What comes to mind when you encounter the term ‘Talking Objects’? If we challenged you to let your imagination run free and restrict every impulse to limit your thoughts and ideas, what do you picture?
For us, ‘Talking’ is both an approach and a product – it refers to how things interact and the conversations that come from these interactions. While ‘Objects’ are a way to see into the wider socio-cultural contexts within which physical objects exist or existed.
Combined…
Talking Objects is an attempt to contextualise objects that were plundered through colonial domination. It is an experiment in building a decolonial archive for decolonial knowledge production. An archive that has no claim to completeness; that is a living archive and an ongoing expression of freedom, through creation, collaboration and iteration.
Some Background…
The TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE, is based on the reflection by Felwine Sarr, “The Western Archive.” If the Western archive has no space for our (African) stories and realities, How then do we build a space that allows thinkers, culture workers and all people of the Global South to engage with their histories?
New perspectives and questions are needed to break up colonial thought patterns and Eurocentric/White perspectives that are deeply rooted in the European understanding of culture and knowledge and that continue to shape Europe’s interaction with cultures and societies of the global South today.
What is needed is a new historiography (the study of the writing of history and written histories), other productions of knowledge, and “epistemic disobedience”, as the literary scholar, Walter Mignolo calls it. The project TALKING OBJECTS is dedicated to the question: What can knowledge be today, beyond Western knowledge systems? It consists of the TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE, a digital archive for decolonial knowledge production, and the Thinks Tank and exhibition series TALKING OBJECTS LAB.
The TALKING OBJECTS ARCHIVE will be a digital platform that, counters Eurocentric perspectives with new narratives, epistemologies, and schools of thought. The Objects in the archive serve as door openers to new epistemologies and a different view of what knowledge can be today.
Based on a curated collection of objects – compiled from European and African museum collections – poly-perspectival narratives are fanned out around the selected objects. Object biography, oral history, craft tradition, spirituality, information on pre-colonial African history, and philosophy play just as much a role as contemporary artistic positions and the effects of the absence of the objects in the societies of origin.
The Process…
After years of conceptualising and dreaming of a “digital garden” (as our Director Chao calls it), we are building an archive that allows for unencumbered play and exploration of African Knowledge systems. Since 2021, the many talks, workshops, artist residencies, and exhibitions that have taken place as part of the TALKING OBJECTS LAB have provided invaluable insights into indigenous cultures, current barriers to cultural heritage and enforced the desire to bring material objects closer to those they intimately impact.
The archive looks to draw audiences in and allow them to engage and contribute in creative, unique, meaningful, or even frivolous ways in an attempt to challenge Eurocentric knowledge systems. It will be open to the public, and we hope that it speaks to researchers and practitioners working in the arts and those interested in decolonial perspectives on knowledge production.
In the spirit of collectivism and community based approaches to knowledge production and world building, in March 2023, we brought together potential end users of the archive to help us ideate a contextually strong version of the archive.
The hope is that by dreaming together, we can collectively design a working archive that serves all of us.
In July, ADH participated in a THINK TANK in Frankfurt with our partners TALKING OBJECTS!
The THINK TANK: The Cosmologies of Objects, that happened from the 3rd to the 6th of July, dealt with the cosmologies of objects, focusing on three main topics materiality, spirituality and gendered objects.
Project Partners and Contributors
Digital Team:
- African Digital Heritage Team
- Visual Intelligence– Alisa Verzhbiskaya, Danielle Rosales and Robin Coenen
- Erik Stein
- TALKING OBJECTS– Isabel Raabe and Jeanne Nzakizabandi
Participating museums:
- Musée Théodore Monod, Dakar
- Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde, Leipzig
- Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, Köln
- Museum der Europäischen Kulturen, Berlin
- Museum Angewandte Kunst, Frankfurt
Funded by:
A note from African Digital Heritage:
The innovation and intention behind Talking Objects does not negate the need for immediate repatriation of stolen objects, but instead works to create digital worlds in which these objects can live until their return. We hold steadfast that the conversations around immediate reparation should not be dulled by the creation of digital cultural heritage archives – one is not a replacement of the other nor a permanent acceptance of alternative placeholders.
