This episode was inspired by my participation in the exhibition "Prussian Palaces. Colonial Histories", taking place at the Schloss Charlottenburg Berlin.
My guest, Carolin Alff, one of the exhibition's curators, guides us through the thoughts that inform the exhibition's making. We discuss the mystery of two statues, their damaged state, a testament to the inaccessible vignette shrouding Germany's deplorable colonial past. The statue in question was the subject of my audiovisual intervention called "Tracing Presence(s)... of Place, Body, Time."
It is important to note that the relevance of this exhibition is not only in its attempt to reminisce about the past but also in how it asks pertinent questions about how the country and its people come to terms with the extent to which their past continues to inform their present where it has to do with white privilege and Western hegemony.
We delve into the curatorial process and the complex decisions made behind the scenes of this exhibition. According to the organisers, the aim was not only to showcase artefacts but to create a safe space for dialogue where history can be reimagined and considered from new perspectives. Yet I ask: to what extent does the need to create a "safe space" come in the way of creating a space of new knowledge that offers an occasion for genuine self-reflection rather than a "glossing over" or latent gloating?
With Carolin, we traverse the tricky territory of sensitive terminologies and challenging historical contexts, recognising the need for a transparent conversation that respects the histories of injustices and violence attached to these relics.
Join us as we grapple with the past, confront uncomfortable truths, and underscore the importance of understanding history to shape a better present and future. This episode should inspire you to visit the exhibition from the 4th of July to the 31st of October, 2023.
Thank you for listening. Follow Nkata Podcast Station on Instagram @nkatapodcast and Twitter.
See the website for extensive materials: nkatapodcast.com
This episode was inspired by my participation in the exhibition "Prussian Palaces. Colonial Histories", taking place at the Schloss Charlottenburg Berlin.
My guest, Carolin Alff, one of the exhibition's curators, guides us through the thoughts that inform the exhibition's making. We discuss the mystery of two statues, their damaged state, a testament to the inaccessible vignette shrouding Germany's deplorable colonial past. The statue in question was the subject of my audiovisual intervention called "Tracing Presence(s)... of Place, Body, Time."
It is important to note that the relevance of this exhibition is not only in its attempt to reminisce about the past but also in how it asks pertinent questions about how the country and its people come to terms with the extent to which their past continues to inform their present where it has to do with white privilege and Western hegemony.
We delve into the curatorial process and the complex decisions made behind the scenes of this exhibition. According to the organisers, the aim was not only to showcase artefacts but to create a safe space for dialogue where history can be reimagined and considered from new perspectives. Yet I ask: to what extent does the need to create a "safe space" come in the way of creating a space of new knowledge that offers an occasion for genuine self-reflection rather than a "glossing over" or latent gloating?
With Carolin, we traverse the tricky territory of sensitive terminologies and challenging historical contexts, recognising the need for a transparent conversation that respects the histories of injustices and violence attached to these relics.
Join us as we grapple with the past, confront uncomfortable truths, and underscore the importance of understanding history to shape a better present and future. This episode should inspire you to visit the exhibition from the 4th of July to the 31st of October, 2023.
Thank you for listening. Follow Nkata Podcast Station on Instagram @nkatapodcast and Twitter.
See the website for extensive materials: nkatapodcast.com
Alright. So this episode was inspired by a project that I've been working on, so sometime in December 2022, I was invited to join a project that is looking at the colonial history and the colonial relics of Germany, and so I was invited as a photographer to photograph two statues that was found in a depot, and these statues once belonged to a German, I think, emperor or someone who is higher up in the politics and the elites of the time, and this was in the 19th century. What's interesting about these statues is that they were found damaged, basically broken, and all of that they were even painted white, in other words, a kind of white washing, so to speak. And what's interesting about this is that no one actually knows how these damages came about. Basically, there was no research, and this is something about dealing with this colonial history, especially when you go back beyond the time when colonialism was very much active within Germany as its politics. If you go into the 19th century, you realize there's a lot of void and a lot of loopholes that research even cannot feel, and this is the case with these statues. No one knows exactly how the damage came about. What we have as speculations as to what happened. Maybe it was damaged during the war or somebody did it, and all of that.
Speaker 1:So this missing episode in the genealogy of these statues opened up a space for questioning, for reflection, for reimagining history. This is how I come into the project. But my approach to photographing these statues was not to see them as objects, because my first reaction when I was invited to this project that is very much object-centric, that is to say, there's all this bringing back into the present all these objects that carry so much violence and there's just so much pain and human injustice that is embedded in the history of these objects. And now this is an exhibition that brings all of that and puts it in display, but at the same time wanting to question even the very politics of representation, the modes of showing in our time, in contrast to what this display would have been in their time. What are the ways that we can rethink and bring these very controversial, polarizing objects into the conversation of the now, without bypassing, circumventing and trying to be politically correct with the truth? So this is the challenge that the curators faced.
