.2023 Share 2023 | Semaine Intensive

On 25 January 2023 Lotte Arndt participates in the SHARE intensive week at the Academie royale des Beaux-Arts - Ecole supérieure des arts in Brussels.

During the conference on 25 January at 6 pm, Lotte Arndt presents her work entitled: «Agentivités discrètes - Toxicité et corps poreux».

Toxic substances often act in an imperceptible way: frequently odourless, invisible, silent, they deploy their action in networks of beings and things, and blur the contours between bodies. If toxicity poisons, it transforms above all the bodies in which it is deployed.

read more

18.01.2023 Conference: Vestibule

Vestibule reconsiders the exhibition not as an enclosed space that hosts works of art and visitors but instead as a system whose growth can be exponential and unpredictable.

read more

12.12.2022 Divergent Conservation. Discussing preservation and transmission of collections of colonial provenance

On 12 December 2022 Lotte Arndt (Technical University of Berlin) and Noémie Etienne (University of Bern) are co-organising "les rencontres internationales" in Paris.

INHA, Galerie Colbert, auditorium Jacqueline Lichtenstein

read more

05—06.12.2022 Menagerie virtueller Tiere

Closing event of the DFG project

Zum Multispecies Turn in der Medienwissenschaft

Makerspace, Ruhr Universität Bochum

Löwe Simba Mbili: Potential Histories of the "Man-eaters" of Tsavo

A presentation by Sam Hopkins & Marian Nur Goni

read more

10—11.11.2022 Récits d'objets: traduction et exposition

An intervention and presentation of the "Reconnecting objects" project by Rossila Goussanou during the seminar "Archiver les récits d'objets" co-directed by Soko Phay and Patrick Nardin (in collaboration with "les maisons de la Sagesse-Traduire et les Archives Nationales") and the Musée Théodore Monod.

 

read more

07—09.11.2022 COLLOQUE: « La recherche sur les esclavages dans le monde : un état des lieux »

From November 7 to 9, 2022, Lucie Mbogni Nankeng participated in the AUF/FME colloquium and focused on the following theme:

« Jeux et enjeux de la transmission de la mémoire des esclavages à travers les musées des chefferies dans les grassfields Camerounais »

Dakar, Senegal

Direction générale de l'AUF - Campus UCAD

read more

02.11.2022 Poisonous Heritage: Chemical Conservation, Monitored Collections, and the Threshold of Ethnological Museums

Publication: Dr. Lotte Arndt

Museums&Society, Vol 20, No 2 (2022)

read more

26—28.10.2022 Colloque international: Art & décolonialité (pratique, théorie, paradigme)

Étendre l'espace de la vie. Le travail de Kapwani Kiwanga sur le seuil de musées.

A presentation by Lotte Arndt in Bordeaux.

read more

14—17.10.2022 International Reconnection Festival

From tradition to creation
«Body painting as resistance and contemporary materiality of ancient artistic knowledge and as a means of reconnection to this knowledge and to new energies».

From 14 to 17 October 2022 Lucie Mbogni Nankeng participated in the International Reconnection Festival in Dschang, Cameroon.

 

read more

12—14.10.2022 Deadly Dreams - When Dreams of Progress, Health, Wellbeing and Beauty Bequeath Toxic Legacies

From 12-14, October, Lotte Arndt participated in the Deadly Dreams workshop in  Kristiansand, Norway, presenting a paper on Toxic Conservation.

Toxic legacies are complex and multi-dimensional, incomprehensible, mysterious and ignorable. In this workshop we will examine the many facets of toxicities,

the dreams and socio-cultural practices that brought harmful toxic substances into peoples' lives and the environment.

read more

06—06.11.2022 Toxicity - the 7th Biennial of Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo

The 7th edition of the Lubumbashi Biennale explores the contemporary creation of the artistic scene in the Democratic Republic of Congo and in the world. It is today one of the most dynamic and experimental artistic events on the African continent. For this edition, the biennale will interrogate toxicity as a condition of existence that has inextricably affected social worlds under the title ’ToxiCité’ or ’ToxiCity’. As a starting point, the theme will open the collective elaboration of a critical and transformative take on the social and cultural environment, in Lubumbashi and in the world.

read more

14.09.2022 Berlin Biennale 12: Workshops Reconnecting 'Objects'

6 - 7.30 pm

Local Practices of conservation, valorization, and transmission of knowledge through objects and cultural expressions in the Grassfields in Cameroon

8 – 10 pm

SONIC ECHOES is a curated mash up, remix, jam session in an attempt to respond to sound archives and sonicities incarcerated in colonial containments, to invoke and unleash their fire.

read more

10—11.09.2022 From Restitution to Repair

This conference considers the debate around restitution a starting point for dialogues aiming at decolonizing arts and culture, as well as an anti-colonial memory culture. It seeks to frame restitution within the broader concept of repair (as developed by Kader Attia) of individual and societal traumas and as a mode of cultural resistance. Participants investigate the psychological dimensions of the loss of cultural heritage in Africa and the paradox presented in mimical museography. The contributions explore the possibility of an ontology of restitution as a cosmogonic, political, and philosophical reinvention.

