inherit. heritage in transformation

Lecture and Book Discussion | China’s Heritage through History: The Orchid Pavilion Gathering and Calligraphy

5 November | 18:00 pm to 20:00 pm | Kurssaal, HZK, Campus Nord, Haus 3, Philippstr. 13, 10115 Berlin

A lecture and book discussion, followed by a reception, by Yujie Zhu (Australian National University), with responses by Sharon Macdonald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and David C Harvey (Aarhus University).

The art of collecting, reproducing, and reinterpreting the past has been an enduring force shaping cultural identity and political legitimacy in China. But who have been the key players in these ongoing processes of reconfigured pasts? What methods have they employed? And how have these practices shaped society at large? This talk, as part of Yujie Zhu’s new book China’s Heritage through History, tackles these questions through the example of the Orchid Pavilion gathering in Shaoxing and its calligraphy art as one of the most renowned works in Chinese history. From Imperial to contemporary China, the talk explores the role of cultural reproductions of material past in shaping knowledge transmission and social transformation.

Free admission - no registration required

Lecture Series | Juliana Robles de la Pava

Material Ecologies and Ethics of Entanglement through an Aesthetics of South America

What is the relationship between aesthetic practices and the materials of the biosphere, such as mineral and vegetable elements? What kind of ethics underlies the ways in which we make and think about art? How can we situate our thinking about the relationships established between artistic practices, heritage, and modes of engaging with nature? This lecture seeks to explore how certain South American aesthetic practices reveal an ethics of entanglement, in which a material ecology of art is interwoven. These practices challenge the codes of modern aesthetics that have been globally disseminated through colonial infrastructures, which shape modes of sensibility.
Through a series of case studies, this lecture will examine what it means to reflect on practices rooted in the South American territory.

Chair: Eva Ehninger
Tuesday, 29 October, 16:00-18:00 | Lecture Hall 3075, Main Building, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Unter den Linden 6, 10117 Berlin

Free admission - no registration required

artistic research workshop with Dani Gal | Dialogical Notions of History

24-25 October 2024 |

Central to current debates about Holocaust remembrance and its entanglement with Europe’s accountability to its former colonies are new critical methodologies that examine cultural and national memory. These approaches, that propose dialogical versus fixed notions of history, are the focus of this workshop.

Through questions and concepts such as empathic unsettlement, witness testimony, multidirectional memory, the possibility of forgiveness and the politics of silence, the workshop initiates discussions surrounding ethical, moral, and aesthetic dilemmas contested through critical, historical and literary texts, Gal’s own extensive research practice, and various films. Drawing from Primo Levi’s concept of Gray-Zone and Franz Fanon’s notion of Vertigo, the workshop challenges oppositional binaries between victims and perpetrators, and examines how binary notions of historical good and evil are destabilized in order to question cultural preconceptions and society’s need to judge.

The workshop, led by Dani Gal forms part of a series of artistic research workshops organized by Tal Adler. To know more, head to our website.

Image courtesy of Dani Gal.

🎊 We’re thrilled to welcome our new fellows—Saskia, Raviv, Daina, Juana, Munyaradzi, and Megha—to this year’s fellow cohort! Over the coming weeks, we’ll be introducing each of them and sharing more about their fascinating research.

We’re also excited to have Paul Starzmann joining us as our Journalist in Residence until December.

Mark your calendars! Our fellows will be presenting their research in our upcoming lecture series, kicking off on 22 October 2024. Stay tuned for more updates!

The Winter Edition of ’s Lecture Series is here! ✨

Like our summer edition, inherit fellows will continue to explore exciting trans- and multidisciplinary approaches to heritage. Each lecture will focus on at least one of the three key strands of ongoing transformation: decentering the West, decentering the human, and transformation of value.

The lecture series will address the following key questions: Which pasts are valued and why? How has this changed historically and in what ways is it changing today? What gets to count as heritage and in what broader global and local transformations is this entangled? How can heritage be proactively changed to help address pressing social, political and environmental problems, including those of decolonization, cultural conflict and climate crisis? And how do the arts, humanities and social sciences need to be done differently to comprehend and enable the potential of such transformations?

