Divinations and re-joined objects

Presented at Panel 19. English Panel: Environmental and decolonial issues in museums
Moderação /Host: Cecília Järdemar
(8 ago. 14:30-16:00, Sala 324, online)

This paper explores how the development of a transnational cultural heritage praxis for new imagined futures can support present day discourses and practices of recovery from colonial epistemicide and ecocide. In her seminal book "Potential History", Ariella Azoulay asks us to unmake the disassociation between people and historical colonial art objects, photographs and documents, instead reframing these as living companions, refugees or missing people. She argues that object restitution is but one aspect of the necessary post-colonial repair; instead, we need to return to the moment during which these objects went missing in order to reconstitute a common world. Using her ideas of the still-present potentialities where objects are seen to hold the memory of the societies they once came from, artists Freddy Tsimba and Cecilia Järdemar have returned to a selection of 'mutilated' Kikongo objects currently held in the collections of the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm. Within Kikongo tradition, objects are merely containers that can be imbued with an 'empowering spirit' through which it is possible to communicate with, and seek guidance from, the ancestors. Using contemporary photogrammetry copies of a selection of divination containers, this case-study explores if and how copies can resume the place of the dislocated objects; as tools for speaking with the dead and returning to lost worlds in a process of participatory critical fabulation. Saiydia Hartman purports that stories can perhaps be the only form of reparation or compensation historically subjugated people will receive. This project has explored what kind of historiography, and in extension reparation, the object copies might engender, during a series of divination workshops and collaborative casting sessions in the Lower Congo. The resulting materials were developed into an exhibition, "Sukali na Mungua" (Sugar and Salt), at the National Museum in Kinshasa during autumn 2023. The exhibition was accompanied by a programme of pedagogical interventions with a focus on the importance of traditional knowledge in the caretaking of nature for the future.