Damiana Otoiu

The process of heritage-making in the context of a nation (re)building is multifaceted. In periods of historical transition, challenges are many and the fragility of the political context is fertile ground for revisiting the representation of the past. To understand these processes, an interdisciplinary engagement with contributions from history, anthropology, archeology, political science, art history and museology is necessary. Interdisciplinary collaboration, however, is not always easy to establish within the existing research institutional framework, built around separate disciplines. The main goal of this winter school is to create a doctoral training space and interdisciplinary exchange between researchers working on heritage- making process, uses and "museumification" of the past in connection with nation-building, or, more broadly, the construction of identities.

The colloquium intends to address the practices of cultural diplomacy between Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern Europe or the “Second and the Third world”, as entry path for the intricacies of the global Cold War. One persistent gap within the literature is the comprehensive discussion of the educational, scientific and cultural exchanges between European socialist countries to Sub-Saharan ones.

The scope of the colloquium is to analyze the pursuit of foreign policy through cultural channels, from broadcasting to educational programmes and to various forms of cultural, scientific and personnel exchanges. We are interested in the agency of African and Eastern European actors as they negotiated their place and status in Cold War hierarchies, beyond the Soviet hegemony. While USSR’s involvement in Sub-Saharan Africa has been widely explored, there is still little scholarship on the connections between Sub-Saharan Africa and Eastern European countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Hungary, Czechoslovakia or the former Yugoslavia, but not only.

The colloquium invites scholars from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds (history, political sciences, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, art history, etc.) to offer a multifaceted reading of how the cultural, institutional, political, and individual interactions between socialist Eastern Europe and postcolonial Africa came into being under the impact of the global Cold War and decolonization. We encourage interested scholars to send paper proposals for 20 minutes presentations on any of the following thematic areas (topics related to these areas will also be welcomed):

- Diplomatic exchanges: official visits and the performative politics of cultural diplomacy.
- Educational and Scientific Exchanges: African students in socialist Eastern Europe and Eastern European teachers and instructors in Africa.
- Actors and Agency: individuals and organizations involved in cultural diplomacy.
- Cultural and Scientific Partnerships: Africa and Eastern Europe in literature, visual and performing arts.
- Ideology and Cultural Diplomacy: Ideological and cultural fronts in the Cold War.
- The domestic politics of diplomacy: establishing the nexus between domestic and foreign policy.

Works of modern art, archaeological or ethnographic artefacts and human remains generally occupy separate realms in the museum world. Yet, the growing discourse surrounding claims on certain objects made to museums by former owners or communities of origin unite them in one very specific category. Their status appears unsettled as they are caught between conflicting desires and points of view. By bringing together scholars and practitioners dealing with case studies related to different types of museums and collections, this conference aims to facilitate a transdisciplinary engagement with the issue of returns (a term that encompasses here both restitution and repatriation questions). One of the aims of this conference will be to ask how we might think about and historicize " contentious objects " as a category in its own right. Might it be considered alongside categories such as idols, icons, fetishes, totems, foundling objects and others discussed by J. T. Mitchell (2006)? What are the social, political and aesthetic dynamics that make objects contentious? How do property negotiations induce profound changes in the value and symbolic meaning of objects and their capacity to impact on post-conflict relationships? How does this process of remaking the museum challenge imperial and colonial constructions of knowledge? In her foundational study, Jeannette Greenfield (1989) privileged the term " return " over repatriation or restitution, writing that it " may also refer in a wider sense to restoration, reinstatement, and even rejuvenation and reunification ". The physical return of objects appears as one aspect of a large set of practices. These revolve around an effective or projected movement that places museum collections in an essentially social and relational perspective, reshaping their rather exclusive relationship with the institution and tying them back to former contexts (Bouquet 2012; 152). " Returns " potentially unsettle not only the object's perceived permanence of place but also the ontological and epistemological interpretations produced by the museum. Practices related to returns can be seen as new ways of asking " what do objects want? " As well as encompassing diplomatic and legal actions, they may also take the form of critical artistic expressions and museum displays that explicitly seek to draw attention to appropriation processes. We welcome papers that look at the trajectories of specific objects or collections, analysing their agency as contested things. By focusing on the objects themselves, we hope to shift attention away from entrenched, often inherently ideological positions (Merryman, 2006). Focus will be placed on how " returns " are in fact changing museum ethics and knowledge systems; calling on new actors and forms of curation and « curature » (Hamilton, Skotnes

