Transpositional Geologies
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| free admission |
| 14 years and older |
| English |
| Humboldt Lab, 1st floor |
| Belongs to: After Nature |
The beauty of many mineralogical collections is captivating. Whether azurite, malachite or duftite – the multi-coloured iridescent, sparkling or bizarrely shaped collection objects fascinate experts and amateurs alike. But where do the minerals in the historical holdings of natural history collections in universities and museums come from? How and under what conditions were they mined locally and how did they end up in the collections? And what are the long-term consequences of the extractivist overexploitation of nature and humans, which often took place as a result of scientific expeditions?
Using the example of minerals from Tsumeb in Namibia – a country rich in minerals and mineral resources – the evening, which is part of the ‘Object Laboratory’ series, is dedicated to the colonial histories hidden in mineralogical collections. And thus also questions of colonial suffering, sometimes questionable scientific research and ongoing environmental destruction.
The evening begins with a film by the artist Sascha Mikloweit, which was created as part of his ‘Transpositional Geologies’ project. For several years, he has been working with mineralogical collection objects from Tsumeb in Namibia – a place and mining district to which numerous research expeditions set out and which reflects the history of German colonialism from the late 19th and early 20th centuries to the present day. Afterwards, scientists and collection experts will discuss the colonial references of mineralogical collections and how to deal with them.
As part of the discussion series “OBJEKTLABOR. Collection talks at the coordination centre”
The following day, the Coordination Office for Scientific University Collections in Germany is organising a workshop for curators, collection and provenance researchers at the Humboldt Lab. If you are interested, you can register here: [email protected] (keyword: Workshop Mineralogical Collections)
Schedule
5:30 pm: Welcoming
5:45 pm: Film ‘transposition 001 (Happy Banality of Everything)’
6:30 pm: Panel discussion
8:00 pm: Interactive book launch with artist and editor Sascha Mikloweit and drinks
With contributions by
Artist and researcher: Berlin, DE; Brussels, BE
Sascha Mikloweit is an artist and researcher based in Berlin and Brussels. His work investigates geological and cultural entanglements through transdisciplinary methodologies, focusing on the materiality, historiography, and socio-political dimensions of geoscientific archives and extraction sites. Between 2019 and 2024, Mikloweit was a research artist-in-residence at the Mineralogical Museum of the University of Bonn, where he initiated the Transpositional Geologies research project. This project examines colonial heritage, histories of racism, and extraction in relation to geological science, with a particular focus on epistemic violence and ontology in geo-scientific collections. From 2025 to 2027, Mikloweit will be research artist-in-residence at the Mineralogical Collection of the Technical University of Berlin. Mikloweit holds a Master of Arts from Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts London, UK, and studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Düsseldorf and Münster, DE, as well as philosophy and history at the University of Münster, DE. His research has been presented at invited lectures, symposia, and workshops, and has been supported by major German cultural and research funding bodies, including Kunststiftung NRW, the Senate Department for Culture and Europe Berlin, and the Goethe-Institut Namibia. His work has been developed and shown internationally at venues such as: Copernicus Science Centre, Warsaw, Poland; European Space Agency, ESOC, Darmstadt, Germany; Tsumeb Municipality, Namibia; the Mineralogical Museum of the University of Bonn, Germany; the 7th Liverpool Biennale, Static Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Associação Brasileira de Empresários de Diversões, São Paulo, Brazil; Platoon Kunsthalle, Seoul, South Korea.
School of Anthropology and Museum Ethnography, University of Oxford, UK
Paul Basu is Professor of Anthropology and a Curator at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford. He is an anthropologist specialising in critical heritage, museum and material culture studies in transcultural contexts. He draws upon a wide range of ethnographic, historical and participatory methods to explore how pasts are differently materialised and mediated in the present, and how they shape futures. Paul’s research examines the complex ways in which natural as well as cultural heritage is entangled in shifting regimes of value and geopolitical configurations. His work has often involved re-engagements with colonial archives and collections relating to West Africa, exploring their ambiguous status as both sites of epistemic violence and, potentially, resources for communities to recover cultural histories, memories and alternative ways of knowing and being in the world.
