As displayed in museums, Nature, of course is never just that, it comes to in particular cultured ways. As much as nature is cultured, culture is also natured, often by similar means, in the same or in similar museum practices. As exemplified by Donna Haraway in her ‘Teddy Bear Patriarchy,’ about the American Museum of Natural History in New York; ‘..every mounted animal, bronze sculpture or photograph … are recomposed to tell a biography embracing major themes in 20th century United States’ (1989:21). What goes on in the Hall of Africa, brings into perspective evolutionary paradigms, theories of eugenics, and American imperialism. All coming together in the form of a dramatic materializations of nature as still life; framed by a particular gaze informed by gendered colonial nature practices, such as wild game hunting, taxidermy and nature photography.
This PhD course explores the story telling devices and heritigization of both natural and cultural history, through a skewed comparison of 3 museums in Paris. Muséum National d'Histoire Naturelle and Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, stages nature at two very different times and for different purposes. Pasts are renegotiated and both humans and animals are currently enrolled in new orders; the postcolonial and the posthuman. Musée du Quay Branly, was established with an ambition of disturbing the existing by placing ethnographic artefacts into new orders. As Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature bears witness to, new orders’ reference particular futures, and may also become dated.
At these spectacular museums, we will focus on elements through which confirmation, or renegotiation of grand narratives, including ways of heritagisation the other, with reference to naturalised hierarchies. We will compare and engage both the specifics of display, exhibition technologies, atmosphere, human and animal postures, organization of space, aesthetics, but also approaches to sound, light, texture and text. Text is a particular tool in this course. The lecturers we bring together all have particular theoretically informed perspectives, involving the role of text in heritage production.
Our aim in this Ph.D. course is to not only invite comparisons and reflections over the cultured displays of natureculture, but also to engage, and momentarily renegotiate the natureculture of heritage, by simple poster interventions in actual exhibitions, exploring ways epistemological insecurity can be stirred in the visitor.
In Paris students will partake in lectures and field visits and produce poster interventions. The posters will simply be photographed in the chosen museum and shared with the other participants.
Who can apply? All PhD-students
ECTS: 3
To receive credits, each student must produce a 3 page reflection in advance of the seminar.
Application deadline:
April 5
Notice of acceptance by April 9
Please send your application and CV to kari.andersen@ikos.uio.no.
Costs:
No course fee. Lunch and dinners are covered by the organizers.
Brita Brenna (IKOS) and Gro Ween (KHM).
Lecturers
Benoît de L'Estoile (Ecole normale supérieure, Paris). Professor
Brita Brenna (IKOS, UIO)
Recent titles: Museum: A culture of copies (2019), Kjønn på Museum (2018). Brenna is theoretically and methodically involved in feminist science studies, new studies materialities, as well as science and technology studies of new cultural history.
Gro Ween (KHM, UIO) Associate Professor.
Recent titles: Domestication Gone Wild: Politics and Practices of multispecies relations (2018), Digitalisation of Crafts. Comparative approaches to Arctic Fur (2018). Ween’s work is centered on postcolonial museum practices often involving indigenous collaborative endeavours as well as on studies of nature in scientific practice.
Lotten Gustaffson Renius (Nordiska museet), Professor.
Recent titles: Repatriation as Ritual, Repatriation as Ritual (2017), The Ritual Labor of Reconciliation An Autoethnography of a Return of Human Remains (2017). Gustaffson Reinius’ is interested in memory production, collective fantasies of the historical and geographic other, and expressive, aesthetic shapes.
Nathalia Brichet (University of Copenhagen), Post doctoral fellow.