Speaker 1:Even myself, who was called in as a photographer, a thinker, a writer, was also asking these questions, but from my perspective I was very clear that I didn't want to photograph these statues as objects, but rather to think of them as a cartography, a cartography of a place, a lost place, and one of the demerits of colonialism is that knowledges and histories were negated as if to render them nonexistent. But that something was negated doesn't mean it does not exist. That something was lost doesn't mean it doesn't exist. So the work of our time would be to create new myths and new imaginaries of places. What would have been? How would it have been? The times are calling on us to reimagine history, to reread history, but also to ask pertinent questions.
Speaker 1:So I started working on this project, like I said, since December 2022, and the exhibition eventually happened, or rather opened on the 4th of July 2023. And so everything is on display at the Schloss Schalotenberg as we speak, and I thought to myself to have a conversation with one of the curators, the one that I worked closely with, the one that was constantly being in touch with me and in many ways, accommodating some of my concerns, the questions that I've asked about the process, and her name is Caroline Aff. So this composition that you're going to listen to right now happen within the exhibition space, and so that accounts for why there are some sort of like reverberations. Sometimes you hear sounds siphting into our conversation, but those sounds are actually from installations within the exhibition, so let me take you right into it.
Speaker 2:My name is Carolyn Alf. I am one of three curators who curated the exhibition Prussian Palace's Colonial Histories. We were a team of three. The others were Hatem Higab, who's a historian who focuses on postcolonial studies, and then Susanne Evers, who's a colleague who's been working at the foundation of Prussian Palace for a long time, Because the idea with this exhibition is to develop it in a process and then to jumpstart a process where the foundation looks at the presentations in other palaces and questions the way they show art, whether the colonial histories that become evident through the objects in the collection are talked about enough and in what way they're talked about. What we would like to show, what we perhaps don't want to show anymore, and to question the way these narratives are told also form ideas of the future.
Speaker 1:This exhibition was organized by this foundation, the Prussian Palace foundation that you work with, so can you give us a sense of what this foundation does and why this foundation exists?
Speaker 2:The foundation looks after the palaces of the Prussian Kings and later the German Emperor. They used to be two different foundations, one in West Germany and one in East Germany, and they then came together after Germany was reunited, and they look after the objects that are still left in the palaces, but also the palaces and the gardens as well. With that comes the responsibility of making sure these objects are preserved for the future, but also the responsibility to pose new questions, questions that are relevant today and that inform the way we see these objects now as well, and not only as historic objects.
Speaker 1:And has this foundation always existed?
Speaker 2:It existed. My history in that place is a little patchy, but I think it's existed in some form of another since the 20s and it exists in the form it is now since about 1990, so after German unification. There are several different departments and quite a few palaces in Potsdam, berlin, but also in Brandenburg that it looks after.
Speaker 1:You know, lately there's been this interest in Germany, revisiting its colonial past and looking at its colonial relics. Why do you think that is right now?
Speaker 2:Well, I think Germany has long preoccupied itself with the history of the 1930s and 40s the national socialists, and what impact and what racist ideas were evident then and by looking at that, they have not yet looked so much at the colonial past, even though both those histories are also, of course, interlinked.
Speaker 2:And so at the moment there is this urge to start looking at the colonial past, and the part that we look at is even earlier than the colonial times that we usually focus on. So end of 19, beginning of 20th century we go even further back to the initiation of the Brandenburg African Company, it's called which started to introduce the trade with enslaved people. They were trafficked from the West Coast of Africa over the Atlantic, and that is a history that has that people have worked on. There are quite a few specialists who have worked on this history, but it's not usually, or it's not told widely, and so with this exhibition we not only wanted to also draw attention to that history, but also show how that history is still evident in the objects and the places that we visit today.
Speaker 1:And, in your opinion, where does this sit in a national conversation of Germany right now? Where, would you say, all of this is situated?
Speaker 2:It's situated more in a question that is, in a long-dury perspective. So looking at this history over a long, long time frame and showing that we shouldn't only focus on a certain number of years at the end of the 19th, beginning of the 20 century, but we should also look further back to see what systems, what practices, what processes are evidenced throughout, how they develop and how this, all this histories are connected in a way. And that's where the Prussian palaces with their collections offer the possibility of looking at the responsibilities of the monarchs, also in terms of colonial history, because that's a history that's also not told so much. We look at the politicians but we don't look at the emperor so much and then also what the family of the emperor, how that tradition also situated and built up to that history at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. So I think this exhibition also offers a chance to ask more general questions and then relate to them in quite a specific way through certain objects.
