Leuven University Press Chapter Title: “Suggestions for a Post-Museum” Chapter Author(s): Nanette Snoep Book Title: Across Anthropology Book Subtitle: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial Book Editor(s): Margareta von Oswald, Jonas Tinius Published by: Leuven University Press. (2020) Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv125jqxp.22 JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at https://about.jstor.org/terms This book is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercialNoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. Funding is provided by Centre for Anthropological Research; the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation; the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin; KU Leuven Fund for Fair Open Access.. Leuven University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Across Anthropology This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms “suggestions for a post-Museum” A conversation with nanette snoep For this book, we have devised a set of interviews or position pieces with curators, since we regard curatorial practice as transversally agentive across the main sections of this book: museums, contemporary art, and (post)colonialism. Bearing this in mind, what for you is the practice of curating? Would you describe your practice as curating and if so, how would you describe it? Although curating has just become a small part of my job since I became a museum director in 2015, when administrative tasks, programming, and strategic thinking have taken the largest part of my time, I still consider myself to be a curator, too.1 My challenge is in finding a balance between directorship and curatorship. Curating enables the generation of interactive situations with objects and actors. Curating to me is combining the ‘language’ of anthropology with the ‘language’ of artistic reflection and the ‘language’ of exhibitions. It generates associative critical and inquisitive thinking in three dimensions with the idea of simultaneousness. This differs from linear thinking on a flat surface, which is the case when it comes to writing an article. Anthropological curatorial praxis distinguishes itself from a work of art or from a scientific article. An artist who creates a work of art with anthropological insight must not necessarily take into account the visitors of the institution. In the context of a scientific paper, its form or its structure is clearly predefined. And here again one must not necessarily take into account the reader as long as your paper is correctly written. Curating is more like composing a musical score or a film where rhythm and emotion and the consideration of the spectator are important components. That’s why I like curating; to put on stage anthropological perspectives in a setting of constraints. This personal definition of curatorial praxis, this idea of three-dimensional thinking, a form of ‘applied anthropology’ has certainly something to do with the fact that during my study in anthropology in 325 This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 326 A COnvErsATiOn wiTh nAnETTE snOEp the mid-nineties in Paris, I was earning my money with theatre design for theatre companies and did ceramic design on a quite professional level. I think that the theory taught at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) and my work as designer at the same time influenced how I became a curator and why I define myself as a kind of ‘applied reflexive anthropologist’. Exhibition-making inside an institution is determined by the moment of time, by space and the architecture framing the exhibition. In a certain way, form guides content. The same content can become completely different depending on the space. That’s why I define my curatorial praxis as a kind of ‘applied anthropology’ permanently facing and circumventing bureaucratic systems, local political webs, institutional legacies, and habits. The final outcome of an exhibition is the result of all these constraints. The place in which I have to curate an exhibition has a profound influence on how I conceive an exhibition. It is different to conceive one exhibition, for example, for the HKW in Berlin, the Museum für Völkerkunde in Dresden, the RautenstrauchJoest-Museum in Cologne, or the Quai Branly in Paris. Those are different spaces, with very different institutional backgrounds, different actants, legacies, and habits, with or without collections. It is not an idea conceived solely in a library. A publication is non-spatial; an exhibition is. The role of the reader and the role of the visitor aren’t the same. When you write an article, you are addressing scholars, often people from the same discipline who have consciously decided to read your article. When you are an artist and create a work of art, you do not necessarily think whether the spectator will entirely fig. 13.2 Open space Die Baustelle, rautenstrauch Joest Museum, Cologne, 2019, © vera Marusic This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms “suggEsTiOns fOr A pOsT-MusEuM” 327 understand your intention. As a curator you have to take into account all kinds of aleatory visitors (and particularly in ethnological museums where your audience is, I think, more heterogeneous compared to a contemporary art center): visitors of all ages, education levels, political opinions, or biographical backgrounds, descendants of colonisers and colonised, people who are merely ‘urged’ to visit (like children, a friend …), visitors who come ‘by