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During the first month, I organized a series of internal roundtables with the curators of the regional collections. I was curious to understand their involvement with the university. Were they invited to teach seminars or lecture? Did they have students, or give classes on museum ethnology? I discovered that in Frankfurt the rift between anthropologists at the university and those who worked at the museum was historically and emotionally charged.

From 1925 until the late sixties, every director of this city’s ethnographic museum was automatically the head of the well- endowed Frobenius Institute, which sat within the campus of the prestigious Goethe University in Frankfurt. However, something had gone afoul between the two institutions and, after much acrimony, they were divided. The museum was sidelined to the municipality, like a public knowledge bank and object crypt, whereas the university institute could afford to do pure research, garnering academic accolades and funding with a minimum of teaching or public mediation. Both venues held collections, which had been severed during the divorce. Photographs taken during fieldwork expeditions to Africa, for example, were kept at the university, while the items they related to were stored in the museum’s depot. This separation was unwieldy and only served to stymie any new research into the archives of both institutions.

For Object Atlas. Fieldwork in the Museum, the first exhibition I curated, artist Thomas Bayrle succeeded in extricating works on paper by his father, Alf Bayrle, painted during a collecting expedition to Ethiopia in the nineteen-thirties led by Leo Frobenius and held in his homonymic institute. We exhibited the elder Bayrle’s gouaches and drawings with the original stone steles that had been in the possession of the museum for nearly a century. To move and install these megaliths in the museum gallery involved renting a crane. One can only try to imagine the outlandish schlep incurred to bring these carved effigies to Germany from Ethiopia. These stones, weighing hundreds of kilos each and incised with the traits of different phallic heads, had been uprooted from their respective sites in former Abyssinia and brought to Frankfurt, an extreme act of dislocation comparable to mass identity theft committed by a German provincial city. The memorial presence of ancestors for an entire community had been obliterated and their gravestones uplifted, regardless of what the reverse act might have implied within a Euro- pean context.

From what I could make out, the division between museum and university centered around two main issues. Firstly, the decolonial developments of numerous countries in the early sixties that brought with them a necessary critical shift in social anthropology from its earlier twentieth-century focus on ethnographic artifacts to more immaterial subject matters. Research collections, once avidly gathered to elucidate non-European cultures, became less central as heuristic tools of scientific speculation. Anthropologist Paul Rabinow describes the situation in the nineteen-twenties as follows: “the museum’s scientific role consisted of promoting technical and sociological studies of objects and peoples cast broadly within a Maussian fait total (total fact) perspective in which each object was illuminated by—and metonymic of—a whole society.”³⁰ For Marcel Griaule, the leader of the French Mission Dakar–Djibouti (1931–33), to understand the background to the 3,500 material artifacts forcefully removed from the African continent was to come one step closer to mapping the indigenous mind.³¹

It was not until the advent of Structuralism that Claude Lévi-Strauss could shift the debate onto immaterial fields of knowledge. As he stated in a lecture presented to unesco in 1954, it was now more relevant and far easier to study the languages, belief systems, attitudes, and personalities of other cultures than to acquire their bows and arrows, drums, necklaces, or figurines. A second reason for the division between the museum and the university was more mundane—the occupational status of anthropologists in ethnographic museums in Germany was traditionally that of a functionary or civil servant and not a university professor. Even if the museum staff harbored ambitions in the arts and humanities, this situated condition of employment promoted an uncomfortable hierarchical and disciplinary division that I wished to address. Like a muscle that had lost its traction, I hoped to revitalize the research arm of the museum, adding value to the museum’s output beyond the required quota of public footfall.

To an outside observer, the Weltkulturen Museum was dormant. Most citizens had visited it only once, as children. This stagnant condition was not a special case, but the reflection of a systemic institutional and political condition that I found in equal measure in the twenty or more Völkerkunde (ethnological) museums in Germany’s provincial cities. Their respective holdings referenced families of artifacts sourced in inordinate quantity on expeditions and then swapped between museums to fill any gaps in their encyclopedic collections. Together with the restorers and conservators, the custodians demonstrated an affective connection to artifacts that lay within their area of cultivation. They had favorite objects, beloved villages or regions, and preferred certain cultures and practices to others. They chose to speak on behalf of these, using a language derived from their studies at one of the many institutes of ethnology in Marburg, Mainz, Göttingen, Cologne, Frankfurt, or elsewhere in Germany. Evidenced by a feeble level of postcolonial reflexivity or readiness to engage in transdisciplinary inquiry, the monoculture of ethnological museums began to resemble intellectual plantations.