Speaker 1:You know, like since I've been in Berlin, I've been coming to Berlin for me personally, I usually don't connect the fact that Berlin is under Prussia. Right, we know Bavaria, everyone knows Bavaria and we talk about Bavaria, but no one talks about Berlin under Prussia. And but recently there's been, everywhere I go, almost like a reference to Prussia. Everywhere there's the airport, brandenburg. Okay, now everybody knows Brandenburg. It was Prussia and now there's a mission here and then the Humbot Forum. That's all of this reference to Prussia. Is this a coincidence? Or is it just me basically living on the Iraq?
Speaker 2:I don't think it's either of those. I think the word or the term Prussia doesn't come easy to everybody. Not everybody living in Berlin knows that Berlin was part of Prussia. Also people don't really know what Prussia was because it was very decentralized. It wasn't only Brandenburg but it had bits of lands even in West Germany and also in what is now Poland.
Speaker 2:And so this, the history of Prussia, although it's evident in Berlin's cultural scene, because we have two foundations. One is the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz, the cultural objects, the objects that are in museums, that also came partly from the collections of the Emperors and Kings. And then there's the foundation of Prussian palaces, which is here and which looks at the private collection of the Kings and Emperors. So it is actually always evident and quite a strong tradition. But maybe there is a new questioning, also through the colonial history, whether the term Prussia should still be part of the name, for example. That's also a discussion have happening with the other foundation.
Speaker 2:So this idea what is Prussia and how did it contribute to our history I think is something that people are questioning again at the moment and asking why? Why, for example, should objects that were taken from Africa or from from Asia, why should they be in a palace that was rebuilt? There was an idea behind that, which today there are a lot of people working on actually analyzing that idea and asking why that was, whether that's really a good idea, whether that's really a good place for them to be, how they should be framed. But of course that's also a chance really to look at that history and to really critically examine it yes.
Speaker 1:So that's a thing you know, because on one hand, we can say, okay, this is basically okay. Let me pause and address the listener. So we are in the exhibition space and once in a while, the sound from the installation will be coming in, so you will hear this sound, but it's all part of it. So I just want to say that. So, as I was saying, on one hand, it is this reading of history, looking back at history, trying to understand it, trying to recontextualize history, but on the other hand, also there is this aspect of a kind of glorification as well. And so how do you understand your position as one of the curators and who put together all of this exhibition? How do you understand you know, that intersection between rereading history and this glorification of Prussia?
Speaker 2:Yeah, being a relatively young curator, prussia doesn't mean anything to me in terms of a tradition that I don't want to touch or that I look up to. It's really a historical context that we're looking at, and so I see it more as a context that needs to be explained and also looked at critically, rather than a concept that I need to uphold, because for me, that is long past. We are living in Germany today, and although this is part of our history, it's not a history that I feel I have a debt to uphold, in a way, where it's put up on a pedestal, but rather than just, it's part of my history and I need to critically examine it, and that's part of my responsibility as a curator.
Speaker 1:And that's very interesting, and that's on the level of the personal preoccupation as a curator. But what about on a national level, which you also have to deal with and speak to and confront? So on that national level, is there like a disparity between how you are thinking about it and how, for which it was sponsored in the first place, for which it was allowed to even take place? Is there like a disparity between what this is doing?
Speaker 2:Well, I think in my case, we always have to look at the individual case, how I was socialized, how I was brought up.
Speaker 2:So, if we're talking about me individually, I grew up in Sierra Leone and in Tanzania, and so for me, my identification with being German is something that came much, much later on and it was something that I very much critically examined because I didn't feel I am a German or so, and I think for me I can only talk about that life path that I've had. I think there are probably other people who grew up here who perhaps feel more identification with being German and being a part of this history. For me, this is something that I'm also experiencing a bit from the outside, although, of course, my family is German and I come from here. But for me this was a process as well to even say, okay, my home is Berlin and I accept that, and so for me, this idea of nationality is something very, very abstract. It's not something that I feel. I don't feel any patriotism for Germany. I see the advantages of living in Berlin, I love Berlin, but that's just also my individual case.
Speaker 1:Are you allowed to say that. They are like out on record, like I don't feel any patriotism whatsoever for Germany.
Speaker 2:For me, that is. I think I'm allowed to say that I don't know. I mean, maybe there will be a lot of hate coming my way.
