Overloaded! Inter-imperial Entanglements of Material and Photographic Collections in Berlin and Vienna (Teil 2)

We live in the age of the “great imperial hangover” (Puri 2020), where overlapping colonial legacies inform our present. Our world did not merely emerge from the ruins of empires past, but it is also molded by resurgent imperialism that shapes contemporary politics, society, and visual culture. Understanding collection histories as well as the future of collecting, requires insight into the long-term patterns of coloniality and the enduring legacies of expansionism and extractivism. It necessitates understanding the ties that bind various imperial projects and the collection practices that underpin them, beyond the confines of the Kaiserreich and the boundaries of a single institution. This study project uses inter-imperiality as an organizing concept for these relations. It explores the material and visual politics of colonial empires through the collections of the Ethnologisches Museum Berlin and the Weltmuseum Wien in Vienna. It relies on a research-based perspective in order to illuminate inter-imperial networks that shaped collections, the protagonists at their center, and the institutions that housed them. This class’s departure point is that ethnological museums are products of imperial projects and hold archives of the political activities of empires, as reflected in the movement of objects from the ‘periphery’ to the center (and vice versa), as well as between several empires. Yet, the history of collections and of anthropology remains too focused on processes limited to one nation and does not account for their global dimension. For example, photographers often studied in a colonial center such as Paris, collected in a colonized 'periphery,' also ran successful studies somewhere else, practiced in the Ottoman Empire, and sold their photographs to clients from other empires. The project aims to mobilize and reactivate the collection as a vital, critical resource for the examination of the global and inter-imperial dimension of objects through a range of methods drawn from ethnology, material culture, and museum studies. The student group will develop new perspectives on the collection in collaboration with museum partners to explore the visual economies of photography and material culture across imperial divides and their reverberations for today. Through current debates on collections, imperialism, and coloniality, students will be encouraged to undertake individual object research and develop group approaches to rethinking museum material today. Students will research selected collections to explore their interconnected pasts and reimagine ethical forms of collecting, classifying, and representing this material for the future. The seminar will be taught in English, and readings will be in English and German. MAPs can be submitted in both languages. Lecture slides and notes will be available to course participants. The seminar room is located at the Institute for European Ethnology on the 4th floor with lift access. For accessibility of the IfEE building, see here: https://www.euroethno.hu-berlin.de/de/kontakt Students are encouraged to contact the lecturer regarding questions of accessibility and learning needs: Magdalena.buchczyk@hu-berlin.de