The recursivity of the curatorial

Doing Diversity in Museums and Heritage

“…Sometimes it signals interesting possibilities beyond those contemplated at the outset. And sometimes-in processes of recursivity (Tinius and Macdonald 2020)-it can be refracted back into both practice and academic theorising, to show alternatives to the terminologies currently in use.…”

“…Many of our other researchers have also taken active roles that had the potential to change what they were investigating. Duane Jethro has spoken in public in favour of changing colonial street names in Berlin and describes his position as one of 'occupying a space of solidarity' with activists; Jonas Tinius organised activities for some of the galleries that he worked with and acted as a 'sparring partner' Tinius and Macdonald 2020); I was a member of Berlin Global's advisory board and made input in other capacities too; Chiara Garbellotto's innovative approach collaborates with participants, and sometimes also with the visual anthropologist in our team, Nnenna Onuoha, to devise workshops (Garbellotto and Onuoha 2019). In addition, beyond the scope of this volume, the project has entailed further engagements, including, as mentioned above, artist-researcher Tal Adler's exhibit Who is ID8470?…”

Across Anthropology

“…Thinking against, with, and across anthropology, our conversations during fieldwork and otherwise inspired the argument to think trans-anthropologically. Hence, we accorded them positions across, in-between, around, and 'nearby' the other contributions by university-based scholars, many of whom are working themselves as curators, thus complicating these distinctions and recursive moves of the expanded curatorial field even further (see Sansi 2020;Tinius and Macdonald 2020).…”

“…In addition, Larissa Förster's Transforming the Ethnographic research tackles questions of provenance and restitution, for which the Humboldt Forum has been such a focus in German debate (Förster 2018;Förster and von Bose 2018;Förster, Edenheiser, Frundt, and Hartmann 2018;and see also, Jethro 2019). As Jonas Tinius explains of his own research in this volume, the Humboldt Forum development was something about which not only he, as part of the wider research team, was thinking and experiencing but was one that his museum and gallery interlocutors, including Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, who is interviewed in this volume, were at least partly responding to in their curatorial work (see also Tinius and Macdonald 2020).…”

“…The curators' invitation of my presence, perspectives, and contributions as co-author, moderator, and colleague, opened the conversations in the gallery to becoming a kind of 'para-site' and field of trans-anthropological practice. This situation arose because we understood our conversation as a form of recursive collaboration, in which curatorial and anthropological positions were not subjecting one another to an overarching position, but rather overlapped and corresponded; these aimed instead at understanding, transforming, and generating the contexts within which they operate (see Macdonald and Tinius 2020).…”