The traces of colonialism still shape our everyday lives and continue to structure how we think, work, live, and love, as well as which privileges we draw on – or are excluded from. Examining how these traces manifest in museum collections and more broadly, in colonial heritage, has been at the heart of the Académie des Traces.

In 2024, the members of the Académie des Traces developed a series of online seminars and a spring school based on the book “Traces du dé/colonial au musée” (“Traces of the De/Colonial in the Museum”, Éditions Horizons d’Attente, Paris, 2024). The use of a slash to relate the colonial with the de/colonial signifies a recurring paradox that lies at the heart of the discussion and practices related to engaging with collections formed during colonialism. The paradox is in the fact that research on colonial-era collections, even when aimed at decolonial engagement, risks unintentionally reproducing the very colonial structures and biases it seeks to dismantle.

This tension is what the different contributions in this collaboration between C& and the Académie des Traces explore. The dossier is composed of seven texts written by the members of the Académie – emerging researchers, curators, and museum professionals – who took part in the spring school in Berlin in 2024.

Throughout the next weeks, we will publish these contributions here:

Invisible Traces of the Repatriated Objects
Adéwolé Faladé highlights and analyzes the traces left by the 26 repatriated artefacts by France to the Republic of Benin in 2021.

Anguezomo Nzé Mboulou Mba Bikoro: Activating Our Emotional Archives
A conversation between Injonge Karangwa et Anguezomo Nzé Mboulou Mba Bikoro on the possibilities of reconnection to our heritage.

‘Open Storage’: An Idealised Image of Museums?
Ariane Théveniaud examines how the museography of ‘open storage’ actively constructs and disseminates an idealised perception of museums.

More to come soon:

Jurist Aliénor Brittmann recounts the construction and instrumentalization of history for contemporary relation-making as part of the restitution process of a sabre between Senegal and France.

Art historian Jan König and cultural-social anthropologist Elias Aguiah take the much-mediatised restitution of the infamous Benin bronzes from various German museums to the Republic of Nigeria as a point of departure to discuss the entanglement of economic and cultural politics in German foreign policy. 

Art historian Salomé Soloum shows how the Beninese Republic embedded the restitution of 26 Dahomean artefacts from the musée du quai Branly – Jacques Chirac to Benin in October 2021 into a larger development plan with tourism and economic goals.

And catholic clergyman and museologist Carly Degbelo engages with the return of archival photographs to Benin from a photographic and cinematographic mission led in 1930 by Father Aupiais, made possible by the philanthropist Albert Kahn and accompanied by the photographer and filmmaker Frédéric Gadmer. He employs exploratory research methods to deepen the understanding of the photographic material by identifying living relatives or acquaintances of those depicted in the images.