What the Archive Things

Wednesday 18 April 2018, 19:00-22:00 hrs
Location: Stroom Den Haag, Hogewal 1-9, The Hague
RSVP: reserveren@stroom.nl
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Language spoken: English
Seminar: with the participation of Erik A. de Jong, Stine Alling Jacobsen and Imara Limon

Part of De Dingen (16 - 26 April 2018 at Stroom Den Haag).
>> Download exhibition guide (English only)

Program
19:15: Welcome and introduction of the speakers by curator Lua Vollaard
19:30 - 20:00: Dr Erik A. de Jong
20:00 - 20:30: Stine Alling Jacobsen
- Short break
20:45 - 21:15: Imara Limon
21:15 - 22:00: Round of questions
There will be refreshing drinks and bites and the exhibition will stay open until the end of the program.

As the categories of things are changing, so are the structures by which we record and display our culture - the archive humanity keeps as a record of its existence. Archives classify, govern, structure and order knowledge, and the practice of archiving makes claims to a certain past to predict a certain future. In this seminar, the archive will be rethought from three perspectives which all deal with the shifting status of things - be it with the zoo as a living archive, geological archives of rocks as records of a disappeared landscape, or the change that museums are starting to implement in the practice of collecting and displaying objects.

Erik A. de Jong
Archive, Museum, Microcosm, Ark, Studio or Theatre: In what Environment Do Things Come to Life?

Long before the legal separation of things in archival and museum collections, living and non-living collections were described in different ways. If we are to suspend existing definitions, how can these older terms help us understand ‘things' and ‘being human' in an endeavour to understand a posthumanist and postcolonial world? Based upon the living and non-living collections of Artis Royal Zoo in Amsterdam, we will elucidate how the thinking about the meaning of things can open new roads to another relation with ‘things'.

Stine Alling Jacobsen
Cryolite Ghosts

Geological science about Greenland was, and still is, shaped by the colonial and industrial initiatives of the Danish state. In the Ivittuut area of South West Greenland, natural deposits of cryolite have been entirely depleted, but its archives of geological and industrial maps reflect the power structures that benefit from a rigorous maintenance of object-categories. Can we create space to decolonise the future?

Imara Limon
The Museum as Archive and the Limits of ‘Decolonising'

The Amsterdam Museum is a city museum with over 100.000 objects. In a Dutch context, with an increasingly multicultural population, museums are only beginning to self-identify as white institutions rather than universal places of knowledge. Priorities are shifting, and the emphasis shifts to drawing in new audiences. The presence of non-white bodies becomes a marker of cultural diversity and decolonisation. But can the underlying mechanisms that frame our shared cultural heritage be fundamentally de-colonised? By whom? And what would that fundamental shift entail for the cultural practice of collecting objects?

MORE ABOUT THE PARTICIPANTS

Erik A. de Jong
Erik A. de Jong holds the Artis-chair for Culture, Landscape and Nature at the University of Amsterdam since 2009. He is also main advisor to the master plan of the Royal Zoological Society Natura Artis Magistra [Artis]. From 2002 to 2006 he was professor of Landscape Studies at the Bard Graduate Center in New York, and from 2002 to 2007 Senior Harvard Fellow Landscape Studies Dumbarton Oaks, Trustees for Harvard University. He has widely published on the relationship between man and nature, issues in natural history,  the history and meaning of garden- and landscape (architecture), and heritage issues in the field of natural history and landscape.

Stine Alling Jacobsen
Stine Alling Jacobsen is a scholar and researcher focussed on maps and archives of the colonial rule over Greenland. She is a PhD Fellow at the Department of Cultural Studies and Oriental Languages at the University of Oslo, as a part of the project Geological Times: Geology and New Regimes of Historicity. Stine is involved in a number of research initiatives including projects focusing on geopolitics in the Arctic, embodied histories and the artistic potentials of eye tracking technology as a critical tool in examining the power of scientific imagery of Greenland.

Imara Limon
Imara Limon is a curator at the Amsterdam Museum, where she curated the exhibition Zwart Amsterdam (Black Amsterdam) in 2016. With a background in Contemporary Art, Museology and Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam, her focus is on legacies of the Dutch colonial past in the Netherlands. She is curating an exhibition programme with The Black Archives (November 2017), as well as setting up New Narratives; interactive museum tours from diverse perspectives that reconsider the narratives told by the institution. She is an advisor at the Mondriaan Fund and the Amsterdam Fund for the Arts (AFK).

What the Archive Things (introduction Lua Vollaard)
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
What the Archive Things (Erik A. de Jong)
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
What the Archive Things (Stine Alling Jacobsen)
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
What the Archive Things (Stine Alling Jacobsen)
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
What the Archive Things (Imara Limon)
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag
What the Archive Things (Q&A)
photo: © Tarona Leonora, courtesy Stroom Den Haag

photo: design: The Rodina
De Dingen
photo: design: The Rodina