Final(?) DISPOSITION (Restless Objects ) A Ride from the Storage to the Palace

Abstract

Imagine a group of people joining the art delivery transportation services responsible for moving objects from the old Ethnographic collection house in Dahlem (Berlin) to the new building of the Humboldt Forum. The transportation vehicle suddenly stops and the two drivers ask the people who joined them to step out along with the artefacts in their crates. Imagine those people standing in the middle of the city with the crates in their hands – what would they do now? Where should they take these objects? What are the tools they have to make decisions? In October 2021, I performed one such ritualistic rehearsal towards a possible act of emptying the museum of heritage. My performance, part of the Moving the Forum project – a participatory dance residency programme at the Humboldt Forum Berlin – unfolded in parallel with the long-running and complex operation of transferring thousands of artefacts from the Ethnological Museum of Berlin to their new ‘permanent home’ inside the reconstructed imperialistic Berlin Palace. During my performative ritual, which consisted of a series of imaginings towards a counter course of action, the public was invited to witness members of the restoration team and art handlers emptying the display cases in the new exhibition spaces. I conceived this performative act as a pre-enactment, a proposal for physical and mental training in reassessing and unlearning the relationships between caretakers of objects in imperial museums and the future and possible fate of plundered objects.
In this article, I discuss notions of training, imagining, and repetition as ways of reassessing and transforming the relationships between imperial institutions acting as caretakers and violently plundered objects. The article offers a fictional script of this ride from the Ethnological museum in Dahlem to the Humboldt forum, drawing on months of field research conducted in preparation for this ritualistic ceremony, Restless Objects of emptying the Forum, during which I closely observed the operational and political aspects of the relocation procedures and examined the structural powers at the basis of imperial collections.