Speaker 2:I don't know, but I can only speak my truth basically and I have to be honest as well when looking at this kind of history that was also something that we talked about in the curatorial team is being honest about what our social backgrounds are, what that means for this topic, where we also say we need to take a step back as curators and leave room for artists or for partners that have long worked in decolonizing Germany and Berlin, so civil society groups like post-colonial Potsdam, or also groups that do their own exhibitions now, like the colonial Erinnerungskultur in der Stadt, and there is a sense that it needs a polyphony of voices to talk about this subject, because and that's what we've also experienced now having opened the exhibition it is a polarizing subject. There are people that feel extremely hurt in their identity for us to be looking into this history critically, but also, on the other hand, there are also people that feel very much hurt through this history. So there is a whole polyphony of voices and I think it really needs a conversation of many different people together, and we try to start that with the exhibition by saying, yes, we are a curatorial team and we make certain decisions, but we have to be very reflective of what our positions are, how we come towards to this topic and then also involve a lot of people and allow a lot of voices to be heard and seen in this exhibition. And that's also what we try to do with the contemporary artworks, because there are a lot of subjects, especially where historical narratives of colonialism are concerned, where, as researchers, we find a lot of voids or empty spaces. And these empty spaces I think we talked about it before are not empty. There is something in them and the question is, how do we fill them when research can only go to a certain extent? And for me personally, I found it very valuable, a very valuable experience working with you, but also working with Nandong Khuma and with Patricia Festa or Lisa Maidavi, who each contributed contemporary artworks to this exhibition, to talk about the way they saw this specific thing that they looked at.
Speaker 2:For example, patricia Festa she looked at the biography of a young girl called Bilile. There are other names attached to that Ajame Machbuba we're not sure whether this is one person or three people, for example. There are a lot of things we just don't know about her. She was brought to Germany by a Prussian, or not Prussian, but a aristocrat, and he also was active at the Prussian court. His name is Fus Pückler and he bought her from out of enslavement and brought her here, where we can presume that she was free, but she was very young. So she was in a very dependent state where she was dependent on him and he was over 50 and she was very young. And the question is also what kind of relationship that these two people have.
Speaker 1:So there's a kind of rereading of that and say how do we bring that to our time?
Speaker 2:and to name it differently, there are certain clues or I don't know if clue is the right word, but I don't have a better word right now that indicate that they had a sexual relationship as well or that he raped her as well, but we don't know for sure. Research cannot go to a point where we know for sure, and so it's important for other ways of looking at things to ask these questions.
Speaker 1:It doesn't have to mean that this is this happened for sure, but it's important to ask these questions, to raise questions and to leave a lot of question marks around these readings and the history they carry Speaking of which this is an elaborate exhibition. I think there are, like how many?
Speaker 2:there are six rooms and in almost every room we have a contemporary voice, either from an artist or from a literature.
Speaker 2:So from perspective of literature or also from art history, we have in the last room a projection where the art historian Sinaraja Tamida de Gora, from Sri Lanka, he puts a little ivory object, a box, an ivory box that came from the court of Kandi in Sri Lanka and we are not sure how it came into the possession of the palaces.
Speaker 2:Maybe it was given as a gift, maybe it was bought, we don't know. There are similar objects like that from in the 17th century as well, but this object was probably brought here in the 19th century at least that's where we see it in the inventory and he places this object for the first time in a context that looks at traditional dances but also other artistic practices, and suddenly there's a new perspective and many more narratives that can be attached to this object and that lets us see this object in a different way. And so it becomes. This little object becomes much, much bigger through his work, through his documentary work, through his films, and then well, let me ask you how long did it take you to put this object in the museum?
Speaker 1:All of this together, starting from the very beginning.
Speaker 2:Well, it was a work that built on work of, for example, post-colonial pot-stom as well, who initiated and who strongly urged the foundation to take up this work, and the foundation looked at their collections and this work has been going on for about three years maybe, and so it was first of all looking at what kind of objects in the collections speak to this topic or have links to this topic and the exhibition. We really started organizing it starting in February of last year, so February 2022.
Speaker 1:And so, while we were planning as curators, what were the sudden moments where there were deviations and changes, and what informed those?
Speaker 2:So we started with a workshop that invited a lot of these organizations that I already talked about into these empty rooms here and asking whether they would be willing to work with us. And there was a lot of, of course, care had to be involved in that, in that process and being very transparent about how decisions are being made, because if you're asking people from the outside of organizations to participate in a process, it really needs trust and transparency and honesty, and so we tried to set up an environment where that would be possible and organized five more workshops that had different themes. For example, the first workshop was about definitions, and we're here at the moment in the middle room, which is a little bit like the swinging door of the exhibition. It's right in the middle, it's more theoretical and it looks at definitions, for example, colonialism. What does colonialism mean? What do colonial continuities mean? That was, for example, where that, through the workshops, we realized that it would be very important for the palaces and, looking at the palaces, what I said before, that it's really a long process that we're looking at, a process that extends even to today, when, for example, if you look at it visually, that's just one aspect of many that you can look at, but there are the allegories of different parts of the world and they foster stereotypes that are still evident even today, in supermarket objects, for example.
