To inherit from toxic conservation

Lotte Arndt

After a brief presentation of the international research project Reconnecting Objects. Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums (2021-2025), my presentation will concentrate on conservation in so called ethnological and natural history museums, and its aftermath. It takes the simultaneity of the rise of conservation as a science and the peak of colonial collecting in the end of the 19-century as its point of departure, to interrogate the lasting consequences of imperial collecting and toxic conservation. As places dedicated to conservation, museums promised the minimization of decay of the objects, and obtained life span prolongation through the isolation of artifacts from living environments, both culturally and materially. Today, demands for restitution and transformative practices question museums as vectors of imperial modernity, and are confronted with the lasting alteration of artifacts by conservation policies, especially in the case of the presence of chemicals. On the basis of heterogenous materials, my presentation asks for practices beyond Eurocentric notions of collecting, conserving, and exhibiting.

Biography

Researcher and curator Lotte Arndt (Paris) accompanies the work of artists who question the postcolonial present and the antinomies of modernity in a transnational perspective. As part of the international project Reconnecting Objects. Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums, she is currently conducting a research project on biocides and the antinomies of curation in ethnographic museums. Between 2014-2021, she taught at the École supérieure d'art et design Valence Grenoble. She is co-founder of the online journal Trouble dans les collections. Among her projects: Elvia Teotski: Molusma, La Criée, Rennes, Sep 2021; Extractive Landscapes (with Sammy Baloji, Salzburg 2019); Tampered Emotions. Lust for Dust, Triangle France (2018); Candice Lin: A Hard White Body (2017, curated with L. Morin, Bétonsalon, Paris; 2018, with P. Pirotte at Portikus, Frankfurt/Main). Selected publications: Toxic afterlives of colonial collections. Trouble dans les collections, no. 2, September 2021 https://troublesdanslescollections.fr/2246-2/; Candice Lin. A Hard White Body (ed. with Yesomi Umolu), Chicago University Press, 2019; Magazines Do Culture! Postcolonial Negotiations in Parisian Africa-related Periodicals (2047-2012), Trier, WVT, 2016; Crawling Doubles. Colonial Collecting and Affect (ed. with Mathieu K. Abonnenc and Catalina Lozano), B42, 2016; Hunting & Collecting. Sammy Baloji (ed. with Asger Taiaksev), MuZEE, Galerie Imane Farès, 2016.