Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures

How can we conduct collaborative research on collections stemming from colonial or violent contexts? How do we negotiate the future of such objects? Experts from Namibia and Germany will discuss these and other questions as part of a collaborative research and exhibition project entitled ‘Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures’.

The event will be introduced by the short film Tracing German-Namibian Collaborations by Berlin-based filmmaker Moritz Fehr. He accompanied scholars, curators and artists from Namibia and Germany in their joint research with and on objects from the Namibia collection of the Ethnologisches Museum of the Staatliche Museen zu Berlin as part of the multi-year research project Confronting Colonial Pasts, Envisioning Creative Futures funded by the Gerda Henkel Foundation.

Featured in the film are the three panelists Golda Ha-Eiros, Cynthia Schimming, and Julia Binter. Moderated by Ndeenda Shivute, they reflect in the subsequent panel discussion on the joint research process and the exhibition at the Humboldt Forum, provide insights into the artistic research and creation process of the art installation Untitled by fashion designer Cynthia Schimming, and discuss the challenges and opportunities of cooperative and transcultural research projects.

Central to this is the future of the objects. Thanks to the support of the Gerda Henkel Foundation, 23 of the nearly 1,400 objects from the Ethnological Museum’s Namibia collection can travel to Namibia, where community representatives, artists, and scholars will further explore their potential for society. One focus will be Namibia’s fashion and design history, which can be rewritten with the help of the historical objects.