Coming from the outside as I did, these schools of museum ethnology constituted a tight network of colleagues and peer groups that was remarkably resistant to external communities of researchers, and particularly to artists. As the first weeks passed, I began to sense the complexity of my position within the museum. If I felt legitimate as the elected director, I could tell that my intellectual and academic identity was foreign matter. Within a short space of time, the partition of competence became clear. I pointed out that I would not compete with the curators’ regional and contextual knowledge of the objects in the museum’s stores, but like all previous directors, I staked a claim to another know-how, in this case curatorial practice and contemporary art. Every time I took an artist through the depots, I could be sure that they would identify something unresolved. Out of the corner of their eye they would spy an object lying on the top of a shelf, locked away and ignored. The presupposition of exoticism was actually alive in the stores of the ethnographic museum. You only needed someone from the outside to activate a search. Later, when we undertook fieldwork in the museum with guest artists and writers, artifacts that had been neglected by custodians for years were seen, touched, and gradually inserted into a critical and experimental process of remediation.

At times, I thought about the death of the ethnographer, as if the departure of this expert on other cultures might constitute the breakdown of this institution. If one museum ethnographer passed on, then so too would their simulacra of voices, ventriloquating on behalf of others. I wondered whether it was just I, as a professional, who was so resistant to the authoritarian discourse of the ethnological museum? What emotions did lay visitors encounter when they entered a museum of mankind? How did they come to terms with the affects generated by this artificial procedure of squeezing every dimension of another life into units and comparatives? Displays were intended to make the public feel transported to an originatory space and time, and the visitors’ book was full of comments along the lines of “Where are the Red Indians?” or “My daughter misses the exhibit on the Pygmies.” Grotesque as these inscriptions appear today, such preconceptions are harbored by the genre of the ethnographic museum, whose role has been to enlighten, enchant, and mystify at the same time.

In 1992, while he was president of the International Council of Museums, the former president of Mali, Alpha Oumar Konaré, valiantly suggested that all museums in Africa be “killed” in order for a new approach to culture and heritage to flourish.³² Can one ever succeed in revalidating an institution that has colluded with the violence of colonialism? Might this be achieved by reevaluating research collections, and insisting on their access and visibility? To this purpose, I changed the designation of the museum’s staff from that of curator to research curator in the hope of motivating a new era of conceptual inquiry and collection-centric prototyping. I would apply the concept of remediation, developed by Paul Rabinow, in a humble, reflexive attempt to heal the injuries and occlusions of the past.³³ This methodology, recognized within advanced anthropological circles, would require the introduction of alternative media and modes of representation in order to activate a process of regeneration and redesign. “The core idea,” writes Rabinow, “is that concepts arose from and were designed to address specific problems in distinctive historical, cultural, and political settings. When the settings change, and as the problems differ, one cannot take these things up once again or simply reuse them without changing their meaning and efficacy.” This procedure, which necessitates teamwork, is a dialogic and recursive condition through which certain practices are “reconfigured, modified, rectified, and adjusted.” However, such remediation is necessarily hostile to the “nostalgia (or worse) of an unconditional allegiance to tradition.” It focuses instead on the reformulation of the contemporary, “an orientation that seeks out and takes up practices, terms, concepts, forms and the like from traditional sources but seeks to do different things with them from the things they were forged to do originally or how they have been understood more recently.”³⁴