accident’ to your exhibition, because they have to cross the gallery in order to reach the exit. There are opening and closing times, rules for behaving like not being allowed to speak loudly, to lie down on the floor, to eat or drink … When you curate an exhibition with anthropological questions, these surroundings of constraints define the way you think and create. Curating enables the involvement of the spectator in ways that are inaccessible to an academic paper. When you conceive of anthropology, are you thinking about its legacies, its present-day practice? How do you relate to anthropology’s legacies in the present? Do you agree that anthropological critique now takes place increasingly outside the discipline and museums, i.e., in what we call trans-anthropological fields? If so, where and how? Anthropological critique was central to my studies of cultural anthropology at the EHESS in Paris. For my master’s thesis, I worked on the representation of Africa in European ethnographic museums and its crisis. After my MA, I did doctoral research on the relation between colonial violence, ethnographic collecting in the Congo Free State, and the production of ethnographic knowledge. In particular, the seminars in ‘Anthropology of the Object’ by Marc Augé and Jean Bazin have notably influenced my way of thinking. Seminars in Historical Anthropology, Anthropology of the Event, Anthropology of the Object, Anthropology of the City, but also Anthropology of Art, Sociology of Art, History of Africa … All those multi-disciplinary seminars you were free to follow, and one could build one’s own research programme without having to worry about credit points. Unfortunately, that time of intellectual creativity and brainwork is over. Anthropological critique was present in almost every seminar (or at least the seminars I was attending). The grappling with objectivity, and the eventual renunciation of claims to the rhetoric of holism by anthropology at the time was informed by the idea that, at its core, ethnographic practice is about points of view and interpretations – in short, about poetic and literary writing. James Clifford, George Marcus, Johannes Fabian, Clifford Geertz, and Hal Foster were discussed in almost every seminar. This led me to consider so-called ethnographic exhibitions also as poetic and self-reflexive installations that address questions of colonial legacies, coloniality, alterity, anthropological representation, and identity. This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 328 A COnvErsATiOn wiTh nAnETTE snOEp Anthropological critique was ‘put into practice’ at that time at the Musée d’Ethnographie in Neuchâtel (CH) with exhibitions like Objets prétextes, objets manipulés (1984), Le Salon de l’Ethnographie (1989), La Différence (1996), or Derrière les images (1998) by Jacques Hainard, Oliver Gonseth, and Roland Kaehr. Those exhibitions were heavily discussed in seminars in those years at the EHESS in Paris. They really left their mark on my subsequent curatorial practice. All of these are surprisingly unknown outside French speaking countries, but those exhibitions already testified to a highly self-reflexive and critical take on anthropological representation and the ambiguities of imperial ethnography in the 1980s and 1990s. And all of this took place long before the much more well-known exhibition of Jacques Hainard in Musée cannibale (2002), which received international recognition. In fact, these exhibitions would still very much be regarded as avant-garde if they were put on today. Some years later, in 2008, I had the honour to curate an exhibition with Hainard on migration in the 1930s in the new Museum for Immigration in Paris. It is a pity that this type of curatorial praxis, which was initiated by Hainard and his two colleagues Oliver Gonseth and Roland Kaehr, has faded away. At the same time, the project around the future Quai Branly Museum was nourishing highly polemical debates. Interesting discussions and research about the future and the past of ethnographic museums and of anthropology were in their heyday then, but were vanishing soon after the opening of the Quai Branly in 2006. Despite those many new anthropological studies on museums, curating, and the production of anthropological knowledge, most of the ethnographic museums in Europe have never opened their doors to this new generation of scholars. From the point of view of museums, it has been mostly argued that it is because of a lack of vacancies and money, but I am not so sure if this is really the case. Fact is that the gap between university or academic knowledge production and ethnographic museums has been amplified. Since I am based in Germany, I’ve also noticed this. Today in Germany, the Humboldt Forum again stimulates anthropological critique and exhibition-making. A new generation of global scholars familiar with post-colonial theory has arrived on the scene, joined by more and more artists inspired by the ethnographic turn, as well as those from the Global South. That’s why perhaps this new wave of global anthropological critique and cross-disciplinary curatorial praxis rather takes place outside ethnographic museums, in editions of documenta, Venice Biennales, and contemporary art centres. My aim is to put this kind of trans-anthropological practice at the heart of my ‘ethnographic museum’. I’ve tried this with this range of exhibitions in the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde, Grassi invites # (2016-2018), and more specifically in the experimental