Lectures are held every Tuesday from 4 - 6 pm (CET) at Unter den Linden 6, Lecture Hall 3075, Main Building, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.
Please note that the lecture on 5th November starts at 6 pm at Philippstr. 13, Haus 3, Kurssaal, HZK, Campus Nord.

You can also join us online (no registration required) at https://nu-berlin.zoom-x.de/j/63948996575

We look forward to seeing you there! 👋

Inherit publication: “Traces du dé/colonial au musée” by inherit research coordinator Margareta von Oswald along with Felicity Bodenstein, Damiana Oţoiu, Anna Seiderer, Éditions Horizons d’Attente 

Comment aujourd’hui interpréter, travailler, déplacer les traces du passé colonial instituées en « collections ethnographiques » au sein des musées ? 
 À cette question, Traces du dé/colonial au musée apporte un éclairage multisitué et plurivoque. Restituer/rapatrier, exposer/représenter, acquérir/s’approprier, imaginer/performer ces œuvres et artefacts collectés en contexte colonial sont les problématiques qui traversent ce livre collectif. Articles inédits, traductions et entretiens visent à rendre accessibles aux personnels des musées, aux étudiants et étudiantes comme au public francophones les pensées tissées et débattues à cet égard dans d’autres contextes culturels.
 Un glossaire, édité par Marion Bertin et Martin Hullebroeck, complète l’ouvrage, dépliant les notions clefs de ce champ de recherche.
 
To get access to the book, go follow the link in our caption!

Hot off the Press!

A Chinese translation of Sharon Macdonald’s Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum has just been published – here she is in Beijing with a copy of the translated book 📔

The book was originally published in 2002 – so it has taken a while, though not all of that was for translating. Good to know that our academic work can have an unexpected new lease of life long after its first appearance. In the pic too is Xiang LI, who initiated the translation and completed the big task together with Huiping CHU. Sharon and Li are also working together on a special issue about science museums in cross-cultural perspective that will be published in the journal Cultures of Science.

Introducing the inherit team: Laëtitia Modot

Laëtitia Modot is a Back Office Assistant at with a background in foreign languages, communication, project and event management. Interested in the promotion and access to culture for diverse audiences across Europe, Laëtitia Modot has worked as an intern/volunteer alongside cultural institutions such as Institut français, Montpellier-Haus, UNi’SONS, United Societies of Balkans, and Centre Français de Berlin. In 2023, she joined the President’s Protocol & Events team as Assistant Event Manager at the Technical University of Berlin (). Inherit gives her the opportunity to broaden her knowledge in Heritage studies. When not in the office, you can find her on walks around Germany and abroad, listening to music/podcasts and taking pictures. She continues to support international youth meetings as a facilitator, such as the Pierre de Coubertin Forums with the AES.   

We are delighted to announce that fellow Christof Lammer’s book Performing State Boundaries: Food Networks, Democratic Bureaucracy and China was published last week by .
 
In this book, Lammer demonstrates how polarizing images of authoritarian, socialist or culturalist otherness compromise analyses of the Chinese state. Still, such images produce effects beyond academia when they inform performances of the boundaries between state and non-state. This book shows how performative boundary work leads to contrasting judgements that decide about support and access to resources. In an ecological village in Sichuan, citizen participation in food networks and bureaucracy signalled Western liberalism, Maoism or traditional rural culture for different audiences. Attention to the multiplicity of performed state boundaries helps China studies and political anthropology to understand such diverging classifications – and how they sometimes co-exist without causing tensions.
 
And what’s more, the book is open access! Follow the link in our bio to read the book.

Introducing our inherit team: Karla Luedtke

As a graduate student of Ethnology at the Humboldt University of Berlin, Karla focuses mainly on material and visual culture, sensory anthropology, and museum studies. Her research interests lay within fields of restitutive justice, object histories, affective and more-than-visual engagement in museum spaces. Furthermore, she is interested in forms of curating and exhibitioning, multimodal ethnographic methods, as well as the intersections between art, research, and activism. Her recent research focused on the potential of museum spaces to challenge grand narratives through artistic, participatory, and sensory approaches within the context of the exhibition “Echoes of the Brothercountries” at HKW. In addition to supporting the inherit team in matters of knowledge transfer, website maintenance, social media, workshops, and events, Karla enjoys engaging in creative activities such as upcycling bycicle tubes, sewing, and working with the medium of screenprinting. 

