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In the period leading to my move to Frankfurt, I walked through as many ethnographic museums in Europe as I could. I wanted to witness their status in contemporary civil society, understand the contradictions evoked by their outdated modes of display, and learn more about the power structures behind the inordinate mass of artifacts held under lock and key. I began by focusing on the immediate constituents of the museum experience. I sought to match the body of the visitor with the corpus of the collection and the broader metabolism of the museum. I wondered in what manner members of the public move through an exhibition. How long do they engage with the displayed artifacts? What is the relationship between seeing, feeling, and thinking? Are they provided with a chair purposefully placed in front of a vitrine for lengthier contemplation? Or do they stand upright as if facing a screen, ready to swipe on, and rarely moving closer or bending down to peer at the underside of an exhibit? At the British Museum, a guard told me of the fainting fits and panic attacks he witnessed, regularly forcing him to give up his chair. This was the public’s biggest complaint: that only one small bench was available to sit on in a room with an expansive exhibition.

The museum as a spatial configuration of inhabited meanings adapts only very gradually to change. Timing is a curatorial unit, place is clearly demarcated, artworks are hung according to norms, lighting and air humidity are coordinated with conservation requirements. Visitors readily accept this monitoring environment, which anchors and regulates their perception. If a video is projected, there may be the opportunity to lie on a carpeted floor, slump on a mattress, or find a stool to sit on. Hours can be spent in this way because new media are recognized as requiring a longer period of intake than a painting, photograph, sculpture, or set of artifacts. Robert Harbison noted in 1977, at a time when video works began entering the museum, that the “immersion in the object that stops time is achieved by treating it as an existence to be lived in rather than something to be stopped in front of or looked at, and one can almost tell from people’s movements whether they have entered a painting or are only staring at it.”²

The bias against the body of the spectator dates back to the European Renaissance, when architects and designers saw the gallery as a “fixed theater of spectatorship” intended “to regulate strictly the viewer’s range of motion and object of focus.”³ As museum spaces gradually evolved over the course of the eighteenth century from private house museums into public institutions, those “unruly social bodies” who once engaged in “flirting, playing, eating, drinking, talking, laughing, and napping” on ottomans, benches, or at tables, were gradually evicted.⁴ By the early twentieth century, the curatorial trope became one of “disembodied opticality,” whereby seating no longer featured beyond a short stop-off point along the scenographic route through the museum. Indeed, with the advent of the white cube environment, the fear of a “reembodiment of the spectator” works to rid rooms entirely of any means of repose or study, leaving only banal exit signs to indicate the “intrusive” presence of human biology.⁵ As Diana Fuss and Joel Sanders explain, “art’s visual consumption owes much to the flow-management philosophy of department stores, which rarely provides seating in the main shopping areas. A seated patron, after all, is not likely to be a consuming patron; consumer culture requires bodies on the move, not bodies in repose. Simply put, the bench is anathema to the capitalist space of the modern museum.”⁶

Today, the museum—now hygienist—is obsessed with its own dirty data, cleansing and disinfecting its contaminated past, particularly the bloody residue attached to the traumatic memories of slavery, colonialism, and the Holocaust embodied in its collections with their absent proof of legitimate provenance. Collections have become the toxic witnesses to genocidal practices.⁷ Forms of human engineering in museums accelerate and support the necropolitical constitution evoked by Paul B. Preciado when he speaks of the museum becoming “a semiotic-social corporation where immaterial goods are produced and commercialized.”⁸ “What bodies can the museum institution legitimate?” he asks. Whatever they are—national histories or artworks—they become pawns or foot soldiers in the battle for sovereignty. The museum, writes Preciado, “is a factory of representation” that supports the “social prostheses of the royal body on which its sovereignty is built and negotiated.”⁹ Identifying Preciado‘s “somato- political” dimensions of the museum leads back to the corpus of the museum and its sequestered collections. Here organs generate meanings under excessive structures of containment, built from that which Ann L. Stoler so succinctly defines as “imperial duress” that is, the effects of “pressure exerted, a troubled condition borne in the body, a force exercised on muscles and mind.”¹⁰ For Felwine Sarr and Bénédicte Savoy, ethnographic objects are the “bearers of a reserve of the imagination as well as the material manifestation of forms of knowledge (savoirs). Fishing nets that encode algorithms from fractals to anthropomorphic statues in passing by amulet-filled vests: the work of decoding the various forms of knowledge they conceal as well as the comprehension of the epistemes that have produced them still remains largely a work to be done.… It is indeed a question of re-activating a concealed memory.…”¹¹

Yet is this dialogue possible when the magnitude of artifacts, including their referentiality to colonial collecting practices, is quite literally impounded underground? Held in inaccessible storage units, belongings acquired, looted, or wrenched away in the name of science, trade, or diplomatic exchange are sedated and safeguarded through their juridical, carceral inscription within the annals of an other’s institution. In the never-ending ethnographic present, anthropologists, both then and now, continue to reflect the image of the slave onto their interlocutors from other cultures, erasing the individual identities and intellectual property rights of the artists, designers, and engineers whose works they acquired or looted.

