20 May 2025 | Luisa Marten
The “Mailopu Archive:” Curating the shared history of an expedition
As part of the colonial project, the transfer of so-called ‘non-western’ things into western regimes of classification, such as archives, constituted a powerful form of cultural oppression that “served to reinforce and institutionalize categories of difference and logics of governance.”[1] Archives, thus, do not just embody static sets of records but encompass sedimented layers of historical dynamics, inherently including complex histories of knowledge generation and scientific practice. How can we mobilize the logics of the archive to work against the asymmetric power relations that it was designed to reinforce? Building on the archive’s processual capacity,[2] is it possible to turn an archive into a productive tool that enables the co-generation and co-interpretation of knowledge across temporal and spatial boundaries? This contribution discusses the challenges and possibilities of such approach, by presenting the digital “Mailopu Archive” which has been created to re-mobilize the dispersed collections of the “II. Freiburg Moluccan Expedition” (1910-1912).
In 1910, three German scientists set out for the Maluku Islands (or Moluccas). During their journey, they met Markus Mailopu from the island Seram, who joined the expedition. Meandering somewhere between an informant, assistant, friend, researcher, he contributed to the expedition’s academic research and output. This complex relationship is materialized in archival records that are housed in various German collecting institutions. Historical interlocutions like these influence contemporary knowledge claims, but their significance for the generation of knowledge is often overlooked. Using the “Mailopu Archive” as a tool, my research makes use of curation as intervention[3] to uncover the expedition's relational history and its impact on knowledge claims that still linger today. In my contribution, I will to draw on this research to discuss how collaborative archiving practices can be implemented in a post-colonial world to reconnect shared histories.
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[1] Ghaddar, J. J., and Michelle Caswell. 2019. “‘To Go Beyond’: Towards a Decolonial Archival Praxis.” Archival Science 19: 71‒81, p. 70.
[2] Battaglia, Giulia, Jennifer Clarke, and Fiona Siegenthaler. 2020. “Bodies of Archives / Archival Bodies. An Introduction.” Visual Anthropology Review 36 (1): 8‒16.
[3] Schorch, Philipp. 2023. “What can museum anthropology do in the 21st century?” Museum and Society 21(3): 96‒112.
The paper will be given as part of the conference "Visual Pasts, Material Presents, Archival Futures: Postcolonial Temporalities in the Making." For more information, visit the conference website or download the program.