Changing Hands: Object Journeys

How do we understand objects that have been stolen or looted from their contexts?
How does their new home in the archive reshape their narrative, their form?

How are they kept hostage?

What is collected and how it is collected serves a particular purpose.

Readings
“How does material culture become data? Why does this matter, and for whom?” - Hanna Turner
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/distributed/C/bo70117236.html

“Curating Discomfort was developed by The Hunterian to address historic power imbalances within the museum and across all our activities. As a starting point to change, Curating Discomfort intervenes in current museum practice to establish new models and narratives around the collection.”

https://www.gla.ac.uk/hunterian/about/achangingmuseum/curatingdiscomfort/

“benandsebastian’s work questions how gaps in knowledge shape identity and how particular absences, for example in the form of lost objects, incomplete artefacts, or excluded narratives, act upon the imagination.”

https://www.benandsebastian.com/?page_id=1164

***************************************************************************************************************

Object #1

DL 1304 - Bogenharfe / Bow Harp

“African Harps, particularly arched or”bow" harps, are found in several Sub-Saharan African music traditions, particularly in the north-east. Used from early times in Africa, they resemble the form of harps in ancient Egypt with a vaulted body of wood, parchment faced, and a neck, perpendicular to the resonant face, on which the strings are wound." [Wikipedia]

[source: Encyclopedia Britannica, public domain]

Adungo/Adungu

“Eastern Nuer on the Ethio-South Sudanese border adopted the instrument from a similar instrument called the adungu from the Acholi and Alur in Uganda.”

https://sbmusicology.com/instruments.html

Audio - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huYdSrK4q_A&list=PL7h3CWH6hfTEinewlGmldRT7QDayNxTZN&t=37s&ab_channel=SarahBishop

Does the harp yearn to be played?

How did it come into Max Freiherr Von Oppenheim’s hands?

How are these instruments crafted?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VX7QRliFIw&ab_channel=QangiQangiMusic

How does humor feature in the archive?

Can the fortified archive be breached by the unseriousness of humor?

Precedents

Satirization of the colonial figure -

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2016/mar/27/podcast-the-mysterious-secrets-of-uncle-berties-botanarium-jemaine-clement

Living Objects / haunted pasts -

“But have you ever stopped to think how the objects found their way there and what they might say if they could tell their own stories?”

https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0ckffkw

Provenance: Cursed objects, hauntology, tropes

The Baron’s Travelogue

“1929, gift from Baron Max von Oppenheim to Faik Borkhoche; Faik Borkhoche, Beirut (until d. 1981); present, by descent to his great-grandson Rayyane Tabet, Beirut”

image (2).pngimage (3).png"One of the unquestionable highlights of the opulently produced series is Max Freiherr von Oppenheim’s account of the journey he took in the summer of 1893 from Beirut to Syria, Mesopotamia, Oman and Zanzibar.

Born in 1860 in Cologne, von Oppenheim was drawn to the Orient ever since reading stories from the Thousand and One Nights as a child."

image (14).png“This work is not a a pure travelogue of the German traveller to the Orient, but a description of the land, the Druse and the Bedouins in their historic development, as well as their ethnographic and religious peculiarities. The author set out to the Persian Gulf in 1893.”

https://foliosltd.com/product/vom-mittelmeer-zum-persischen-golf-durch-den-hauran-die-syrische-wuste-und-mesopotamien-two-volumes/

Fictional tropes in pop-culture: Adventuring Archeologist

Seemingly benign fictional trope, hero archetype is in service of colonial narratives of the “civilization mission”.

Beloved and popular fictional characters like Indiana Jones, Lara Croft, The Mummy, in film franchises, RPG video games and fictional novels.

“As historical practice, as well as epistemological model, the exploratory practices of archaeology are ambiguously embedded in both imperialist histories and their postmodern critique.”

Spatial imagination in game, film, historical dialogues follow the “colonial logic of penetration.”

excavation > extraction > displacement

Hauntology: consequences and conscience

Derrida - “there is no temporal point of pure origin but only an”always-already absent present""

“Hauntology (a portmanteau of haunting and ontology) is a range of ideas referring to the return or persistence of elements from the social or cultural past, as in the manner of a ghost.”