Works of modern art, archaeological or ethnographic artefacts and human remains generally occupy separate realms in the museum world. Yet, the growing discourse surrounding claims on certain objects made to museums by former owners or communities of origin unite them in one very specific category. Their status appears unsettled as they are caught between conflicting desires and points of view. By bringing together speakers dealing with case studies related to different types of museums and collections, in Europe, Africa, Australia and Canada this conference aims to facilitate a transdisciplinary engagement with the issue of returns (a term that encompasses here both restitution and repatriation questions). Taken in parallel, case studies from different fields and periods will hopefully allow us to approach some important questions: How can we understand historic cases of returns, in relation to the contemporary culture of redress? Have the growing number of negotiations around human remains impacted on how we perceive the issue of ownership for other types of objects, i.e. can artworks also be perceived as unique bodies? What do negotiations around Nazi looted art have in common with the legal and ethical questions related to objects appropriated in colonial contexts?

One of the aims of this conference will be to ask how we might think about and historicize "contentious objects" as a category in its own right. Might it be considered alongside categories such as idols, icons, fetishes, totems, foundling objects and others discussed by J. T. Mitchell (2006)? What are the social, political and aesthetic dynamics that make objects contentious? How do property negotiations induce profound changes in the value and symbolic meaning of objects and their capacity to impact on post-conflict relationships? How does this process of remaking the museum challenge imperial and colonial constructions of knowledge?

In her foundational study, Jeannette Greenfield (1989) privileged the term "return" over repatriation or restitution, writing that it "may also refer in a wider sense to restoration, reinstatement, and even rejuvenation and reunification". The physical return of objects appears as one aspect of a large set of practices. These revolve around an effective or projected movement that places museum collections in an essentially social and relational perspective, reshaping their rather exclusive relationship with the institution and tying them back to former contexts.

 

Convenors
Eva-Maria Troelenberg, Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz, director of the Max Planck research group "Objects in the Contact Zone – The Cross-Cultural Lives of Things"
Felicity Bodenstein, Postdoctoral fellow, Max Planck Institute, Kunsthistorisches Institut Florenz
Damiana Otoiu, Lecturer in Political Anthropology at the University of Bucharest, director of the project "Museums and Controversial Collections. Politics and Policies of Heritage-Making in Post-colonial and Post-socialist Contexts", New Europe College, Bucharest

   

Program
Friday 21st of October

9:30
Eva Maria Troelenberg, Damiana Otoiu & Felicity Bodenstein
Introduction

 

Biographies and objects
Chair: Costanza Caraffa

10:00
Fabrizio Federici (Rome)
Baroque restitutions: the donations and re-uses of Francesco Gualdi

10:30
Ewa Manikowska (Warsaw)
Entangled Identities. The Recovery of Eastern European Photographic Collections

11:00 Coffee Break

11:30
Ulrike Saß (Hamburg)
Saving lives with artworks. Do objects really want their stories to be told?

LUNCH BREAK 12:30-14:00

 

The subject of return: between objects and bodies
Chair: Annie Coombes

14:00
Noémie Étienne (Bern)
Life-Casts, Relics, and Human Remains. The Return of Museum Tools

14:30
Christopher Sommer (Wellington)
Of Phrenology, reconciliation and veneration – An object biography of the life cast of Māori chief Tangatahara

15:00
Clarissa Förster (Cologne)
The Long Way Home. On the Biography of returned objects/subjects

15:30 Coffee Break

16:00
Cressida Fforde, Major Sumner (Canberra)
The Dead or Artefacts: contention in the definition, retention and return of Ngarrindjeri Old People

16:30
Damiana Otoiu (Bucharest)
"Can biological history be determined?" South African Museums in the "New" Era of Genomics

 

Keynote

17:30
Bénédicte Savoy (Berlin)
Le droit des objets

 

Saturday 22nd of October

Return and afterlives of objects
Chair: Anna Seiderer

10:00
Christoph Frank (Mendrisio)
Genocide, Capitalization and Amnesia: An eighteenth-century French sculpture and its unexpected return to life

