Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Institut für Europäische Ethnologie

Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin | Institut für Europäische Ethnologie | Promovieren und Habilitieren | Habilitationsprojekte | Dr. Jonas Tinius – Minor Curating. Art and Anthropology After the Museum of World

Dr. Jonas Tinius – Minor Curating. Art and Anthropology After the Museum of World

(ERC Minor Universality, Saarland University / CARMAH, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)

Abstract

Minor Curating is a book about experiences and narratives of world that grapple with the difficult legacies of the European World Museum. It documents and analyses artistic and curatorial approaches to world-production that respond to the crisis of the Western universal museum and its colonial legacies. The book unravels struggles within the field of cultural production, especially the tension between statist cultural musealisation and grassroots social mobilisation in the context of major world heritage developments in Germany, Italy, and France. Based on long-term participant observation, this book documents institutions and forms of cultural production that grapple with the in-between, the interstitial, and which act as intermediaries and prisms that open a broader spectrum of socio-cultural production. Against the backdrop of three major sites of world heritage production – the Humboldt Forum in Berlin, the Palazzo di Brera in Milan, and the MuCeM in Marseille, it follows actors that operate against, but more often within a closely tied oppositional stance that could be described as a minor position. It is from this, often awkward and not clearly defined, positionality, occupied by activist cultural organisations, small artistic collectives, publishing houses, emergent curatorial teams, and non-commercial galleries that this book unfolds possibilities of minor narratives of world, which are emergent, that is, not yet defined and therefore elusive, hard to grasp. This book’s perspective on these practices avoids an all-too-easy Manicheanism, between small and large, state and non-state, hegemonic and counter-hegemonic, offering instead a glimpse of cultural production that troubles from within to construct non-normative narratives of world, which are emergent (Rabinow), that is, not yet defined and therefore in-the-making. Through collaborative, multimodal, and experimental modes of fieldwork, which include curating and exhibition-making itself, this book also asks what consequences this form of curating of world after world may have for a different modality of fieldwork, ethnography, and anthropology on and amid these heritage transformations.

 

Kontakt: jonas.tinius (at) hu-berlin.de