On Thursday, the 4th of April the PM team organized a visit to the exhibition Colonialism and Rotterdam at the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam. Our senior provenance researcher François Janse van Rensburg contributed to the exhibition by lending some objects from his personal collections. The exhibition is scheduled until the 30th of November 2024.
On May 31, 2024, the Katholiek Documentatie Centrum (KDC) will celebrate its 55th anniversary. Traditionally, the Jan Roes lecture is given on an anniversary. This year, Prof. Dr. Susan Legêne, historian at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, has been invited to speak. She is intensively concerned with the question of how colonial objects can contribute to a responsible handling of the colonial past and its impact on current and future society.
This subject was also close to the heart of Jan Roes (1939-2003), the first KDC director. On his initiative, the archives of the Archdiocese of Jakarta (1807-1975) were made accessible to researchers at home and abroad. He is at the forefront of efforts to safeguard the shared Catholic heritage of Indonesia and the Netherlands for conservation and research.
The KDC wants to make an important contribution within the field of dealing with colonial history. The aim is to contribute to reconciliation in historically complex social relationships and thus promote equality among a multitude of population groups in society.
Different voices can be heard in and about the colonial past. Prof. Legêne will illustrate how this layering can be discovered. Representatives of communities of origin, heritage professionals, researchers and other stakeholders then respond. They supplement the argument with their experiences about the value and application of these insights in decolonizing archives.
The invitation and details of this event can be found in the attachment.
On Thursday the 23rd of February, our senior provenance researcher Karwin Cheung presented in the Acquiring Loot panel at the Boxerloot Conference that took place from the 22nd to the 23rd of February 2024 in the Museum Fünf Kontinente in Munich.
Two of the Pressing Matter team members wrote a chapter in the edited volume Ordering the Human: the Global Spread of Racial Science (Columbia University Press), which will be published in April 2024. Dr Paul Wolf Mitchell wrote the 1st chapter, entitled Origins of Races, Organs of Intellect: Polygenism, Political Order, and the Enlightenment Construction of Cranial Race Science, and our PI Professsor Amade M’Charek wrote the 4th chapter, entitled Race and Sameness: On Ordering the Human and the Specificities of Us-ness and Other-ness.(this is related to WP 3A)
The signing of the MOU with Universitas Nias Raya – Dr Martiman S. Sarumaha, on 15 December 2023 in the context of the Pressing Matter joint research on the physical anthropological research on Nias in the early 1900s and its material legacies.
One of the aims of the Pressing Matter project was to think through provenance its meanings and methods, with a special interest in the question of provenance across different institutional/academic frames, mindful of the fact that much of the provenance practices have been oriented towards art historical research. The theme of this consortium was ‘Provenance Matters’, reflecting on the question of provenance and its potential and limitations.
As a basis for the consortium, the provenance researchers in the Pressing Matter team (François Janse van Rensburg, Karwin Cheung, Laetitia Lai and Micaela Cabrita da Palma) prepared a position paper Provoking Provenance. In this volume the provenance researchers aimed to provide perspectives from the field, and informed by their experiences, to provoke discussion on both the potentialities and limitations of provenance research and its ability to contribute to the broader reckoning with the colonial past. The position paper is expected to be available and downloadable on this website by mid-2024.
The topics at the consortium:
The following video is a summary by Programme Leader Prof. Dr .Wayne Modest of the Pressing Matter Biannual Consortium on Friday 16 June 2023.