exhibition Prolog #1-10 Stories of People, This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms “suggEsTiOns fOr A pOsT-MusEuM” 329 Things, and Places, which I organised in Dresden. I realised this in adapted form in the Grassi Museum in Leipzig under the title Werkstatt Prolog (2018). One can generally perceive that ethnographic museums are slowly opening their doors, or that they are forced to do so because of increasing public pressure. Is there any value for you in talking about “trans-anthropological” curating, that is, as a practice that engages with such anthropological issues, but not within the classic domains or institutions of anthropology? As the disciplines are blurring, I am not sure if “trans-anthropological” curating is the appropriate terminology. The term risks reducing ‘trans-curating’ only to anthropology. Why does anthropology have to be the starting point? I would rather prefer ‘transdisciplinary curating’, which blurs all boundaries. I think all cultural institutions are in a kind of crisis, and we have to undo and rethink those structures. It is just that in ethnographic museums, it seems more striking. I think we will go more and more in the direction of a cross-disciplinary curating – whether it is in an art museum or in an ethnographic museum. They just have different collections, different legacies, which influence the final outcome. Up until recently, art history focused predominantly on a history of European art, while non-European art was mostly regarded and professionally constituted as the domain of anthropological research. Can you describe how you regard these disciplinary divisions, and whether and to what extent you see or even participate in breaking down these divisions? The disciplinary boundaries between art history, cultural anthropology, and history seem to me more rigid in Germany and by consequence curatorial praxis is defined by those somehow hermetic boundaries. In France, this categorisation is more open, as symbolised by the Pavillon des Sessions devoted to ancient non-Western art in the Louvre, inaugurated in 2000. I also taught African art history for ten years at the University of Nanterre, as well as at the somewhat traditional Ecole du Louvre, mixing up anthropology, art history, and theory. In Paris, between the late nineties and the early 2000s, I was member of a research group of anthropologists and art historians, called “Anthropologie, Art, Objets et Esthétiques”. In France, I always conceived and curated interdisciplinary exhibitions, like for example Recettes des Dieux. Esthétique du Fétiche (2009), Exhibitions. L’Invention du Sauvage (2011) or Maîtres du Désordre (2012) at the Musée du Quai Branly. Nobody asked me whether these exhibitions were anthropology, art history, philosophy, or history. This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 330 A COnvErsATiOn wiTh nAnETTE snOEp The Quai Branly has been heavily criticised, particularly by German, British, and American scholars and journalists, because of its aesthetic approach. I don’t think that this was and still is the most critical point of this institution, especially if we take into account its general exhibition programme and twenty hours of ethnological films, which accompany the permanent collection. Since I have been in Germany, I feel that these disciplines in universities and museums are more hermetic. The ethnographic museum is expected to make ‘ethnographic exhibitions’ and not so-called ‘art exhibitions’. Ethnographic museums and art museums in Germany are two very distinct museum landscapes. One observe that this is slowly melting together. fig. 13.3 Maîtres du Désordre (Masters of Chaos), Musée du Quai branly, paris, 2012, © nanette snoep fig. 13.4 Megalopolis – Voices from Kinshasa, grassi Museum für völkerkunde, Leipzig, 2018, © Mo Zaboli This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms “suggEsTiOns fOr A pOsT-MusEuM” 331 This is the case not least because of an upcoming generation of scholars and curators who are interested in crossing the disciplines, and because of audiences expecting that such institutions change. Considering the different institutions you have worked with, what kind of curatorial practices did these institutions enable or prevent? What did you have to change in institutions to realise your kinds of curatorial interests? While there were no objections from the side of the management team at the Quai Branly, for instance, to mix categories and to combine ethnographic objects with modern or contemporary art, post-colonial critique was much less tolerated. In this context, curatorial freedom was restricted. We weren’t enabled to include post-colonial critique in an exhibition, or at least it was very difficult. I experienced this with the exhibition Human Zoos. The Invention of the Savage (2011). Since I have been in Germany, I am in a different role that I can hardly compare, because I am director of a museum now. In my role of director of three ethnographic museums in Leipzig, Dresden and Herrnhut (2015-2018), and subsequently as a director in Cologne (since 2019), I could theoretically do what I would like as long as I found the money and an audience. Yet one must not underestimate that the political environment, museum structures, and institutional legacies and habits can restrain your actions even as a director. I was quite surprised to observe how somwhat refractory one could be in German ethnographic museums concerning mixing disciplines, working with artists, or dealing with anthropological