Awkward Archives

This project seeks to develop a modular curriculum for the purpose of documenting, reflecting on, teaching, and learning with current archival practices. The curriculum tackles crucial questions of the present by grappling with archiving processes. What do particular archival and archiving practices contribute to queries of the contemporary? How do they address issues of material agency and new ontologies, restitution and historical repair, new digital infrastructures and forms of trans-national collaboration? Rather than conceiving of archives as immobile and passive, the curriculum seeks to capture, relate, and think further creative ways of activating materialised pasts. 

The curriculum departs from research conducted in the context of the second edition of the Whole Life Academy (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, April 2021). Drawing on collective document analysis, participant observation, and interviews with the participants of the academy, the curriculum will develop creative profiles of each of the participating institutions / projects, including further reading, associated artworks, and exercises for the students. We design this curriculum to speak to the Academy, its member organisation, as well as developing its own life in teaching and public outreach beyond the project and beyond Berlin. 

Awkward Archives
Ethnographic Encounters with Berlin histories and presents
Summer Semester 2023
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

Archives do not just preserve the past, they allow for new questions about the present to emerge. They contain remnants of specific places and times, and they are the ground for new relations to spring and new connections to be made. In this seminar, we ask: Why archiving and for whom? How do archives shape societies and constitute knowledge? We will engage with “awkward archives” in Berlin – archives posing problems and causing disquieting frictions. In each of the seminar’s modules, we address a particular modern ideology through a particular Berlin archive, including the following: Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Colonial Neighbours Archive of SAVVY Contemporary, Naomi Wilzig Art Collection, Museum of Natural History, a database of German colonial punitive expeditions, and the Hahne-Niehoff Archive of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

This seminar will be offered as an interdisciplinary course through the Berlin Perspectives programme for international students. The seminar focuses on field visits with methodological exercises, which introduce students to diverse ways of doing research that they will build on to articulate their own research outcomes in a multimodal portfolio. 

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As a new reckoning with the colonial past is, belatedly, taking shape today, former metropoles and colonies are increasingly searching for what Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy call a “new relational ethics” in response to demands for accountability, transparency, and repair for injustice past and present. This course focused on a key element of this contemporary confrontation: the role of public institutions, particularly museums, archives, universities and related institutions whose own histories are inextricable from the colonial project. How do institutions such as natural history museums, ethnographic collections, contemporary art galleries, film archives, or libraries function as both a target of critique and a means through which former empires reckon with their colonial past? How can ingrained ways of seeing, collecting, conserving, and curating inherited from imperial modernity become inverted, subverted, and diverted? How do collections of artefacts and human remains become sites for multiple contestation of ethics, law, politics, identity, money, and, not least, anthropology itself, as both the subject and object of critique and reinvention? This course approached imperial formations and their material remains through contemporary practices. Readings were drawn, inter alia, from anthropological theory, ethnographic studies, critical museology, postcolonial curating, and conversations with practitioners and activists. Students pursued individual site-specific projects, with a focus on a comparative perspective on the cities of Berlin and New York that was also addressed in the student-projects and a series of public webinars. The seminar was co-taught and offered jointly to students of the MA Europäische Ethnologie, Institut für Europäische Ethnologie, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Anthropology Department at the New School in New York, USA (with Jonathan Bach). 

This project seeks to develop a modular curriculum for the purpose of documenting, reflecting on, teaching, and learning with current archival practices. The curriculum tackles crucial questions of the present by grappling with archiving processes. What do particular archival and archiving practices contribute to queries of the contemporary? How do they address issues of material agency and new ontologies, restitution and historical repair, new digital infrastructures and forms of trans-national collaboration? Rather than conceiving of archives as immobile and passive, the curriculum seeks to capture, relate, and think further creative ways of activating materialised pasts. 

The curriculum departs from research conducted in the context of the second edition of the Whole Life Academy (Haus der Kulturen der Welt, April 2021). Drawing on collective document analysis, participant observation, and interviews with the participants of the academy, the curriculum will develop creative profiles of each of the participating institutions / projects, including further reading, associated artworks, and exercises for the students. We design this curriculum to speak to the Academy, its member organisation, as well as developing its own life in teaching and public outreach beyond the project and beyond Berlin.