Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Abstract

This habilitation project analyses curatorial narratives of world that grapple with the difficult legacies of the European World Museum. It documents and analyses artistic and curatorial approaches to world-production that respond to the crisis of the Western universal museum and its colonial legacies. The project unravels struggles within the field of cultural production, especially the tension between statist cultural musealisation and grassroots social mobilisation in the context of major world heritage developments in Germany, Italy, and France. Based on long-term participant observation, it documents institutions and forms of cultural production that grapple with the in-between, the interstitial, and which act as intermediaries and prisms that open a broader spectrum of socio-cultural production. Against the backdrop of three major sites of world heritage production – the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the Palazzo di Brera in Milan, and the MuCeM in Marseille, it follows actors that operate against, but more often within a closely tied oppositional stance that could be described as a minor position. It is from this, often awkward and not clearly defined, positionality, occupied by activist cultural organisations, small artistic collectives, publishing houses, emergent curatorial teams, and non-commercial galleries that this project unfolds possibilities of minor narratives of world, which are emergent, that is, not yet defined and therefore elusive, hard to grasp. This project's perspective on these practices avoids an all-too-easy Manicheanism, between small and large, state and non-state, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, offering instead a glimpse of cultural production that troubles from within to construct non-normative narratives of world, which are emergent, that is, not yet defined and therefore in-the-making. Through collaborative, multimodal, and experimental modes of fieldwork, which include curating and exhibition-making itself, this project also asks what consequences this form of curating of world after world may have for a different modality of fieldwork, ethnography, and anthropology on and amid these heritage transformations.

Kontakt: Jonas Tinius