Visual Pasts, Material Presents, Archival Futures. Postcolonial Temporalities in the Making.

This conference aims to bring together current research on visual, material and archival collections and explore the ways in which their materiality is shaped by time and place. Held in museums and archives, objects, natural specimens, human remains, photographs, films, sounds, drawings, documents and more embody the disruption created by missionaries, militaries, colonial officers, scientists, explorers or humble travellers in territories which endured colonisation. Through the act of collecting, classifying, storing and exhibiting, museums, anthropology and imperial politics shaped an ethnographic present in order to dominate colonised peoples, whose own temporalities had no space to exist. This conference will explore how accessing archives and museum collections can enable communities to recover their past and rekindle “alternative stories” as well as disrupt the discourses constructed by Western views.