Since 2010, the theorists and artists of the MAB have been working on a range of topics related to the new life sciences; they are examining the precarious zones between life and death and investigating the milieu of the dead – or more specifically, advocating changing the milieu of the dead for the better. With the series continuing from 2017 through to the end of 2019 in collaboration with the Humboldt Forum Berlin, it is now focusing on gaps and absences in archives, collections and exhibitions. While the Humboldt Forum exhibitions present world history through objects and artefacts, the performances by the Mobile Academy Berlin stage the stories of things and beings which cannot, or should not, be exhibited, and where any representation is doomed to fail.

What you cannot see, you can talk about. What you cannot know, you should definitely talk about. Narrating, fabulating and hallucinating in all appropriate ambiguity: that’s the way to maintain relationships with things and beings that are not present. (MAB, 2010)

Absences

MAB has invited the American authors and theorists Saidiya Hartman and Christina Sharpe to take a close look at the impossibility of describing, representing or historicizing slavery, using their own previous works as a starting point: Lose your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route and In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Is it possible, narratively and imaginatively, to overwrite the emptiness and limits of the archive of slavery?

In the 1990s Saidiya Hartman travelled through Ghana searching for remnants of the history of the enslaved. As a footstep traveller, she follows the old slave routes, visits the dungeons and reads historical papers, chronicles and documents. She finds deserted places, abandoned landscapes and silence, for “to read the archive of slavery is to enter a mortuary”. And because “Africa was the land of graves without bodies”, even the dead are absent. The history and stories of the enslaved cannot be told because signs of their existence were erased, and because this history has not passed into the past, but is inscribed in the present. The losses were passed on, and they still determine the reality of black lives: “We live in the wake of slavery” (Christina Sharpe), in the backwash of the slave ships on the transatlantic route.

Hartman’s method of “critical fabulation” takes the gaps and absences in the archives and the ephemeral signs of the lives of the enslaved as the starting point for impossible stories, which at the same time reflect on the historical and contemporary reasons behind the impossibility of telling them. Christina Sharpe entwines a wide variety of images and motifs from poetry, film, art, historical documents and current news reports as a way of looking closer at the deeply ingrained history of slavery in contemporary “black lives” and “black deaths” – “a past not yet past, in the present.” Both books circle around the impossibility of describing slavery’s “archives of breathlessness” and reflect on the systematic conditions which have prolonged this situation down to the present day. Hartman collects a choir of voices before adding her own story of what could have happened to what she did not find. Sharpe’s writing approaches theory as a kind of poetology that calls on us to read, speak and imagine differently. She traces concepts and motifs in repetitions and variations through history, weaving them into dense theoretical and poetic patterns.

An echo of polyphonic speech acts respond to the two authors on the two evenings: the theorists pick out text and pictorial motifs from their books and comment on them in short, overflowing footnotes, which top up the motifs with their own research. A performer and a DJ recite text passages in a spoken-word performance, while experts in exhibition practice and theory give responsespondering what the ideas of Hartman and Sharpe could mean for ethnographic world museums. What leads and pointers can literature and theory give for curating collections and exhibitions?

For The Milieu of the Dead series, Mobile Academy is setting up a travelling theatre at assorted locations around Berlin (concept by Hurtzig; architecture by Stirnemann; production by the Humboldt Forum). A mechanized arena which has been specially designed for the series alternately shuts the audience and protagonists in and out. It functions like an earpiece, making it possible to listen in on the dead and their hitherto unheard stories. The irreverent Berliners have nicknamed it the “Humboldt Snail”.

Programme as PDF

PRESENTATION SAIDIYA HARTMANN:
LOSE YOUR MOTHER. A JOURNEY ALONG THE ATLANTIC SLAVE ROUTE.

Footnotes:
*1: Un/Picturability by Ulrike Bergermann
Looking at museums in Liverpool and London and how they use documents, pieces of writing, narratives, political accusations and evocations of empathy, Ulrike Bergermann will provide a footnote on the un/picturability of slavery in exhibitions: what language speaks of slavery in the museum, through its space, design and objects? 

*2: Historiographies for emancipatory movements by Karin Harrasser
Karin Harrasser will provide a footnote on how to practice historiography in a way that is dedicated to urgencies of the present while keeping the future open. How can we narrate history in such a way that the past is able to transform our political present? How can I write about music I have never heard, but which colonized minds and bodies 250 years ago? 

