Ferdiansyah Thajib and Syafiatudina (KUNCI) are in conversation with Yvette Mutumba (ContemporaryAnd, C&) about how to keep doing what needs to be done, institutional practices and the current hype on decolonizing in Europe context. The conversation was conducted in Victoria Park, on 21st May 2017, in Berlin, Germany. Editor: Syafiatudina

Download the audio file via this link.

Tuesday 6th June 2017, 11am – 4pm,
Tropenmuseum, Linnaeusstraat 2, 1092 CK Amsterdam

Heterotropics and the Research Center for Material Culture are pleased to announce the symposium Tropical Dissonance: Decolonizing knowledge through ethnographic archives on Tuesday June 6th. The symposium is organized with the research collective KUNCI Cultural Studies Center (Yogyakarta, Indonesia) as a concluding event of their residency project at the Tropenmuseum. Tropical Dissonance brings together scholars, curators and artists from a wide range of practices to explore the intersections between decolonial research, artistic practices and alternative knowledge production. Focusing on the use of ethnographic objects, or more broadly colonial archives in imperial and post imperial knowledge formation, we want to explore the multiple, often hidden, fractured legacies of this colonial past in the present and its impact on how we understand the world today. The contributors of this symposium will discuss various methodologies of studying colonial archives and epistemologies, through different sensorial approaches and experiences.

During the symposium speakers will address questions such as:
1 — If to study is understood as a practice of reflection that involves the interplay between learning and unlearning, what are the modes of study that we can utilize to better understand colonial pasts in the present? What modes of learning or unlearning should we employ to achieve a decolonial practice?
2 — How can we reclaim and reconfigure the ambivalence of colonial desire in its attempts to both “civilize” and “appropriate” otherness through representational economies of education, collection, dispossession and exhibition?
3 — How can we activate the ruins of ethnographic and archival gaze as a means to reorganize knowledge circulations between the tropics and the metropolis from the inside out?
4 — How do these shifting relationships affect the material life of objects (collection, commodity, archive, artefact) and practices of mediation (language, aesthetics, research)?

The symposium will start with a conversation between KUNCI and Wayne Modest (Head of the Research Center for Material Culture, which takes as a point of departure, KUNCI’s observations, findings and questions generated over the six weeks of the residency.

If you wish to attend this event, please send an email to [email protected]. Due to a limited number of seats, reservation is mandatory.

Schedule — Tuesday 6th June 2017
11 am – 12 noon KUNCI in conversation with Wayne Modest
1 pm – 1.30 pm Introduction by Ferdi Thajib and Sara Giannini
1.30 pm – 2.30 pm Panel 1: On Listening, with Adam Bobbette, Carolyn Birdsall and Wendelien van Oldenborgh. Moderated by Syafiatudina.
2.30 pm – 2.50 pm Break
2.50 pm – 3.50 pm Panel 2: On Looking, with Pamela Pattynama, Paul Bijl, Wim Manuhutu. Moderated by Brigitta Isabella.
3.50 pm – 4.30 pm Conversation on Exhibiting and Sensing with Fiky Daulay, Nuraini Juliastuti, and Pim Westerkamp. Moderated by Sara Giannini.

This event will be broadcasted live through Radio KUNCI. Podcasts from this research residency are also available in Radio KUNCI.

About Heterotropics #2
The Research Center for Material Culture in collaboration with the research platform Heterotropics, invited KUNCI Cultural Studies Center to be Researchers in Residence at the Tropenmuseum for the period May – June 2017. Heterotropics is curated by Sara Giannini in collaboration with TAAK. KUNCI’s residency project has been done with the kind support of the Research Center for Material Culture, Amsterdamse Fonds voor de Kunst, and Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds.

Photo information: Stand of the education system in the Dutch East Indies in the second Dutch pavilion on the Colonial World Exhibition in Paris, 1931. Archive of Tropenmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands.