10 of 1000 Stories: "Loot"

Hartmut Dorgerloh is a German art historian and monument conservator. Since June 1, 2018 Dorgerloh has been the General Director of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

After reunification, Dorgerloh moved to the Ministry of Science, Research, and Culture of the newly re-established state of Brandenburg at the beginning of 1991. There, he headed the Department for Monument Conservation, which was responsible for the tasks of the state’s supreme monument conservation authority and, among other things, was responsible for the first monument protection law (1991) in the eastern German states. From 1997 to 1999, his duties also included supervising foundations and chairing the Committee of “Referents” of the Foundation of Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg. In 1999, Dorgerloh was appointed by the state as the founding commissioner for the House of Brandenburg-Prussian History (HBPG) in Potsdam and was responsible for its inaugural exhibition “Milestones – A Journey through Brandenburg-Prussia” as part of the “Prussia 2001” project.

From August 1, 2002, to May 31, 2018 Hartmut Dorgerloh was the General Director of the Foundation of Prussian Palaces and Gardens Berlin-Brandenburg (SPSG).

Highlights of the exhibition program led by Dorgerloh at the SPSG included “Miss Prussia 2010. Three Exhibitions for the Queen” (Luise), “Friederisiko” on the occasion of the 300th birthday of Frederick II of Prussia in 2012, “FRAUENSACHE. How Brandenburg Became Prussia” in 2015, and “Pückler. Babelsberg – The Green Prince and the Empress” in 2017.

Since 2004, Dorgerloh has been an adjunct professor at Humboldt University Berlin; he has also taught courses at the University of Bern and the University of Applied Sciences Potsdam.

Dutch-American creative duo Eline Jongsma and Kel O’Neill (Jongsma + O’Neill) use documentary and XR storytelling to explore history’s impact on today’s society. They won the IDFA DocLab Special Jury Award for Creative Technology at the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam for their Instagram-based documentary series His Name Is My Name, and created PBS’s Emmy-nominated, Webby-honored interactive documentary Empire. They also won the Tim Hetherington Visionary Award for their virtual reality documentary The Ark, which was one of the first VR productions to be licensed by Hulu and Meta. They have exhibited and premiered projects at some of the world’s most important cultural venues, including REDCAT, Tribeca Film Festival, SXSW, Les Recontres d’Arles, and the New York Film Festival (Lincoln Center). They hold Fellowships from the Sundance Institute, The Eisenhower Fellowships and the Economist Media Lab. They are the creators of Loot – 10 stories, a mixed reality exhibition that meditates on the future of museums in the wake of restitution efforts. Loot – 10 stories was
initiated by the Mauritshuis in The Hague and is currently on view at the Humboldt Forum in Berlin.

www.jongsmaoneill.com

Lars-Christian Koch studied ethnology, musicology and ethnomusicology in Bonn and Cologne. From 2003 to 2017, he was head of the Department of Media and Ethnomusicology, Visual Anthropology and the Berlin Phonogram Archive of the Ethnologisches Museum of the Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin. In 2018, he was elected Director of the Ethnologisches Museum, the Museum für Asiatische Kunst and the collections of the Staatliche Museen in the Humboldt Forum.

Onias Landveld is a Dutch multidisciplinary artist and playwright who also uses spoken word and animation in his work. Both his parents have Surinamese Maroon roots (Saamaka and Ndyuka). As a child, his family had to flee South America due to the civil war and, although his family did move back to Suriname, Onias returned to the Netherlands in 1998. Onias has a strong connection to his community of origin, their traditions and knowledge – he has been in contact with the Ethnologisches Museum/Humboldt Forum regarding an object in the collection that was taken from the Ndyuka village Wanhatti, where Onias’ uncle is a traditional leader.

Jan Linders (host) is head of programme at the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss.

Malte Mierheim studied German and history as a teacher and contemporary history at the University of Potsdam. After working in radio and at university, his keen interest in contemporary history and source work led him to the museum: he has been a research trainee for provenance research at the Stadtmuseum Berlin since March 2023. Here he conducts research into the provenance of various museum objects, including a gouache by Adolph von Menzel, and explores the contexts of Berlin’s urban history and the European art trade in the 20th century.

Andrea Scholz is curator for transcultural collaboration in the Ethnologisches Museum and Museum für Asiatische Kunst in Berlin. She is a trained anthropologist with a focus on Amazonia and has been working in various collaborative projects with indigenous communities and educational projects, mainly in Latin America.

Julia von Sigsfeld has been Restitution Coordinator of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin and Museum für Asiatische Kunst as part of the project “The Collaborative Museum” since September 2023. Previously, she was a research assistant to the director of the State Ethnographic Collections of Saxony. This was preceded by a doctorate at the Institute for Latin American Studies at the FU Berlin as a fellow of the research training group “Minor Cosmopolitanisms”, which she completed in 2020.

Regina Stein is a museologist and collection historian. She researches personal biographies, the provenance of objects and the history of museums and collections. After many years documenting the collections of major museums in Germany and Austria, she now devotes herself exclusively to provenance research. Since 2021, she has been a research associate for provenance research at the Stiftung Stadtmuseum Berlin. Since 2023, she has been responsible for the development of systematic provenance research for the period of the Soviet occupation zone and the GDR (1945-1990) and for checking the Märkisches Museum’s acquisitions of that time for critical provenances.

Anna Szöke is the scientific coordinator of the project “The Collaborative Museum” of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin and Museum für Asiatische Kunst. She is an art historian and curator and was previously managing director of the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) of the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, head curator of the Tieranatomisches Theater, Berlin and guest researcher at the Museum für Naturkunde. Her scientific and curatorial work focuses on questions of handling and provenance of “sensitive collections”, as well as the development of transcultural formats in terms of co-producing.