Curator of the Mineralogical Collections: Technische Universität Berlin, Berlin, DE
Research Fellow: Department of Geology, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, ZA Johannes Giebel is a researcher and curator of the Mineralogical Collections at the TU Berlin. He obtained his PhD in Mineralogy from the University of Tübingen (Germany) and the University of the Free State (Bloemfontein, South Africa) and completed a Master’s degree in Economic Geology in Bloemfontein and a Diploma in Geology and Paleontology at the Martin- Luther University Halle-Wittenberg (Germany). Johannes worked at the State Museum of Natural History in Karlsruhe, where he was responsible for the reorganisation and digitalisation of the petrographic collection. His research interests encompass interdisciplinary fields of geology, with long-standing research activities in southern Africa. Through his work with the Mineralogical Collections, which contain a significant proportion of Namibian specimens, he is concerned with the historical background and the appropriate handling of minerals extracted under colonial conditions.
Postdoctoral Fellow: International Studies Group, University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, ZA
Saima Nakuti Ndahangwapo is a Postdoctoral Fellow with the International Studies Group at the University of the Free State and affiliated to the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Namibia. She teaches history modules on the German and South African colonial periods and the process of decolonisation in Namibia. Her research interests include diplomatic, mining and labour histories in southern Africa. Her recent publications are: Defending the Investment: Rössing Uranium and the Business of Decolonization in Namibia (Basler Afrika Bibliographien Basel, Switzerland, forthcoming); ‘Follow the Yellowcake Road’: Historical Geographies of Namibian Uranium from the Rössing Mine. Historical Social Research 49 (1) (2024): 32-54; (With Christopher R. Hill). Technical and Vocational Education and the Place of Indigenous Labour in the Mining Industry of Namibia, 1970–1990, Journal of Southern African Studies, 47:1 (2021): pp.127-142.
2022
Experimental Film
00:46:01, 4k
Film by Sascha Mikloweit
Animation: Holger Risse
Soundtrack: Irakli Kiziria
The film transposition 001 (Happy Banality of Everything) is a product of the Transpositional Geologies Project three year art residency hosted by the Museum of Mineralogy University Bonn. The collection houses 60,000 minerals, all meticulously named, and catalogued according to the Strunz’s classification system, which follows their chemical composition.
The starting point for the production was artist Sascha Mikloweit’s vast archive of “object-images” generated from the collection using a modified flatbed-scanner. After a nine-month trialogue between Mikloweit, the animation expert Holger Risse and the composer Irakli Kiziria, the film emerged as a poetic re-engineering of the scientific collection driven by the trio’s desire to convey the untold violent History inscribed in the minerals. The effect is at once seductive and profoundly unsettling.
If you enter an institutional mineralogical collection, you typically encounter glass cabinets organized by classification systems according to material properties. Yet, each mineral carries with it a history of extraction, destruction, (dis)possession, and global relations.
Transpositional Geologies localizes such collections as indices of the afterlife of colonialism and proposes an evolving political geology, reading mineral specimens as objects of “culture” rather than of “nature.” Capturing his five-year artistic engagement and cultural collaboration in Namibia and Germany, Sascha Mikloweit brings together international voices from fields including anthropology, critical theory, geology, history, museum studies, philosophy, poetry, public administration—and the perspectives of boltwoodite, cerussite, or smithsonite.
Rock by rock, this exquisitely designed volume invites us to engage with a progressively nuanced reading of geology’s history: its epistemic violence, omissions, and racial regimes, and how the lasting residues of its colonial legacies continue to shape our present-day extractive realities.
Edited by: Sascha Mikloweit, with texts by:
Paul Basu, Charmaine //Gamxamus, Johannes Giebel, Elizabeth Grosz, Maria-Oo Haihambo, Selby Hearth, Bastian Herbst, Chris Hill, Herbert Jauch, Juuso Kaluvi, Veripuami Nandee Kangumine, Malina Lauterbach, Helmut Maier, Saima Nakuti Ndahangwapo, Prince Kamaazengi Marenga I, Sascha Mikloweit, Hidipo Nangolo, Paul O’Kane, Jermaine Solunga, Ellison Tjirera, Kuhepa Tjondu, Samo Tomšič, Kathryn Yusoff
Further information:
https://www.kerberverlag.com/en/2162/transpositional-geologies