10:30
Jenny Graham (Plymouth)
The Van Eycks' Ghent Altarpiece and the Second World War: Restitution and Restoration as Cultural Patrimony

11:00
Eugenia Kisin (New York)
Resources and Returns: Totem Pole Afterlives in the Anthropocene

11:30 Coffee Break

12:00
Ruth E. Iskin (Jerusalem)
The Other Nefertiti: Symbolic Restitution in Contemporary Art

LUNCH BREAK 12:30-14:00

14:00
Lucas Lixinski (Sydney)
Colonial and Post-Colonial Discourses in the Restitution of the Axum Stele (Ethiopia)

 

Objects in Intermediate "States"
Chair: Christian Fuhrmeister

14:30
Elena Franchi (Vicence)
Contentious and Missing Objects: the Landau-Finaly Collection in Florence and the EGELI Archives

15:00
Andrzej Jakubowski (Warsaw)
Failed States, de facto Regimes and the Return of Cultural Objects: the Role of Safe Havens

15:30 Coffee Break

16:00
Erin Thompson (New York)
Return to the Scene of the Crime: What Does the Future Hold for Looted Antiquities from Syria and Iraq?

 

Keynote

16:30
Laurajane Smith (Canberra)
Objects, agency and power: the pragmatic politics of heritage

 

Concluding discussion

A troubled and segmented East-European history has given rise to a troubled and segmented museum history. Museums in Central and Eastern Europe have found themselves, time and again, faced with difficult and uncomfortable choices. Immediately after the Second World War, museums had to update their exhibitions in order to narrate radically different stories. One of the major changes also included exhibiting the socialist present, such as the accomplishments of the regime, and the recent past: the violent, revolutionary coming to power of communist parties all over Eastern Europe became part of the permanent exhibition of local and national museums. Museums also had to literally hide entire collections that were suddenly found inappropriate. After the fall of communism, these collections were brought back to museum halls (although much of their history, documentation and context had been lost) and it was time for the communist collections to become bothersome and thus be hidden or even destroyed. The workshop seeks to explore the specificities of reaction to political and social change in the context of museums and heritage sites. Museums could be considered in terms of their historiographic and political foundations, as the outcome of mobilizations of a wide variety of actors who have contributed to their creation or their dismantling (museum professionals, architects, academics, public historians, victims' associations and other cultural brokers). In some contexts, the heritage process has contributed to a discursive criminalisation of previous regimes – for instance the transformation of detention centres in museums or memory sites. In others, it has facilitated implicit forms of rehabilitation, under the guise of commercially exploiting the legacy – architectural, artistic, political – of the former regime. Finally, a significant number of museums and memory sites were faced with the challenge and task of reinvesting their collections with a new meaning and a new narrative, framed in new historiographies and nation-building projects. Within this framework, our workshop will bring together contributions that respond to one or more of the following aspects, relating to the central concern on whether museum displays and heritage sites have been remade to conform to new scientific and political narratives/ agendas:-will examine case-studies of metamorphoses of East-European museums and built heritage during the Cold War and in post-communism.-will discuss whether museums are sometimes in the vanguard of social and political change or are they merely reacting to societal transformations.-will analyse how museums and heritage sites have been mobilized to qualify, and at times to criminalize the socialist period-will seek to highlight the emergence and circulation of heritage models at national, regional and trans-regional levels, evident in the museums established in former detention centres, in the management of heritage assets related to past dictatorial regimes, and in the reconfigurations of exhibitions in museums around the area.

Sharon Macdonald, Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage, Humboldt Universität zu Berlin

How can ethnographic museums tackle their colonial legacy?

This talk will consider a number of approaches that have been taken to tackle the colonial legacy of ethnographic/ethnological museums. By such museums, is meant those that predominantly see their remit to involve displaying collections that emanate from outside Europe and that are not exclusively constituted by art objects. Typically, many of the collected objects were acquired under colonial conditions but even such objects that were not are often regarded as being part of broader colonial ways of seeing that have done symbolic violence to those so represented. Here, I propose to raise discussion by looking at the following strategies: (1) reflexive exposure of the ethnographic museum’s own practices and colonial entanglements; (2) deep object-histories and an emphasis on provenance; (3) collaborative practice with source communities and the indigenous turn.

