“Ce qui ne sert pas s’oublie”

The exhibition’s curator, Catalina Lozano, addresses the changing status of objects from a social perspective, considering how items encapsulate subaltern narratives, particularly from colonialism. Take, for instance, Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc’s contribution: five rods made from ten melted copper Katanga crosses. In the past, populations of central Africa utilized these articles as currency, and the metal’s abundance in the Katanga region attracted Belgian colonizers. Today, the pieces resemble Minimalist sculpture. In both cases, value is of significance.

Elsewhere, Jorge Satorre’s Matar vasijas (Killing Pots), 2014, consists of replicas of pre-Columbian pieces from the Community Museum of the Xico Valley placed on a platform, evoking a Mexican folkloric motif, as well as of two reproductions of contradictory registry forms, one issued locally, the other by a state agency. The Community Museum preserves local artifacts and classifies them using empirical methods, rather than official systems. These relics, once employed in rituals, are now often used in quotidian contexts, and the installation highlights how their function and symbolic quality have altered across time.

Other featured works mine the connection between Eurocentrism, the gaze, and the politics of display. Wendelien van Oldenborgh’s resonant video La Javanaise, 2012, for instance, records a conversation between a top model, an artist, and an academic that occurred in Amsterdam’s former Colonial Institute, currently an ethnographic museum. Their discussion touches on the topic of a Dutch company that takes advantage of traditional Southeastern technique to produce textiles for a contemporary African clientele. Here, themes of fashion and identity articulate the tension between museology and power that transverses the exhibition.