If contemporary, globalized artistic practices increasingly engage in the creation of social worlds as opposed to Western art’s traditional approach centred on representation, (how) can we mobilize the potential of these practices to deal with the pressing matter of colonial heritage in European museums? The return of colonial objects is in many ways an impossibility, as those objects cannot be restored to their worlds of origin that have been destroyed by colonialism. Can we mobilize social practice art then to turn this im/possibility into a springboard for new approaches? Can we imagine alternative forms of repair that engage with this impossibility? This talk explores these questions by reflecting on the Repair Lab (RL), a series of transnational, performative conversations and workshops around return, restitution and repair driven by the Pressing Matter artists. While open-ended, the RL was inspired by the model of Creative Co-Productions or CCPs developed by artist Tal Adler for the Horizon2020 research project TRACES (Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts, running between 2016-2019). In the RLs the application of artistic and collaborative practice-based research to the question of restitution was experimented within settings bringing together transnational, transdisciplinary groups of artists, scholars, museum practitioners, activists, curators, community organizers in different parts of the globe. RLs took place in the Netherlands, Mexico, Indonesia and South Africa to gather diverse perspectives on restitution and return by voices from outside European universities and museums. Weaving conversation with practice, the RLs were intended also as testing grounds and springboards for practical and theoretical ideas. Firmly centred on museum objects, the repair labs attempted to reimagine colonial heritage and experiment with new modes of relations based on it. In this presentation, I will examine the fruits of these experiments, their successes and failures, and what this all may say about the future of museums.
Chiara de Cesari (she/her) is Professor of Heritage, Memory and Cultural Studies, and Chair of Cultural Studies at the University of Amsterdam. Her research explores how forms of memory, heritage, art, and cultural politics are shifting under contemporary colonialisms and multiple, entangled planetary crises. She is particularly concerned with the ways in which race, racism and colonial legacies live on today, especially in museums and cultural institutions. Another strand of research examines the intersection of art, activism and socio-institutional change, especially how artists and activists are collectively experimenting with and arguably reinventing (cultural) institutions. She leads a Dutch Research Council-funded project on this theme, called ‘Imagining Institutions Otherwise: Art, Politics, and State Transformation’. Among others, she is the author of Heritage and the Cultural Struggle for Palestine (Stanford UP, 2019), and Decolonize the Museum: Art, Activism, and the Question of Race in Curation (with Wayne Modest and Marta Pagliuca Pelacani, Routledge, 2025) as well as the co-editor of two key volumes in memory studies (European Memory in Populism, Routledge, 2019; Transnational Memory, de Gruyter, 2014). Committed to transnational and transdisciplinary collaboration, she has been and is involved in several major international research projects, connecting universities across worlds with different social partners, museums and cultural institutions.
Banu Karaca works at the intersection of political anthropology and critical theory, art, aesthetics, and cultural policy, museum and feminist memory studies. She is the author of The National Frame: Art and State Violence in Turkey and Germany (Fordham University Press, 2021), and co-editor of Women Mobilizing Memory (Columbia University Press, 2019). She has published on freedom of expression in the arts, the visualization of gendered memories of war and political violence, visual literacy, and restitution. At the Forum Transregionale Studien, she directs the research group “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) supported by a Consolidator Grant of the European Research Council.
This event will be held in a hybrid format. For in-person attendance, please register in via eume(at)trafo-berlin.de. For online participation, please note the login details for Zoom:
https://zoom.us/j/98433931431?pwd=NupIlh6Ebbar0Xt8FHbJ8QGC2Gx0nf.1
Meeting ID: 984 3393 1431
Passcode: 748815
The event is part of the conversation series Restitution and its Vantage Points: Beyond the Preservation Paradigm of the BEYONDREST Research Group. “Beyond Restitution: Heritage, (Dis)Possession and the Politics of Knowledge” (BEYONDREST) is an ERC-funded, five-year research project at the Forum Transregionale Studien (Project No. 101045661). More information on the project and the conversation series can he found here.
Views and opinions expressed are however those of the speaker(s) and author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Research Council Executive Agency. Neither the European Union, nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.
Depending on approval by the speaker(s), the Berliner Seminar will be recorded. All audio recordings of the Berliner Seminar are available on SoundCloud.