We’re excited to have curated and taken part in the talking objects project between 11th-12th June 2021 whose theme ws Decolonizing Knowledge and Memory.
What can knowledge be today, beyond European knowledge systems? New perspectives and different questions are needed to break up colonial thought patterns and challenge Eurocentric, white views. This project aims to negotiate these questions on the African continent and in Germany. Through vox pops, panel discussions, video conversations and a card game (currently in development), we will be exploring, imagining, and unpacking decolonization within the universe of object movement through five thematic fields: decolonizing memory, decolonizing knowledge, the re-evaluation of objects from colonial contexts, empowerment by and opportunities of artistic perspectives, and questions about classical museum forms of preservation and presentation.
We collaborated with the fantastic Nest Collective and fellow curators Kahire Nginge and Rosie Olang to curate Nairobi sessions around:
- Decolonization labour is emotional labour? – Unpacks the contrasting words and feelings that accompany decolonising labour in different projects and contexts
- The Other Objects”– Explores “The Other Objects” – the idea that the framework of object movement needs to expand beyond the 3-dimensional artefact and consider the public space, the constructed environment as objects upon which the same forces of colonial appropriation and movement
- New Behaviour – Explores a new set of use cases for the ‘museum object’ – other than the default institutional urge to conserve, to store, to hold. What does it mean to use, wear, dance with the objects?
- Renaming – An invitation to the public to rename Kenyan public spaces, towns, estates and buildings with inscrutable, derogatory or ill-suited etymologies.
The Berlin program was curated and put together by Isabel Raabe and Mahret Kupka
Website link- http://talkingobjectslab.org/unexpexted-lessons