critique in temporary and permanent exhibitions. It is quite a long process to open up museum institutions and making possible the destruction of boundaries between disciplines, the mixing of genres, and the opening of museum doors for anthropological critique and reflexive exhibitions in a permanent way. Surprisingly, the ‘ethnographic turn’ in contemporary art practice has scarcely influenced ethnographic museum praxis. What, in your view, makes an “anthropological framing” in an exhibition? Are there specific display techniques, modes of exhibiting, and framing which you would describe – for better or for worse – as typically anthropological? Is there such a thing as an ‘anthropological’ or ‘ethnographic’ exhibition? Yes, I think there is a specific and even typical ethnographic exhibition grammar and aesthetics, which has been repeated for more than a century. It is surprising to note that ‘ethnographic display’ has hardly changed over time – as if its institutions, its objects, as well as its display has been frozen, as if This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 332 A COnvErsATiOn wiTh nAnETTE snOEp contextualisation can only be done through dioramas. This is actually very fascinating. Even museums of natural history did much more to transform their design than anthropology museums: Wall display cases, dioramas, mannequins, the use of very specific colours, which one can only see in ethnographic displays, and even in how objects and costumes are mounted, in the way a group of objects in showcases is displayed, in the way of protecting them, the way of displaying text, the use and the status of photography as illustration. All of these are part of this typical ethnographic design heritage, which has its roots in the nineteenth century. One can witness some changes in ethnographic design during the time of the early 1930s, such as in some French institutions like the Rivière-Rivet at the Musée de l’Homme, or for example in the Julius Lips exhibition about masks at the Cologne Museum, and later on in the 1960s in the GDR, for example at the Grassi Museum für Völkerkunde. But these transformations never lasted very long and haven’t been spread throughout Europe and often returned rapidly to a received prior routine. Perhaps it is also due to the actors within ethnological museums, who are surprisingly often quite reluctant toward modern and contemporary art and design. However, I wish to tackle this question about the ‘anthropological framing’, and give a new meaning to such museums, to their design as well to their content. That’s why I often speak of museums as places of conVersation among objects and actors, instead of museums as places of conServation – as territories of exchange, contradiction, interaction, and experience. As places that generate various kinds of ‘conversations’. This could become this new anthropological frame. Some critics have described the use of contemporary art in ethnological museum contexts as a quick and easy but unsustainable remedy for the institution’s problems. How do you see the role of contemporary art in the ethnological museums, and in relation to its collections, that you have worked in before, especially in Leipzig and Dresden – and what do you intend to do in this regard in Cologne? I understand this criticism, because anthropology museums have often worked with artists, since they did not know how to deal with their own colonial legacy. This work was then simply left to artists – in a certain way out of despair perhaps. I consider my collaborations with artists as curating with and around a specific question. Rather than delegating difficult and problematic questions exclusively to artists, in order to avoid these questions that museums should ask themselves. It is a matter of collaborating in order to better face problems and not to avoid the confrontation. This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms “suggEsTiOns fOr A pOsT-MusEuM” 333 If you think of the ground-breaking exhibition Mining the Museum curated by Fred Wilson at the Maryland Historical Society in 1992, and you consider the incredible influence of this exhibition on further exhibitions and theoretical works, it is evident that artists play a very important role in the transformation and the decolonisation of anthropology museums. Sometimes artists are simply better skilled to communicate ethnographic findings. I am myself a director and curator who has worked a lot with artists, and I consider the museum not just as a repository for scientific production, but also for artistic production. The museum offers a wide range of interesting material for an artist, starting with the collection, the archives, the museum rituals, and also the institution itself. The progressive strengthening of links between anthropology museums, anthropological critique, and artistic practice could also be seen as a further confirmation of the emergence of a new transdisciplinary field that operates across art, museums, and collections. In Leipzig and Dresden, due to a persistent lack of funds, I had to improvise and work with the means at hand. When you don’t have a penny, you have to be inventive. As a result, one is forced to drop the ‘museographic rules’, whether they concern the quality of the rails or walls, the printing of exhibit labels, or the lighting, to name just some examples. This took place against the backdrop of a very complex political context in Eastern Germany with the extreme-right movement Pegida (founded at the end of 2014) and the