Today we are faced with the “incalculability” of the act of restitution.¹² As a result, the public exhibition with its tightly coordinated displays actually works to tame the tension inherent in these sealed-off storage spaces, as if the custodians were dealing with a feral, uncontrollable energy yet to be exploited. How else can one explain the elaborate retention strategies that work to prevent access to the contents of these depots? Such vast inaccessible holdings of ethnographica can be read as multiplex organizations of material ingenuity waiting to be re-encoded within today’s contexts, needs, and realities. The constellation of artifacts in a collection, each with its inevitably creolized imprimatur, rejoins the condition of today’s visitor who searches among numerous iterations of difference for that singular sensation of conceptual intimacy. As such, the public needs to experience exhibitions as multiperspectival reflections on the museum itself, its disputed collection, and its position within European history. On June 2, 2010, I wrote, “How can we know the intentionality behind an object without named and documented authorship? Can we empower the new observer to create an additional and nonexclusive interpretation? We don’t want a cathedral. We aren’t representing foreign policy. We can dare to articulate the possibility for confusion.”

At the interview for the job, I laid down my concept. It was still in development, but the key issues were clear to me. The new model for the museum would be the house itself, a renewal of a domestic environment of repose and reflection, of living, dialoguing, researching, and production in contrast to a corporate site of consumerist culture. I would introduce a laboratory into the museum, and initiate new inquiry along with international artists, writers, photographers, filmmakers, and lawyers, who would live and work quite literally in the museum. The door would be open to anthropologists, too, but the invitation was directed mainly toward outside disciplines and practices. Every selected object would generate printed matter referencing both historical records and new interpretations. By then I knew that I wanted students to work in the museum, we would set up an evening school, and there would be fellows with long-term affiliations.

Over the course of the interview, I was asked a rota of questions. Could I develop a concept for a new building and permanent display; what did I think of the current exhibition on the Sepik; how could I manage crises among personnel; and what would I do to make the museum more attractive? That day, I visited the museum in preparation for the interview and jotted the following notes:

Too much information on the walls and all in German; clutter hidden behind cardboard structures that act as decoration; blue linoleum laid onto the original wooden parquet flooring; no authentic photographs, only reproductions; stuffed animals presented alongside ethnographic artifacts; simulated installations that pretend to represent anthropologists at work; rubber plants dotted in different parts of the exhibition presumably to evoke a tropical atmosphere. The museum has gone to seed.

I began to recognize the museum as a complex body with a severely ailing metabolism, afflicted organs, and blocked channels of circulation. To transform this condition would require careful nurturing, but also radical operations. It was Issa Samb, the late Senegalese philosopher and founding member of the Laboratoire Agit-Art who provided me with essential guidelines for the task:

To work in the ethnographic museum, you have to begin with an inversion. You need to exhume the objects and place them at the forefront again. This will constitute the first level of analysis, the first reading. Then walk through the interior of the museum. Don’t start to classify anything yet. Just walk, look, and name the directors who preceded you and recognise their bias. By criticising their bias, you will begin your work. Today, every person who directs an ethnographic museum will need to proceed in this manner in order to help ethnography advance quietly towards its status as a science. In the world today, meanings for such sciences need to be redrawn, or it will always be the same. So, leave traces, mark your presence. It’s only in this way that all these objects will supersede their aesthetic status and finally retrieve their human dimension. You will be able to socialize each object that you find and, in doing so, you’ll restore life to them. No object in a museum is a useless object. Each one can elucidate proto-history and sociology. In reading them, one acquires a facility to understand the present. If you come across a prototype, isolate it straight away and give it a new number below the initial one. Prototypes change. Ethnographic museums confused culture with civilisation, human beings with their objects. Every person has a culture. Civilisation is a fabrication. You will need to make corrections here, corrections to notions of modernity and classification. We need a critique of classification because classification contains the germ of racism.¹³