read more

09.09.2022 Berlin Biennale 12 - Reconnecting ‘Objects’: An opening conversation

The research project Re-connecting “Objects”: Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums aims to tackle the legacies of containment in colonial collections from a multiplicity of approaches. Involving three African and two European universities and two museums (the Théodore Monod Museum of African Art in Dakar as well as the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford), the project aspires to collaboratively rethink and redo modes of working between these two continents, with a special attention to the sometimes subtle shifts and reconfigurations of power in the field.

read more

05—06.09.2022 Gbégbé Days

Rossila Goussanou participated in « Gbégbé Days in Berlin » with the members of the prefiguration committee of the Gbégbé House (Nadja Ofuatey Alazard, Dr. Ohiniko Mawussé Toffa and Anani Dodji Sanouvi), Sename Koffi Agbodjinou and Mathilde Ter Heijne and they continue a reflection on the governance and the functioning of the Gbégbé House, future reception structure for works looted during colonization.

UDK, Berlin, Germany

read more

31.08.2022 On the repercussions of racial science: The difficulty of talking about the dead

presentation by Sophie Schasiepen at the Kitong-Kiass Symposium in Vienna.

read more

08.07.2022 Dan Hicks: The Risks That Lurk in Europe’s “Scramble for Decolonization”

As the global consensus on restitution passes the tipping point, some skepticism towards these sudden, improbable Damascene conversions towards restitution is probably justified.

https://hyperallergic.com/745527/the-risks-that-lurk-in-europes-scramble-for-decolonization/

read more

07.07.2022 Published: Lotte Arndt 07/05/22 The Invention of Pest Control in Museums Book Review of Schädlingsbekämpfung in Museen. Wirkstoffe und Methoden am Beispiel des Ethnologischen Museums Berlin. 1887–1936 by Helene Tello.

read more

01.07.2022 Who tells the story? Stratégies discursives en temps de restitutions (7e RENCONTRES DES ÉTUDES AFRICAINES EN FRANCE – TOULOUSE)

Plusieurs ateliers sur les restitutions, retours, collections et narrations lors des 7e rencontres des études africaines en France. 

read more

08.06.2022 Africa's cultural heritage in European museums: from entangled (hi)stories to new relational ethics?

Many objects in (ethnological) museums were brought to Europe by force during colonial rule. While only a few of them are exhibited for a broader public, large quantities slumber unnoticed in the archives. The form of presentation of these stolen objects in “Museum collections” often conceals the violent circumstances of appropriation. It also ignores the object’s meaning for the societies of origin - embedded in cultural, spiritual, religious, or social practices, those “objects” were experienced as “subjects”.

How can the critical engagement with such objects create a new relational ethic between the formerly colonized countries and the colonial powers? The recognition of colonial injustice and the transfer of property rights to the societies of origin are at the core of the current restitution debates. If handled properly, the process of restitution could become a door opener for mutual learning around the objects, people and communities.

This roundtable is connected to the “Decolonial Dialogues” of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, in which actors from Germany, Europe and Africa exchange perspectives, knowledge and experiences. The aim is to discuss joint steps for the decolonisation of museums, the development of the creative industries and new forms of cultural cooperation.

read more

23—25.05.2022 Colloque scientifique de Dak'art. La biennale de Dakar, 2022.

The exchange-meetings are part of the general topic of Dak'art 2022 " Ĩ NDAFFA# /FORGE /OUT OF THE FIRE ".Ĩ NDAFFA is inspired by I NDAFFAX which - in Serere language – is an invitation to forge. The term expresses thefreedom to transform as well as the multiple possibilities of creating. This suggests the alchemy of the forging and thetransformative action that leads to a new stage. In addition, the 2022 edition of the Biennale of Dakar calls to thetransmutation of concepts and the foundation of new meanings. To forge refers to the act of transforming amaterial, most often metal, and in several languages, it has now lost the meaning of creating, imagining and inventing. It is therefore a question of creating new artistic expressions, new knowledge and know-how, which integrate African perspectives, in order to forge views and tools likely to help us overcome contemporary challenges and thus lead to the constantly renewed creation of a meaning that enables us to better understand the complexity of the world. To this end, the following questions will be explored during the exchange-meetings of the 2022 Biennale of Dakar.

read more

01—31.05.2022 Préparation de la Biennale Dak’Art 2022

Réalisation de l’affiche du kakemono, de la feuille de salle et Montage de l’exposition « Teg Bet Gestu Gi »

Co-curatée par Emmanuelle Chérel et Malick Ndiaye dans le cadre de la Biennale Dak’Art 2022.

read more

06.05.2022 « Festival Gbégbé Days »

read more