Alongside demands for restitution , collections in museums of the global north have become toxic witnesses to genocidal practices . Ethnology ’ s claim is that it salvages the past but what it relies on and renews is the destruction-reconstruction-reificationscarcity sequence that we are currently witnessing through historicizing provenance studies – effectively going back to what was not written down when the objects were acquired , stolen , bought , or gifted , and subsequently inserted into an ethno-logical taxonomy , including race-led arguments and the ideology of conservation . Ultimately , ethnology has produced a cult of possession , an obsessive focus on determining and unravelling life ’ s unknowns embodied in the religious objects of other people and embedded within the violent and racist dramaturgy of ethnographic museology .
Recent bio-medical analyses of collections are currently being performed in ethnographic museums using the same equipment deployed for human beings . This new “ inner voyage ” reveals initial knowledge about quasi digestive tracts carved or incised into solid wood by the artist , providing small ducts to be filled with content by a shaman or priest . I would argue that this is an infringement of ethical and intellectual rights for which the museum is to be held responsible . It cannot own the sole rights for reproduction ! For indeed , ethnographic collections can be read as a library of organs , the vital matter , so to speak , of Black lives , and are significant repositories that need to inform decolonial practices , from art to design and engineering , and their respective epistemologies . Sadly , most , if not all museums , hinder physical access to their collections , thereby denying contemporary remediation and defining the conservationist role of the custodian or curator more than ever before .
This is where a methodology of academic iconoclasm supports the debate on the decolonial . Here , I wish to distil iconoclasm from its usual art-historical references 1 , and retain the struggle it evokes for shifts in meaning and method , for new techniques that dislodge concepts of the masterpiece , the master narrative , the master institution ( university , museum , academy ) and their respective distinctions . Academic iconoclasm is the wilful suspension of normative discursive and architectonic structures that inscribe epistemic , bureaucratic , and legal rules to police others working with public collections . It is a form of counter-conduct that blankly refutes disciplinary departments inherited from 19 th -century European scholasticism . In the words of Nigerian Nobel prize-winning author Wole Soyinka , it defies “ species narcissism ” or in those of British-Nigerian artist Onyeka Igwe , it requires “ finding illegitimate ways of knowing ”. In a series
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2 . Metabolic Museum-University KW , Berlin , 2022 Photo by Eva Stenram
1
Finbar Barry Flood describes iconoclasm as follows “ Derived from the Greek eik∫noklasts ( eik∫n “ likeness ” + klan “ to break ”), first documented in eighth-century Byzantium , the term iconoclasm entered the lexicon of European languages only through the Latin iconoclasmus late in the early-modern period ( Bremmer ). In modern scholarship it has assumed a capacious character and can refer to the defacement or destruction of artefacts , buildings , images , or inscriptions . See Encyclopedia of Islam , Vol . 3 , Iconoclasm .
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Observing Memories Issue 6