Benoît de L’Estoile, CNRS, Ecole normale supérieure (CMH)

Les musées face aux héritages coloniaux : questions ouvertes

Je voudrais ouvrir ce séminaire en réfléchissant aux difficultés qu’ont de nombreux musées (pas uniquement catalogués comme « ethnographiques » mais aussi de sciences ou de beaux arts) à se confronter à la question complexe des « héritages coloniaux », c’est à dire aux diverses façons dont le passé colonial est présent dans notre monde d’aujourd’hui. Si souvent cette question est traitée par le silence, certaines voies ont été explorées. Je m’appuierai sur divers exemples de musées ou d’expositions, notamment en France, mais aussi dans d’autres contextes nationaux.

Ce séminaire portera sur les formes de réécriture, de renégociation et de réappropriation contemporaines des collections constituées pendant la période coloniale, sur le continent africain, et qui sont depuis lors conservées dans des institutions muséales. Ces collections comprennent les objets ethnographiques ainsi que des archives écrites et visuelles, acquises ou produites par ou pour les musées.

Porto-Novo, Bénin (17-31 juillet 2018) Les processus de patrimonialisation ou la revendication d'un héritage dans le cadre d'une (re)construction nationale, locale et /ou ethnique sont des phénomènes complexes. Dans les périodes de transition historique, les enjeux sont multiples et la fragilité du contexte politique est un riche terreau pour un renouveau des rapports à la représentation du passé. Pour comprendre ces processus, il faut mobiliser des savoirs en histoire, en anthropologie, en archéologie, en sciences politiques, en histoire de l'art, et en muséologie. Leur décryptage nécessite une collaboration interdisciplinaire, qui n'est pas toujours aisée à instaurer dans le cadre institutionnel existant dans le domaine de la recherche, construit autour de disciplines distinctes. Le but principal de cette école d'été est de créer un espace de formation des doctorants et d'échange interdisciplinaire entre des chercheurs travaillant sur les processus de patrimonialisation, les usages et la « muséification » du passé en lien avec la construction nationale (ou plus largement identitaire). L'école thématique prendra la forme d'une formation à la recherche en sciences sociales. La première édition fut organisée à Istanbul, à l'Institut Français d'Études Anatoliennes (juin-juillet 2016), la deuxième au Cap, en collaboration avec Iziko Museums of South Africa et l'Institut Français d'Afrique du Sud (juillet – août 2017). Nous organisons notre troisième université d'été à Porto-Novo, avec un groupe de doctorants et d'artistes sélectionnés suite à un appel à candidatures. L'école a une double finalité. Premièrement, une finalité scientifique : mener une réflexion sur les processus de patrimonialisation (notamment en contexte postcolonial, post-dictatorial et à l'issue des conflits politiques), sur les usages et la « muséification » du passé en lien avec la construction nationale. Deuxièmement, l'école a une finalité pédagogique : proposer aux doctorants d'effectuer un court stage de terrain ethnographique, leur permettant de pratiquer différentes méthodes de recherche en sciences sociales et politiques. Format de l'école L'école comporte plusieurs volets : • des enseignements dispensés par des professeurs provenant des institutions partenaires, mais également par des professeurs invités. Les enseignements porteront tant sur la méthodologie de la recherche, que sur des sujets comme l'histoire des politiques urbaines/ des musées/ des recherches archéologiques au Bénin. Aux cours et ateliers « classiques » s'ajouteront des discussions informelles quotidiennes avec les étudiants tout au long de l'école, pour les aider à remanier leur projet, à élaborer les guides d'entretiens, à trouver des références bibliographiques ou des sources documentaires, etc. • un atelier pratique d'anthropologie visuelle • des visites guidées de la ville, des musées et de sites patrimoniaux • une enquête de terrain proprement dite : des « équipes » de trois étudiants réaliseront une recherche de terrain (entretiens, observation participante, recherche dans les archives nationales centrales ou locales/ privées, etc.) • un atelier de pratiques curatoriales, en collaboration avec l'Ecole du Patrimoine Africain (EPA) et le Centre culturel Ouadada, dans lequel les doctorants apprendront à concevoir une exposition, du projet scientifique muséographique jusqu'à la mise en place des partenariats et des dispositifs de médiation. • l'école thématique sera close par une présentation des résultats de cette recherche préliminaire, sous une forme choisie par les doctorants : présentation orale, poster scientifique, exposition photographique/ multimédia (extraits d'entretiens, matériel vidéo), projet de film documentaire ou happening dans un musée/ atelier d'artiste. Contenu scientifique : Les cours et les projets de recherche des doctorants se déploieront sur quatre axes principaux, à savoir : 1. les politiques urbaines et les politiques de la mémoire, 2. les constructions muséographiques, 3. les pratiques artistiques contemporaines, 4. les pratiques archéologiques.