From 4 Haunted Objects in Museums Around the World

"The Hope Diamond

One of the most famous diamonds in the world, the Hope Diamond originated in the Kollur Mine in Andhra Pradesh, India. According to legend, the stone is cursed and brings misfortune to anyone who owns it. The curse is said to have come about when the original diamond was stolen from the eye of a statue."

sort of guilt laden popular myths of the misfortunes of theft, looting, plundering and trafficking items

These tropes of cursed artifacts that punish the thieves when removed from their cultural settings seem to carry throughout popular films and media

Objects of interest

These objects strike me as oddly personal and intimate, why were they valuable to him (the baron)? The closeness these objects once held to their owner’s body, some worn as jewelry, gifted to brides, used to store perfumes and khol that latch onto the owner’s skin, endows the artifacts with a sense of mystery, a romantic haunting. Each may have been specifically designed or acquired for an individual long forgotten. What do they mean in the hands of the colonial collector? Who would have come to possess them today through familial inheritance or other means?

image (4).pngDL_892

image (6).png

DL_899

image (7).png

DL_901

image (8).png

DL_1241

image (9).pngDL_259

image (10).pngDL_260

image (11).png

DL_219

image (12).pngDL_222

image (5).pngAlien Property - Rayyane Tabet

image.pngimage (13).png

Resources

https://www.academia.edu/38488036/Digital_Digs_or_Lara_Croft_Replaying_Indiana_Jones_Archaeological_Tropes_and_Colonial_Loops_in_New_Media_Narrative

https://www.metmuseum.org/exhibitions/listings/2019/rayyane-tabet-alien-property

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eJPLiT1kCSM&ab_channel=LastWeekTonight

Images

https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/827296

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Egon_Josef_Kossuth_-_Portrait_of_Max_von_Oppenheim,_1927.jpg

Unraveling the Hero’s Journey

The aim of my project is to retrace the lines of extraction, following objects in the collection to their point of origin. The work will not only be an object oriented geography, but rather a critical look at ownership and colonial conquest. 

The creators of the objects themselves are erased, disconnected from the artifact. What remains is the object and the story maintained by the “collector,” typically a white male colonial figure. 

What is the role of the “collector” who so generously donated all these precious objects to museums? 

Why were the material cultures of the Global South considered unreal until they pass through white hands and are rendered through the white graze? 

Beginning with the character of Max von Oppenheim Collection whose foundation has donated a vast amount of artifacts from the African continent to RJM, we begin to unwind and problematize his role in the archive through a method of “critical fabulation”. 

Critical Fabulation, a term coined by Sadiya Hartman is defined as a method f “combining of historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative to fill in the blanks left in the historical record. It is both a fleshing out and a problematizing of history and is ultimately as gratifying and frustrating as it sounds.”

Essentially a rich banker turned adventurer, Oppenheim’s legacy as a brave discoverer and worldly scholar is maintained by the foundation after death. 

4A360A8E-9F62-49B3-BADA-9C68A17F273E.jpeg

According to the Max Von Oppenheim Foundation’s website, Oppenheim is praised with “Building Bridges between Orient and Occident.” 

This framing of his character as “hero” can be deconstructed through a critical lens where Orientalism can be witnessed as a colonial worldview, that of conquest and exploitation rather than innocent discovery. 

By retracing the collection objects through a satirical version of Oppenheim’s “hero-arc” or “hero-journey” we can create fractures in the archive so it can leak out into the world in messy ways! 

Terms:

Critical Fabulation

Hero’s Journey 

Columbusing - an Internet slang term used to describe the act of white people appropriating non-white culture for themselves without recognizing its true origins. The term is named after the Italian explorer Christopher Columbus, who was credited with discovering the Americas while it was already inhabited by indigenous people.

3C9C038A-9B16-4DB3-9270-3068D7DDDB36.jpegBiography of Oppenheim from foundation’s website: 

“Max von Oppenheim was born on 15 July 1860 in Cologne. His father Albert was the head of Sal. Oppenheim jr. & Cie., a respected private banking institution founded in 1789. The family played a leading role as a generous donor and patron; its professional ethos, cosmopolitanism, and love of art and culture played a decisive role in the development of Max’s character and world view.

As a matter of course, Oppenheim’s upbringing pursued the aim of succeeding his father at the bank. But Max imagined a different future. Having read “Thousand and One Nights” as a boy and devoured the popular travel accounts of German scholars’ journeys, he, too, wanted to explore the Islamic world. What Oppenheim’s parents considered a youth’s enthusiasm matured into a serious preoccupation. A year-long tug-of-war between parents and son ended in compromise when Max consented to study law, first in Strasbourg and then Berlin. In 1883, he passed the first state examination and earned a doctorate in jurisprudence. A doggedly endured year as a judicial clerk was followed by another uneventful year in the Prussian civil service. Finally, Albert von Oppenheim came to understand his son’s predilection – not only did he abstain from imposing his will on Max, but in a generous and prescient move, he also promised his son unconditional support.”

https://max-von-oppenheim.foundation/max-von-oppenheim/biography/?lang=en