📸 © .mantel

Time flies! ⏳

Last Thursday, 19th September, we had our final research meeting with .zencirci and Kyrill Kunakhovich, who recently wrapped up their fellowships at . We celebrated our time together with photo souvenirs, croissants, and plenty of smiles! 🥐🥳 We also had the pleasure of having them sign inherit’s new pink guestbook 📕

A huge thank you .zencirci and Kyrill for their contributions and we wish them all the very best for their future projects.

           

Greetings from Beijing!

Sharon Macdonald meets with Board member Pan Shouyong to discuss heritage developments and ideas for inherit.

Shouyong Pan is Professor of Museology and Anthropology at Shanghai University, and an internationally acknowledged expert on museums and heritage, especially in China. If you want to know how many museums in total or of a particular kind opened in any particular year in China, just ask him - he’s a walking museum encyclopaedia! Sharon and Shouyong discussed Chinese museum developments and how the study of them is growing in China. They also talked about the idea to have all members of the advisory board speak at an event in inherit next year about what they see as the most pressing heritage issues in their part of the world. Watch this space!

Introducing the inherit team: Franziska Blume

Franziska Blume is an M.A. student of Art and Visual Culture at Humboldt University. She has studied in Amsterdam, Berlin, and New York and holds a B.A. in Cultural History and Theory. Her research interests include the visibility/invisibility of labor, affective material relations, and the circulation of transcultural goods such as costume albums and printed textiles. She is curious about artistic research practices and has curated multiple exhibitions and performances as part of a collective. Her love for objects often finds its way into the weekend, when you find her thrifting, sewing, or building furniture. 

📸 © .mantel

We are delighted to share that fellow Dani Gal’s work Dark Continent (25 mins, 2023) is showing at the exhibition Forgive Us Our Trespasses / Vergib uns unsere Schuld (14.9-8.12.2024) at

Dark continent deals with the racial phobias resulting from the colonial imaginary and their transmission through music. Dani’s film is an adaptation of a case study from Martinican psychiatrist and anti-colonial writer Frantz Fanon’s book Black Skin, White Masks (1952): A young White French woman suffers from a nervous disorder triggered by the sound of African drums prohibited by colonial regimes and slave owners because they were suspected of carrying signals of rebellion.

To watch Dani’s film, visit the exhibition or the link in our bio.

Written and Directed by Dani Gal. Camera: Itay Marom, Produktion: Kirberg Motors und Dani Gal, Music: Tyshawn Sorey. With: Yoli Fuller, Maj-Britt Klenke, J.David Hinze and Patrick Joswig.

Photo Courtesy Dani Gal

Introducing our inherit team: Emma Jelinski

Emma’s (.jelinski) latest research has focused on wondrous creatures, uterine toads, playing with the tools of speculative-critical ethnography to q***r the votives of the Museum of European Cultures . Her text „The Toad - A Queerfeminist Subject“  was published in 2023 in the catalogue for the exhibition „Läuft“ (MEK). 
Emma works as a museum educator at the Jugend Museum. Her planned Master’s thesis deals with the revision of the permanent exhibition Villa Global and reflects on curatorial, artistic, educational and political negotiations of diversity, home and migration and tries to establish intervening formats. 
Since studying ethnography, she looks and feels with new eyes that critically and playfully perceive beings like the toad. 

📸 © .mantel

***rthemuseum

Introducing our inherit team: Aisha Allakhverdieva

Aisha Allakhverdieva (they/she) is an Art History and Philosophy B.A. student at Humboldt University and a student assistant in the department of Modern Art. During the Enslavement and Art conference, they organised and moderated a film screening of Yugantar’s Molkarin (1981) and conversation with Nicole Wolf and Pallavi Paul alongside Franziska Blume, Justine Ney, and Hanna Steinert.
Inspired by their volunteer work their current research examines collage as a medium that explores, represents and creates q***r identities, spaces and temporalities.
Aisha is deeply committed to community engagement and actively involved in initiatives supporting refugees, migrants, and the LGBTQIA+ community. They are dedicated to create safer spaces where different individuals can unfold themselves and exchange with each other.