arrival of refugees in the post-2013 summer of migration to a region with the lowest percentage of non-German citizens in the country. This was the situation with which I was faced as director of three Saxonian anthropology museums between 2015 and 2018. Despite the unfortunate infrastructure and financial situation, I was tasked by the former general director of the SKD, Hartwig Fischer, who invited me to come to Saxony, to create a new permanent exhibition. In Dresden, the museum had been closed and was entirely empty. By contrast, the permanent galleries in Leipzig (inaugurated in 2007), as I encountered these at the beginning of 2015, were stuffed with thousands of objects, highly naturalistic puppets, and plenty of dioramas, accompanied with texts that hierarchised cultures, and people stuck in a frozen time. I called upon students from art schools and universities, artists, and designers to work with my team on our collections and our museum so that we could collectively start a kind of analysis of this museum and to show the transformation processes we would like it to undergo. Of course, this caused a lot of critique, because I worked with students and non-professionals, instead of professional museum ethnologists. I must say that most of the people I involved did very serious research in our archives and collections and realised amazing productions, This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms 334 A COnvErsATiOn wiTh nAnETTE snOEp which revealed aspects of the museum’s history that would otherwise never have been shown. In parallel, I curated in Dresden in this empty and abandoned museum an experimental and growing workshop and laboratory exhibition (Werkstattausstellung) called Prolog #1-10 Stories of People, Things, and Places (December 2016 – April 2018). In it, we built up a reflexive exhibition in ten steps/ten stations. Every month, we opened an installation with a specific reflexive anthropological topic. Among those ten stations, several were conceived in close collaboration with artists. For the last show in Leipzig, Megalopolis – Voices from Kinshasa (November 2018-March 2019, see Fig 13.4), I gave carte blanche to a collective of twenty-four young artists from Kinshasa who curated an exhibition about the megacity Kinshasa in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Among individual art installations, films, fashion, performances, and photography, they produced a collective art work, the so-called “Restitution-Box”, based on the historical museum collection from Congo (Republic of Congo and DRC). In matters of restitution, I think it is crucial to let people, artists, scholars, spiritual experts from these regions express by themselves where the objects come from. The method of the carte blanche was more important to me then the final outcome; I gave priority to having the intensity of their rich exchanges on this historical collection merge, which took place mainly in the storage areas of the museum, and in their discussions with visitors and my museum staff. During my time in Cologne at the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum, I will certainly do things differently, because it is an entirely different museum institution with a different legacy and institutional habits with one of the best permanent exhibitions among European anthropology museums. However, the debates on anthropology museums will unfold, the process of decolonisation of anthropology museum institutions will provide strong inputs for rethinking our institutions in the years, if not decades to come. This is our chance. I would like to develop this idea of the museum as a place of “ConVersation”, a polyphonic museum where we further experiment with the method of the carte blanche, the creation of sovereign spaces inside our permanent galleries, but also the idea of collective dialogical curating. We will experiment with this in the exhibition Resist! Die Kunst des Widerstands (Resist! The Art of Resistance), to be opened next autumn 2020, an exhibition about colonial and post-colonial resistance from the perspective of the colonised. This means offering space for external curators from all kind of disciplines, artists, dancers, musicians, students, activists, and communities from the regions where our collections come from, but also diasporic communities in the German federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia, where we are based. I This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms “suggEsTiOns fOr A pOsT-MusEuM” 335 would like for my museum to become a laboratory for scientific, artistic, and spiritual production. Above all the museum needs to become less authoritarian. For me, this is one of the main issues. Who has the authority to define a culture? Who is controlling? Transforming museums means taking away some of their own authority and giving back to people from outside in order to try to transform the museum as hegemonic institution into a democratic one, into the famous ‘third space’. Museums need to be challenged to step out of their comfort zone, to take risks, to break with their traditional authority. Through methods such as the carte blanche or ‘autonomous spaces’, could we break this rigid structure and perhaps achieve a ‘post-museum’? Note 1. The image on p. 324 is Figure 13.1 Prolog #1-10 Stories of People, Things, and Places, Museum für Völkerkunde, Dresden, 2017, © Vera Marusic. This content downloaded from 91.64.87.161 on Wed, 17 Mar 2021 09:07:12 UTC All use subject to https://about.jstor.org/terms