by Julia Binter (University of Bonn), Golda Ha-Eiros (National Museum of Namibia), Larissa Förster (Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt)
How can we set up more just and sustainable processes to return ‘cultural belongings’ (Gwasira 2022), once looted, traded or gifted in colonial contexts, to the places where they were initially created, used and cared for? What remains once these cultural belongings return home? In 2018, the project ‘Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures’ on the collections from Namibia at the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin set out to grapple with these questions amid the context of one of Germany’s most contested heritage sites, the Humboldt Forum. At the heart was the attempt to contest the colonial knowledge entangled with the historical museum collections and to establish a safe space, where various forms of knowledge, including embodied, performed, orally transmitted and materialised knowledge, could be articulated, translated and reconnected with the cultural belongings. Moreover, the curators, artists and scholars from Namibia and Germany perceived the return of cultural belongings to Namibia not as an end in itself, but the beginning of envisioning creative futures with them – a key message they also sought to bring across in their exhibition at the Humboldt Forum. This article embeds the project in the history of restitution conversations and negations between Germany and Namibia and self-critically discusses the process of curating the multimodal research, exhibition and restitution process from perspectives in Germany and Namibia. It puts an emphasis on the categories such as “art” that were introduced and contested throughout a process, arguing for a trans-, if not anti-disciplinary understanding of collaborative provenance research and restitution.
This article will be published in the Special Issue “Repatriation and Contemporary Art”, edited by Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll, Jessyca Hutchens and Verena Melgarejo Weinandt
Julia Binter is Argelander Professor for Critical Museum and Heritage Studies at the University of Bonn and co-leads the project ‘Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures’ with partners in Germany and Namibia. She holds a doctorate from the University of Oxford and has worked in numerous transdisciplinary settings, including art, historical and ethnological museums. Her publications include ‘The Blind Spot. Bremen, Colonialism and Art’ (2017), ‘Beyond Exhibiting the Experience of Empire? Challenging Chronotopes in the Museum’ (Third Text, 2019), and ‘em II power II relations. A booklet on postcolonial provenance research in the permanent exhibitions of the Ethnologisches Museum and Museum für Asiatische Kunst at the Humboldt Forum’ (together with Christine Howald, Ilja Labischinski, Birgit Sporleder and Kristin Weber-Sinn, 2022).
Golda Ha-Eiros is Senior Curator of the Ethnographic Collections at the National Museum of Namibia. She holds a Postgraduate Diploma in Heritage Conservation from the University of Namibia and has previously worked as curator at the National Art Gallery of Namibia and as curator for the Heritage of the Liberation Struggle at the Ministry of Defence and Veteran Affairs of Namibia. She co-curated the exhibition ‘Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures’ at the Humboldt Forum.
Larissa Förster is Honorary Professor at the Institute of European Ethnology at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and newly appointed Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt. Between 2019 and 2024, when the project ‘Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures’ was realised, she was Head of the Department for Cultural Goods and Collections from Colonial Contexts at the German Lost Art Foundation, and in this function academic advisor to the project. She holds a PhD from the University of Cologne, which was focussed on the memory of the colonial genocide of 1904-1908 in Namibia.