***ridentity

This Tuesday, the co-director of Sharon Macdonald gave a talk called ‚Anthropology and Heritage:
Developments and Directions‘ to the Visual Anthropology group in the Department of Journalism and Communication, Tsinghua University, Beijing.

In her talk, she discussed anthropology’s contribution to the development of heritage studies, suggesting that its expertise in ‚culture‘ has now transferred to ‚heritage‘. Significant developments in heritage studies were illustrated with examples from her own research, and ‘s research agenda was outlined as proposing important directions for the future.

Introducing our inherit team: Tal Adler

Tal Adler is a conceptual artist, working with and within research and academic institutions, developing artistic-research methods to engage with difficult pasts and contentious heritages. Through his projects, first in Israel/Palestine and later in Europe, he has engaged with the politics of history and memory, of aesthetics and display, of state and institution, of nature and science, and of ethnocracy, theocracy and diplomacy. At inherit. heritage in transformation, he works with our artistic-research fellows and continues to promote the integration of artistic-research practices into the university’s structures.



📸 ©Michelle Mantel

Introducing our inherit team: Margareta von Oswald

Margareta von Oswald is an anthropologist (PhD, EHESS Paris/Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) and works at the interface of academia, collections, and society. In her research and curatorial practice, she deals with negotiation processes around difficult heritage and the question of how museums can become truly democratic places. She curated exhibitions and published widely on these questions and loves to develop interesting formats to think and learn together, such as the Académie des Traces. This programme opens up spaces for dialogue on colonial collections between the European and African continents, and was initiated by Margareta in 2023, together with an international collective of researchers and heritage professionals. Beyond that, she loves music, food, and dancing. If you want to get a taste of her taste, you can listen to Margareta’s radio show that she used to host at , as part of the DJ-collective Crush.

To find out more about Académie des Traces, go follow the link in our bio!

📸 © .mantel

Inherit publication: “Private museum as public space: Local remembering and memory politics in Yan’an, China” by Yujie Zhu, Memory Studies, Vol. 17

In memory studies, museums and memorials have been actively employed in constructing and reinterpreting the social memories of nation-states and sub-groups within national populations. As such, scholarly debates have often focused on the roles of social and political elites in creating national remembrance. This article provides an alternative theoretical and empirical lens that focuses on China’s local memory practices and initiatives within the context of private museums and their dynamic interaction with the state. It examines how grassroots communities in Yan’an use private museum space to commemorate, interpret and negotiate local histories promoted by political elites. While local governments actively promote official sites of memory in Yan’an as the roots of Chinese communism for patriotic education, the private museum offers an alternative form of public space for social gatherings and memory transmission. Instead of promoting a grand narrative of the founding of the nation, the private museum focuses on local folk culture and the representation of the everyday landscape in response to rapid social change. Such forms of local commemoration are not driven by radical social movements that challenge the dominant historical narrative of ruling elites. Instead, they provide spaces for local communities to safely negotiate, communicate and sometimes compromise within and through official constraints. The findings contribute to our understanding of memory politics and its roles in shaping the state-society relationships of modern China.
 
To read the full article, please follow the link in our bio.
 
© Yujie Zhu
 

Inherit’s theme: “Decentring the Human”

Yet another significant research strand being tackled at inherit. heritage in transformation is "Decentering the Human". Decentring the human indexes a confluence of developments in the humanities, relating to wider socio– and especially socio-environmental concerns, which call for giving more recognition to non-human beings and entities. The Anthropocene, anxieties about climate catastrophe and the associated need to develop approaches and ethics that go beyond immediate human interests have been major impulses. So too have been the material turn and aspects of the ontological turn; the digital, and especially artificial intelligence; and the less human-centric perspectives of other, particularly some indigenous, worlds. These all, in various ways, challenge the humanities to examine their remit and premises, and even to transform into what some call the posthumanities.