Speaker 2:And then we also invited other terms. For example, there was Mariana Bale Moudumbou from Pavlo Masoso, an organization in Potsdam. She brought the term MAFA and said that that was a term that we also needed to discuss on the same level as colonialism. And then there was also another we call all of our expert partners and, for example, from the Kuriya Fappand. Her name is Natalie Hahn and she wrote about the term Hahn as well. So we see that, although we always know the term colonialism, there are a lot of other terms which mean slightly different things, which have other meanings, but that also speak into this history. And that's what we look at in this middle room, where you can also sit down and read in books and also look through a media station, where you can look through these terms and also read them for yourself, as well.
Speaker 2:Because it's an exhibition that is not supposed to be. Okay. Here is the end point, and we've figured it out and this is the history we want to tell. But it's supposed to ask questions, give you an area where you yourself can look at this history and pose your own questions that may be relevant for you, for yourself and for your own social background as well, and how you come to see these objects.
Speaker 1:What has been the feedback of the German audience coming here?
Speaker 2:Very varied. Some say we're not critical enough. Others say we're ideological and we don't give any facts, so it's really everything in between. Some say there's a lot of parallels to today. For some it's very hard already that we don't. We've decided to not use the M word, so I will say it now once for the listeners. But we decided not to use more in German because there's a big discussion about this word and it was important for us from a starting point to say we're not going to use this name in order to be able to talk about it with also people of colour, that we're not using this term that discriminates against people of colour and that is very critical for some people because they say it's a historical term and we are changing history by not using it.
Speaker 1:So that's very interesting, because I also worked on this project and I photographed the statues two of them and at some point there was this question of will the head of the second statue be brought into the exhibition or not? And so that is a very big question Should it be left out or should it be brought in? What is it going to do if it is just the head standing outside of the body because it can't be attached? And what if you attach it and it feels too contrived To adhere to the body? I had to adhere to the body and to force it, and then eventually you decided not to put it. So now this idea of deciding to keep something away, don't you think it's politically correct?
Speaker 2:I don't know. I don't really like this political correct term because political correctness is subjective. Something may be politically correct for me that is not politically correct for other people. But these statues that you talk about, we found them in an old storage facility in Glinneke, near Glinneke, which is also a palace near or it's still in Berlin, but it's a little further outside, and it was owned by Prince Karl, who himself also had servants here that had been bought free from the enslavement trade. So we find Prince Karl in many different histories in the exhibition space.
Speaker 2:And these statues were broken. Their head was broken off, which is not uncommon for statues, because it's a fragile point where many statues break. And there were other pieces the legs, the arms that were broken off, and the main part was the torso that could still be found. And then we found other fragments as well, and the question was what do we do with this? Do we show it? Do we not show it at all because it's fragments and it goes back into a storage facility, or what should happen with these fragments? But it's an interesting point because there are so many questions and it reflects so much the process that we are in at the moment of looking at objects, how they can be displayed and what sort of impact they have through the way they are displayed. And we discussed that in our group of three, but also in a workshop, and for me it was a learning process to learn that the heads, that looking at it from an art, historical standpoint is not unusual, that they are off the body Because, as I said, that's just a fragile point where it breaks off.
Speaker 2:But for others in our discussions it was very impactful because it was a evidence of violence and it brought out images, impressions of historical moments where Germans also decapitated. So for example, in Namibia, the Herero and the Nama, that in that genocide they decapitated people and that these sculptures that are from a different time suddenly evoke that history as well. And the question was what do we do with that? And we decided to also remain true to the place that we're in. So the question was what would be the usual process with these objects? And the usual process would be to clean and to look at the pigments, to fasten the pigments that are still there, and then you would put the pieces that can come together together and have the sculpture stand upright in order to conserve it. So we show these sculptures in these two different moments and with the one that is still lying. That is not connected.
Speaker 2:The question was, what do we do with the head? And we decided then, discussing it with our partners, but also in the group of us curators, that we don't want to show the actual head, but we show a picture of the head and how we found it. So we're not saying this didn't happen, but we're trying to contextualize it and not show it on its own, where it can evoke other pictures from photographs, where it is contextualized. And then we of course also invited you to look at these objects again, also the heads, and photograph them and put your perspective on these sculptures forward. And for me it would be really interesting to find out what your perspective on the fragments and the sculptures was when you started photographing them.
