17 Jun 2024 - 18 Jun 2024  |  Bart Barendregt, Luisa Marten, Philipp Schorch & Magnus Treiber

(Re)mobilizing historical expeditions: Collections, fieldworkers and digital returns

Historical expeditions were usually underpinned by specific spatial and temporal positions and orientations. Departing from some contemporary Euro-American metropole – in the ‘here’ and ‘now’, they generally set out to study foreign worlds of humans, animals, plants etc. as remnants of distant pasts – in the ‘there’ and ‘back then’, presumably in need of salvage and alien classification. What happens, then, if the remains of such expeditions – e.g., material and visual collections, archival and linguistic records, fieldwork notes and cartographic representations, but also personal impressions of involved participants – are (re)mobilized, both spatially (from Euro-American institutions back to originating societies) and temporally (towards new futures of historical reconstruction, cultural revitalization and political reimagination, both ‘at home’ in the societies where these collections originated from and in their dispersed locations ‘abroad’)?

Departing from the project Markus Mailopu and the II. Freiburg Moluccan Expedition: Reassembling, reactivating and redistributing ‘anthropology’s interlocutors’ through the archive, this symposium seeks answers to the above question. Participants are invited to dwell on the future potentialities of historical expeditions, that is, on the ways and forms through which collections and fieldworks of the past can be remobilized along and against the grain, and how they can give rise to novel forms of fieldworks and digital interventions (e.g., open access databases, virtual reality, online citizen science) in the present and geared towards the future. We invite contributions from across the disciplinary spectrum – history, anthropology, curatorship and the arts – and across (post)colonial boundaries, such as those between Germany, the Netherlands and Indonesia, as well as their political, cultural, linguistic and scholarly manifestations.

 

Conveners

Bart Barendregt (Leiden University)

Luisa Marten (LMU Munich)

Philipp Schorch (LMU Munich)

Magnus Treiber (LMU Munich)

 

Speakers

Nuraini Juliastuti (Dutch Art Institute)

Wim Manuhutu (VU Amsterdam)

Luisa Marten (LMU Munich)

Liesbeth Ouwehand (RCE)

Tri Hardjanti Riedel (independent scholar)

Geger Riyanto (University of Indonesia)

Hermien Soselisa (University of Pattimura)

Tamara Soukotta (Radboud University (ISS) & Erasmus University Rotterdam)

Fridus Steijlen (University of Pattimura)

Fadjar Ibnu Thufail (BRIN)

Magnus Treiber (LMU Munich)

Marjolein van Asdonck (Wereldmuseum)

Pim Westerkamp (Wereldmuseum)

For more information, please see the workshop program and the list of abstracts.