Heritage as a field of scholarship and practice readily opens up to – and even demands – more-than-human approaches. Involvingmore than just the human, heritage raises questions about materiality, the agency and affordances of objects, the implications of infrastructures, the workings of the digital, and multi-species engagements. Heritage can be officially ‘natural’ as well as ‘cultural’, while it simultaneously blurs the boundary between these; and likewise for so-called ‘tangible’ and ‘intangible’ heritage. As such, more-than-human heritage research and practice leads to critical interrogation of certain heritage classifications and ways of defining and dealing with heritage.

© World Heritage Promotion Team of Korean Tidal Flat

Introducing our inherit team: Yoonha Kim

Yoonha Kim is an anthropologist with a background in design. Her doctoral project explored alternative worldings, addressing ecological sensibility and diversifying technological imagination through wearing and making Korean sartorial heritage. Her previous education in Fashion Design at Central Saint Martins University of the Arts London (GradDip), and Visual and Media Anthropology at the Freie Universität Berlin(MA) led her to deploy a range of multimodal forms of anthropology, from curatorial practices to filmmaking and sensorial workshops with emergent technologies. She has also conducted various modes of interdisciplinary research within the Cluster of Excellence 'Matters of Activity. Image Space Material' where she is an associated member. At inherit, Yoonha is responsible for the research strand „Decentring the Human“. She is into tea, wetlands, season-specific activities, and homebuilt computers.

© Michelle Mantel

Inherit’s theme: “Transforming Value”

One major research strand around which inherit. heritage in transformation‘s work is centered is called „Transforming Value“. Questions of value are central to heritage and to the humanities. Which pasts are given attention and why? What gets to count as ‘heritage’? Who or what determines this? And how has this changed over time?

Not only do heritage and the humanities raise such questions, they also, explicitly and implicitly, offer theories and schemes for according and defining value. Indeed, because heritage functions as a mode of signaling what is deemed ‘of value’ – including in the humanities themselves – it is a (and arguably the) key cultural mode for negotiating value. This makes the investigation of heritage value transformation of major relevance for the humanities.

To explore more about inherit’s „Transforming value“ theme and the fellows associated with it, please visit our website: https://inherit.hu-berlin.de/themes/transforming-value

© John Lockwood Kipling, Three Men From Amritsar Jail Working at a Carpet Loom, Amritsar, India, ca. 1870. Pen and wash on paper, 26.2 x 35.6 cm, Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK.

Introducing our inherit team: Habiba Insaf

Habiba Insaf leads the research strand ‘Decentring the West’ at . Her research and writings span the domains of art history, museum education, and anthropology. She is interested in themes of decolonization (its uses and misuses), popular culture, and museums. Her ongoing doctoral research at Humboldt University, Berlin, examines the politics of displaying and interpreting Indian objects in Berlin StateMuseums and is funded by the Gerda Henkel Stiftung (2021-2024).

Previously, she curated museum walks such as Love and Longing in Indian Art (2016) which explored the pluralistic idea and expressionsof love in visual art, and Ladies Only! (2017) which focussed on gender and aesthetics in modern and contemporary Indian art. As part of the winning team Flow India that was awarded the Prince Claus Foundation and the British Council’s Contemporary Take, Beyond Cultural Heritage (2017) prize, she contributed to the planning and conception of an immersive VR experience at Qutub Minar, Delhi. For her work in museum and heritage education, she was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation’s German Chancellor Fellowship (2018), and Singapore International Foundation's Arts for Good Fellowship (2019).

She earned her Master’s in Arts and Aesthetics from Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi. Trained in Kathak, she also enjoys learning ‘belly dancing’ and hip hop. Outside her academic pursuits, she can be found dancing to mostly sensible Bollywood songs, cooking delicious Murg Amritsari and pretty average dals, drilling holes in walls, walking on moist grass, and playing chess.

Here you can read an article Habiba wrote for Caravan Magazine: https://caravanmagazine.in/culture/the-complexities-of-addressing-past-while-decolonising-museums

📸 © .mantel