Doctoral Summer School in Urban Anthropology
Heritage-making, Uses and Museumification of the Past in Relationship to Nation-building

French Institute of Anatolian Studies (IFEA), Istanbul, Turkey (June 26th- July 9th 2016)

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The process of heritage-making in the context of a nation (re)building is multifaceted. In periods of historical transition, challenges are many and the fragility of the political context is fertile ground for revisiting the representation of the past. To understand these processes, an interdisciplinary engagement with contributions from history, anthropology, archeology, political science, art history and museology is necessary. Interdisciplinary collaboration, however, is not always easy to establish within the existing research institutional framework, built around separate disciplines. The main goal of this summer school is to create a doctoral training space and interdisciplinary exchange between researchers working on heritage- making process, uses and "museumification" of the past in connection with nation-building, or, more broadly, the construction of identities.

The school has a double aim. First, a scientific aim: to reflect on the heritage making process, on the uses and the "museumification" of the past related to nation-building, especially in the post-colonial and post-dictatorial contexts as well as after political conflicts. Second, the school has an educational aim: to enable students to practice various methods of research in the social sciences in a short ethnographic field trip.

The school has several components:
courses taught by lecturers from partner institutions, but also by invited lecturers. The courses will cover both the methodology of research and the four main themes of the summer school, namely: 1. Urban policies and politics of memory, 2. Museographies, 3. Contemporary artistic practices, 4. Archaeological practices.

a practical workshop of visual anthropology.

guided tours of the city (public and private museums, contemporary art galleries, areas affected by contemporary transformations).

field research project: teams of three students will conduct a field research project (interviews, participant observation research in the central or local national / private archives, etc.).

a workshop of curatorial practice covering practices in the design of an exhibition, from the museographic project to the development of partnerships and mediation.

The summer school will end with the presentation of results of this preliminary research in a form chosen by the PhD researchers: an oral presentation, a scientific poster, a photo / multimedia exhibition (excerpts from interviews, video material), a documentary film project or a happening in a museum / artist's studio.

Going beyond strictly legal and property-oriented aspects of the restitution debate, restitution is considered as part of a larger set of processes of return that affect museums and collections, as well as notions of heritage and object status. Covering a range of case studies and a global geography, the authors aim to historicize and bring depth to contemporary debates in relation to both the return of material culture and human remains. Defined as contested holdings, differing museum collections ranging from fine arts to physical anthropology provide connections between the treatment and conceptualization of collections that generally occupy separate realms in the museum world.

"This is a timely book that tackles controversial, pressing issues from a range of angles in an innovatove way. The editors and authors indeed manage to reach beyond the currently predominant focus on provenance research, restitution and repatriation by foregrounding actors and challenges as well as political and epistemic aspects of appropriation and return." • Annette Loeseke,

This workshop aims to bring forward new scholarly work on the politics of decolonization in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. What can the stories of decolonization tell us about both past and future? What were the international actors in place in these spaces? How decolonization shaped the local and the regional? What were the limitations faced by the new independent countries? What is the rhetoric of decolonization today?

These are only few of the questions that our workshop wishes to challenge through the multifaceted, interdisciplinary work of the three scholars announced below.

Museums, these quintessentially modern institutions, are built to last. Together with archives, they preserve the memory, embodied in objects, of a given community. The terminology used in museums clearly shows this drive towards permanence. Nothing more telling than the term “permanent exhibition” whose life-span in contemporary museums is shortening as we write, but continues to be used widely despite its obvious internal contradiction.

“So, when do you plan to change your permanent exhibition?” is the question commonly asked of museum curators, even when their “permanent exhibition” has just been opened to the public. This special issue of MARTOR journal seeks to offer different answers to this question, from diverse corners of the planet, from former Yugoslavia to Senegal, from Bucharest to Rome, diving not only into the “when” but equally into the “why” and “how” museums change.