Speaker 1:Well, for me it's very interesting because, of course, from the onset, when I was invited to do this, I was asking myself how do we move away or beyond the idea of a study and autopsy, and particularly for the sculptures, you know, how do you bring life into those objects? Because it's an object-centric exhibition and it's not limited to this exhibition. This is basically how exhibition that actually looks at the colonial times, that's the approach. That's the first approach. The same thing is happening at Humboldt Forum, for instance. But how do you move beyond that idea of the object? But also, at the same time, how do you bring life?
Speaker 1:And that was why the opening text of the work is we are here to nurture life, not to resuret it dead. Is that a question? Are we here to nurture life or to resuret it dead? Is that a question? But over the months it became a statement and I thought it was so important to use that as an opening statement to make a mark and say this is the direction, this is where we're going, which is that we are here to nurture life. So it also allowed me to begin to think about how to photograph and how to bring life. So I was looking at all the, because I photographed when the you know it's still, it's not being cleaned, and so you had all the signs of things growing around it sand and everything growing from where it was.
Speaker 1:they were stored, and so I try as much as possible to come at the sculptures from there. Now, I was thinking about the head. That was omitted. My conclusion was that if you're going to omit the head, why don't you just omit the entire sculpture? Because you might as well just have the images telling you everything about it and then you can say well, these sculptures are somewhere there, but because of how this does that, we can bring all of it. But the idea of singing out the head when there are also other parts that couldn't be put together, we still have it in the exhibition there lying around.
Speaker 2:We show them.
Speaker 1:Yes, we show them, but the head was removed. It's like something happened. The idea of removing the head is almost like contaminating the entire process in a way, because that is a very specific decision in the head. Not due to the fact that the head is too violent. We decided not to show the entire thing, but the head was removed. So I feel like this is this thing about covering a part of history because it is offensive, Not necessarily because for us the conversation.
Speaker 2:But I think that although the head is not physically present, it is still very much present in the way it is shown and the image that you have there. I think the importance about showing both sculptures as well is to show the movement between that. I mean, if we look at the sculpture that is in sort of the first stage of conservation, it is lying there, and if we talk about forensics and so on, it is still sort of placed lying down. And then you have the other sculpture that is elevated, and there is the question that you ask through your images, I think, really also resonate in the way the sculptures are placed, one lying down and the other one upright. And so the question for admitting the head was, yes, it was a concern that the head is offensive and hurtful to people, because that's what we asked with all these objects is what can we show, what can we not show? And that was a process that we started on in these workshops, and it was also a process that me, as a white curator, I also need to trust people in this process that have perhaps family, that were part of the enslavement trade, that are effective of this history in a very different way than it affects me today in my privileged position, and so I need to be respectful of what they're also telling me.
Speaker 2:Going back to those conversations that we had when putting together this exhibition, our decision was that it would be too hurtful to show the object and it would make people basically not want to not feel safe in that environment, and that's what we definitely wanted to create, even though we're looking at a very brutal history.
Speaker 2:We also wanted to create safe spaces where we're very conscious about what we're showing and what we're not showing.
Speaker 2:We didn't want to omit it fully, which is why we use the photos to contextualize it and also showed the head on the sculpture that is standing upright and also through the images that are in your presentation. So for us, this question of showing the head is it there or is it not? There is also part of the conversation that we all need to have Is what kind of history or along what kind of objects and history do we want to tell these history and how do we also want to carry that on into the future? I think it's very interesting what you're saying about the head and it also makes a lot of sense to me. But at that point in the discussions that we had, it seemed to go over the line where we would show something to be a spectacle as well, and that was a concern throughout the exhibition on also choosing the objects that we have in this exhibition space to still have an environment and an area where we can talk freely and safely about the subject.
Speaker 2:That was also why we decided to put a filter on some of the depictions, the reproductions, especially from the 20th century, where you can choose yourself of whether you want to see it or whether you don't want to see it. So if you're standing right in front you can see it, but if you're standing to the side.
Speaker 1:You can't see it. It becomes like a black slate.
Speaker 2:And so it becomes your choice of whether you want to see it or you want to look away.
Speaker 1:Very interesting. Ultimately, at the end of the day, my conclusion is that, okay, this is a very difficult question to answer entirely. The most important is not whether, at the end of the day, one arrives at whether the head was shown or not, but all the myriad conversations that's happened and who took part in that conversation, who took part in the decision making. There has to be all these people who are very much invested in this conversation.
Speaker 1:They had to take part in it. That's what's most important in all of this. This is actually people coming together and making knowledge. It's not so much about these objects, anyway, whether they are here or not here. What's most important is that we talk about safe space, but it should also be a space of the production of new knowledge and where knowledge is not reduced to ignorance just for the sake of it. It's one of the reasons why I've also said to myself that if I'm ever going to do projects like this and people call me two weeks before the exhibition, I'm not even doing that. It has to. You need to have enough time to be able to deliberate on these things, to have conversations, to see what can change, what can move. Now, speaking of which, there's this installation there as well, where you are playing with the light. Can you speak about that a bit?