By gathering artifacts into new assemblages, one would activate taxonomic transgressions, clashing entrenched identifications and highlighting the underlying structures of power generated by listings, narratives, visualizations, and omissions, dating from different periods and authors. Earlier monographs drafted by anthropologists and experts from area studies would still be central to contextualization. Testimonials from the original producers and users of these artifacts so rarely recorded or documented, would remain paramount. However, all these interpretations would need to be expanded with contemporary readings that crossed disciplines and instituted a new constellatory mapping, or object atlas. Extending Aby Warburg’s system of the Mnemosyne Atlas onto three-dimensional phenomena was a way to disconnect existing denominational and classificatory systems, or at least to place them into jeopardy. To articulate the complexity of the museum through its collections would necessitate a curatorial methodology that explored different propositions, be they aesthetic, art critical, cultural, historical, scientific or personalized. One approach to this decolonial dialogue would be through experimental exercises between artworks with recognized makers and artifacts with undocumented authors, both being subject to discursive procedures of allocation, evaluation, and marketability.

In 1990, I had curated an exhibition for the Steirischer Herbst in Graz, which included selected works by neoconceptual artists alongside various items purchased in markets in West Africa.³⁵ Lotte or the transformation of the object was a response to the formalist anachronism of the New York Museum of Modern Art’s 1984 exhibition Primitivism in 20th Century Art, and a critique of the naïveté of Magiciens de la Terre held in Paris at the Centre Pompidou and at La Villette in 1989 and which opened the floodgates of the Eurocentric art world to the numerous axes of global art production. At the time, I was interested in the crisis affecting ethnographic museums in Europe. In parallel was another debate: the suppression of art-critical interpretations that engineered a discursive closure around the reception of contemporary art from the African continent. Catalogues produced in the nineties more often omitted the art criticism written by Africa-based intellectuals and writers.³⁶

To articulate this lacunae through an exhibition, I drew in different commodities made from mass-manufactured objects, which I garnered from markets in Kumasi, Freetown, Abidjan, and Ouagadougou, but equally from other commercial spaces such as galleries including Jay Gorney Modern Art in New York, and Max Hetzler and Gisela Capitain in Germany. This juxtaposition was a ruse based on formalist friction aimed at drawing attention to the failure of Western museums and curators in the late eighties to recognize and respect art-critical and academic positions from the African continent. I sought to align the undocumented ethnographic artifact with the Readymade, and recast this modernist tension in the context of early Institutional Critique. The exhibition indirectly referenced the nonexistence of the named artist in European ethnographic collections. As a result, all the exhibits in the Lotte exhibition, including works by Haim Steinbach, Jeff Koons, Mike Kelley, Rosemarie Trockel, and Lubaina Himid were presented in the exhibition without wall labels. Today, it would be practically impossible to omit references including not only the name of the artist, but also that of the gallery (or galleries), agents, and coproducers. In the early nineties, this experiment in visual thinking deployed artworks and artifacts on equal level in order to throw light onto the narrow referentiality of an art world suddenly confronted with alternative modernisms and a new geo-aesthetic cartography.

By the turn of the millennium, curating had developed into a booming academic discipline that extended earlier museum studies once taught in provincial universities to include master’s courses on exhibition histories and a burgeoning multilayered critique of ethnocentricity. But this new complexity to exhibition making had not evolved at the same pace within European ethnographic museology. Britain and France quickly airbrushed over the predicament, cutting down on custodians and research facilities by centralizing their respective collections. In London, the Museum of Mankind celebrated its upgrade to the grandeur of the British Museum and in Paris, Jacques Chirac created his own “secret garden,” a monument and memorial to the cultures of the world designed by architect Jean Nouvel. Germany lagged behind but banked on its construction of the Humboldt Forum in Berlin to enter the club of state-funded, universalizing museums. By 2010, the typically DIY style of ethnographic exhibitions had been superseded by an entire industry of interior architects and exhibition designers, who also played their hand in the mises- en-scène of department stores. The Cologne ethnographic museum, Rautenstrauch Joest, reopened following an extensive refit by a leading German firm costing several million euros that came replete with interactive tables designed in pseudo-Rococo style, silky white fringed curtains to veil ritual objects from too much inspection, and elaborate wall texts, all there to perversely compensate for the absence of contemporaneity and legitimacy surrounding this ethno-colonial institution. The gamble was that these costly makeovers would provide a smooth transition into the twenty-first century and help to address new audiences. We were back at the capitalist aesthetics of the emporium.