Son[i]a #205
Clémentine Deliss
Clémentine Deliss has been Director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt since 2010. She studied contemporary art and anthropology and holds a PhD in Philosophy, and has extensive experience as an independent curator in Europe and Africa. She is now directing an institution for the first time – an ethnographic museum that opened over one hundred years ago and is trying to find its reason for being. It is what Deliss calls a sick museum, a permanent condition that needs to be healed.
SON[I]A talks to Deliss about the possibility of a post-ethnographic and post-colonial museum, and about the strategies that she has tested in recent years to counteract the ideology of conservation. These include the ‘remediation’ of objects in the collection, fieldwork in the museum, and opening up spaces for work, production and research that go beyond storage and exhibition.
Vincent Meessen
Vincent Meessen talks about journeys, uprisings, and metaphors, about work cooperatives, music groups and constructed scenarios, about the politics of making versus the politics of showing, and about how to revivify lost or dying colonial memories in the present.
Anti-racism and anti-colonial resistance from the perspective of people of African descent
We talk with Lucía Piedra Galarraga, Diego Falconí Travez and Karo Moret from the Study Group on Afro/Black Ideas, Practices, and Activisms about altars, ekekos, nefandos, Saint Barbara, and Valdivia's Siamese twins. They turn their attention to the politics of hair, talk about sugar as the star product plying the Caribbean routes, and acknowledge the usefulness of ashes in proving the extermination of the ancient Andean sodomite communities.
Fatima El-Tayeb
Fatima El-Tayeb talks about the need to reassess Europe’s internalist narrative and the discourse of integration. She evaluates the role of race in the construction of this account and argues for the creation and recovery of archives as a strategy for developing other types of narratives.
Deleted scenes
We dig up some unreleased fragments of the interview with Clémentine Deliss that we were unable to include the first time around.