Speaker 1:Yeah, in the second room as a way of how to show, because there is also what to show, but then there's how to show.
Speaker 2:Just as a context for the listeners. We focus on biographies of people that were purchased out of the enslavement trade and brought to Prussia and then served here for the aristocracy. We have portraits of them here. These are not portraits that are realistic, but they are paintings that are meant to represent wealth and power. Here as well was a question of do we want to show these objects, do we want to show these paintings or do we not want to show them? If we show them, how can we create movement? What you were saying I think that fits very well to what we're trying to do is how can you foster a discussion about what is happening in these paintings Right now? You heard also questions that we ask, that we don't necessarily have answers to, but it's questions that can also foster discussion.
Speaker 2:What happens is that the light with which these paintings are focused on it changes.
Speaker 2:So first there's little light and then there is quite a strong focus on the bit of where the person of color is represented, with potential biographies of people of color that live and worked at the court at that specific time, so that we can discuss who they might have been, who the person represented might have been, and to draw attention to that person and also not spend so much time discussing the white aristocrat that is represented there, because we all know, I mean, you just need to see these paintings and you know they're meant as representation, as of power, of also war and might.
Speaker 2:With some of the biographies we can actually see that they married, they had relationships where they got children. They then married someone else and had several other children. So it's important also to say here that there are these biographies that we haven't told yet and we want to focus on them now. And the light is an important sort of initial point where we start changing our perspective on these paintings. Hopefully, I mean, you're always, as a curator, you think about something and you try and make it work, and also, within the boundaries that you have, working with historical objects and you let it go and people come into the exhibition space. Hopefully the hope is that they discuss these biographies and the meaning that they have, and the light is an important way of switching that perspective and creating a movement that can also create discussion.
Speaker 1:You know, what has been very interesting for me in this exhibition is because I've always said that we've come to a time when we have to allow or there has to be.
Speaker 1:You know, yq8 as 10, this story this story of colonialism, but in collaboration with other experts who are very much invested in that conversation. But it's also important that white people begin to tell the story themselves. It's part of that self-reflection. In fact, I would say that we should have a white history month, a white history month where everybody comes together to talk about the colonial past. All those knowledges are omitted from the textbook. That's what's going to make up the white history month.
Speaker 1:During the opening of this exhibition, there was a certain official that spoke, of course, amongst other prominent officials, some of them politicians, even spoke in a very affectionate way, but it was also particular to the language he was using. He spoke of how many of these knowledges that this exhibition is trying to engage they don't exist in the curriculum and the textbooks of German schools that the people of today, germans of today and the ones coming after, have not really found the words to even begin to enter and comprehend these realities from the past, and many of them, of course, filtering in many other forms into the present. He tasked the listeners that day to make the effort to engage, to look into themselves, and so for me it was an indication that perhaps things are shifting. When I say things are shifting. It doesn't in any way excuse the frustration that many people, for whom these knowledges, these colonial pasts and relics are made for, have the luxury to just gloss over it and even to some extent to gloat oh look at what our country have done in the past. But that wasn't me. But somewhere there is this undertone of gloating what Germans will call Shadam Freyder. It doesn't excuse any of that, but that day, listening to this man, I feel that there is a shift, however little, however sluggish. So I just wanted to make that comment because I never had the chance to ask Caroline that question.
Speaker 1:But I strongly believe that it's important to mention this as something that is very much the outcome, or I would say instigated by this exhibition here. And of course, the context for me is always that this is a conversation in continuum. By and large, if we take a step back and try just a little bit to be expansive and cast our glance into the future, it's obvious that we are moving into a more planetary world. Of course, nothing of what I've said undermines the fact that there is still, even modern day, slavery, subjugation, marginalization, gluttonous pursuit of capital and materialism. None of that is excused in any way by what I have said.
Speaker 1:But let us look at the young ones. They are now drawing knowledge from a multi contextual reality. If we can support this way of allowing connections to happen, what Edward Lisant called the Poetics of Relation, that for me is a road towards healing and reparation of our world, where we can grow beyond our petty demarcations and dichotomies and think about the kind of wholesomeness that will be the reality of the human being if we allow the wealth of difference to really thrive, by nurturing it, by nurturing it All. Right back to the conversation.
Speaker 2:I think that's also one role for the foundation, because our traditional viewers, I think, are not totally, but predominantly, white people.