*3: Zombi by Gudrun Rath
Narratives about the Caribbean have defined the zombi as the living dead whose soul has been stolen, so that after their death, burial and resurrection, they can be put to work as a slave. These narratives have shaped the zombi as a figure that passes on the memory of enslavement. 

Response 1 by Wayne Modest
Wayne Modest will consider the influence of theory on the curation practices of ethnographic museums. Drawing on his experience as both a researcher and curator, he reflects on how best to cope with the difficult legacy and the “postcolonial anxiety” that is so disconcerting for European collections and institutions. 

Response 2 by Etienne Turpin
The MuseuAfroBrasil in São Paulo is an artistic and ethnographic museum dedicated to researching, preserving and exhibiting the objects and works of black people in Brazil. Philosopher and curator Etienne Turpin describes why this museum is the best he has ever seen. 

PRESENTATION CHRISTINA SHARPE: IN THE WAKE. ON BLACKNESS AND BEING 

Footnotes:
*1: Aesthetics and Affect by Elahe Haschemi Yekani
This footnote deals with the interconnectedness of historical archives and contemporary affects and the influence of this connection on the aesthetics of writing about slavery. How does Christina Sharpe’s critical, poetic, essayistic, collectivistic and associative text reflect the afterlife of slavery? 

*2 & *3: Recitation & spoken word by Goitseone Montsho and İpek İpekçioğlu
The performance artist and storyteller Goitseone Montsho and the Berlin DJ İpek read extracts from Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake and from the long poem Zong!by Canadian poet M. NourbeSe Philip. 

Response 1
Clémentine Deliss discusses the unresolved condition facing ethnographic museums in Europe. She argues that this colonial institution, which is currently deadlocked around questions of public display, needs to perform a radical transition into a “museum–university”. By enabling artists and researchers from diverse disciplines and cultures to gain rights of access to so-called ethnographic collections, a new kind of inquiry and interaction can take place between rigorous transdisciplinary research, innovative aesthetic practice, and tests in law, economics and mediation.  (Clémentine Deliss)

Response 2 by Etienne Turpin
The MuseuAfroBrasil in São Paulo is an artistic and ethnographic museum dedicated to researching, preserving and exhibiting the objects and works of black people in Brazil. Philosopher and curator Etienne Turpin describes why this museum is the best he has ever seen. 

Response 3 by Friedrich von Bose
In his footnote presentation, Friedrich von Bose reflects upon the disturbing potential of an archive’s blind spots for exhibition practice. How can we deal with these blank spaces and simultaneously leave them open for future interpretation and narratives? How do they relate to the museums’ crowded storage areas, which tell their very own histories? How can museum critique be made fruitful for exhibition practice without losing its transformative power? 

Protagonists

She’s Gotta Have It, Spike Lee, 1986
Meeting point: S-Bhf. Jannowitzbrücke. (In collaboration with HIT and RUN KINO)

Killer of Sheep, Charles Burnett, 1977
Wolf Kino, Weserstraße 59

For Ahkeem, Jeremy S. Levine, 2017
St. Elisabeth-Kirche, Invalidenstraße 3

Concept: Hannah Hurtzig, Marian Kaiser
Stage: Florian Stirnemann
Film Curator: Dorothee Wenner

Production: Eva Lämmerzahl, Laura Weber
Video: Phillip Hohenwarter
Sound: Jonas Hinz
Translation: Paul Bowman
Simultaneous translation: Lilian-Astrid Geese, Sungur Bentürk
Research: Sonja Lau
Event management: Philipp Hochleichter
Stands and stage: Bartmann Berlin
Supporting steel structure: Ertl & Zull
Rail system and curtain: Gerriets

Many thanks to:
Sarah Lewis Capellari, Alexandra Heimes, Gisela Lenthien, Siddharta Locanandi, Marc Siegel, Antke Engel, Institut für Queer Theorie;
 Moira Hille, Akademie der Bildenden Künste Wien; Khashayar Naderehvandi, Valand Academy Göteborg

A production by Mobile Academy Berlin, coproduced and organized by the Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schloss, made possible thanks to the representative of the Federal Ministry for Culture and Media.