Speaker 2:So I think this is also responsibility. We have to bring this discussion to the forefront and to not have this be a conversation that is only on the shoulders of initiatives like post-colonial nepotism, who've done really important work, or decolonial erinnerungskultur in the Stadt, who do still very important work. But it's also our responsibility as a big foundation to ask these questions and ask them critically and create movement and change. That change is not an easy process. It's not something that happens overnight, which is why also an exhibition like that it's not only about the exhibition that you see here, but for the organization, it's also about the questions that you ask going into this exhibition. As you said, how can we foster a discussion where a lot of perspectives are involved in this process and not just create an internal discussion and then also to be aware of our privilege and the things we don't know? And I think that's been a very important process that we're just starting on at the moment.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it's very interesting. So I wanted to ask you because you designated yourself as a young curator, so this is like Relatively young.
Speaker 1:Yes. So your profession is like future facing right. So has this process been for you as a person? Personally? What has it unraveled in someone who sees yourself on the side of, on the privileged side of things? Yeah, so I ask this question because I believe strongly that we are living in what Franz Fanon has called the double bind. It's like a premonition. Franz Fanon's work was a work of healing, so already he had envisioned today where we will be forced to confront that double bind between the colonized and the colonized, and there is no circumventing it. You have to pass through it. There is no going around it for us to go to somewhere, but again in that double bind, it means that it's calling on every one of us to emancipate, to the subjectivity, to emancipate. But emancipation can only happen through a critical self-reflection and no one can do that for anybody. So the colonizer, the colonizer, everyone has to find a way to self-reflect in a way that it unravels the self. So, having dealt with all of this for the past, like how many months?
Speaker 2:Well, since February last year, so more like one and a half years.
Speaker 1:What has it done to you as a person?
Speaker 2:That's a hard question. I'm still reflecting on that as well. I'm still because I'm still in the middle of it. It's not like, oh, this is done and now I'm sitting at home and not thinking about it. So I think it's probably I might have a different answer for you in maybe a year's time.
Speaker 2:But it wasn't without wanting to sort of complain. It was not an easy process, but it was a process where I always had to reflect that this is a process where I have a choice and I make this choice consciously, that I want to go into the subject, knowing also that I am privileged in that, and also that I don't have the experience that other people have had who I'm in conversation with. So that was sort of something that I always tried to critically go into and that does something with or did something with me. Definitely where for me, going into conversation where I expect from the very beginning that I don't know everything, it also makes things much more open and it's so rewarding when you're actually going through that process. So the workshops were a very, very rewarding subject and I'm so grateful for that process and that experience that we had in those workshops.
Speaker 2:And that means that the difficult parts in. That is, I think, part of a process that, at the end of the day, can be very rewarding, but you need to make the choice that you want to go there. The first home that I knew was Tanga, at the Indian Ocean in Tanzania, and for me it was awful coming back to Germany. So for me, this entire process of identifying myself as a German is a process that I've been doing my whole life, and now it was an interesting addition to that in a different way, because I could then critically look back at that history and ask even more questions and be even more aware that the real question that I've been asking myself all this time is also the privilege that I've had and coming to terms with that privilege and thinking of how can I use this in a way that can bring me forward. I don't think I'm helping anybody else, but it's been a very rewarding but also difficult process for myself.
Speaker 1:And I want to ask that question in another way as well, to ask how has it affected your outlook of the world entirely?
Speaker 2:It's made even more clear how everything is interconnected and how certain choices that we make may have effects that we don't even know about in the moment that we make it.
Speaker 2:So for me, this experience has shown much more how we're really in this giant network and we're all connected together, and our experiences and our decisions that we make have effect on people not living here, for example, living somewhere else and that's also a subject that we try to bring in right at the beginning of the exhibition is that, even though we're looking at colonial histories of objects that are here, they are connected to colonial histories that are in other places, for example, the west coast of Africa today, ghana, where the Brandenburg African Company was first built for, and a point where they traded from, and to see how all that is connected through monetary networks but also through people.
Speaker 2:Even though you don't think when you're looking at, for example, the sculptures we were talking about, that they may be connected to other people in a history. Later on it always turns out suddenly. There are connections like, for example, here these sculptures were commissioned by Karl Albrecht von Brandenburg-Schwed, who we show in a portrait that we just discussed, where the light changes, but then as well the connections between the people that are represented in this portrait and whose biographies we're now talking about. They are also connected in networks, in communities at that time. So this, really this idea of that everything is connected, is something that I sort of felt before already, but that I come back with much more poignantly than before.
Speaker 1:That was the last question. Thank you so much. It's been wonderful having this conversation with you. Thank you, and yeah, the exhibition is here until the 31st of October. So if you are in Berlin, try to come and see it for yourself. So once again, thank you, karina Af.
Speaker 2:Thank you, emile. Yes, ok, very good, all right, thank you.