20 May 2022: Impossible stories: Linking Colonial Collections and Climate Change Through Critical Fabulation

This seminar is centrally about the re-imagination of colonial collections through the lens of the Anthropocene. Colonial conquests and the exploitation of beings, species and territories in Africa, Asia or Latin America result from and produced intimate nature-culture relations. Researchers, curators as well as artists and designers, and also students, exchange about how to tell stories about these colonial encounters in relation to the contemporary climate change urgency.

The seminar will take place on 20 May 2022 at the Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, in the context of the exhibition ‘In Search of the Pluriverse’.

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How do we mobilise the colonial archive to construct and to imagine the voices that have been silenced? Writer Saidiya Hartman refers a style of creative and interpretative practice as critical fabulation. How can we use techniques such as, perhaps, collage, speculative narratives, or montage in exhibitions, in writings, or in moving image or spatial design as a way of bringing about key questions about collected specimen, colonial encounters and climate justice? Decolonial thinker Rolando Vasquez posed the question: can we envisage the possibility of an ethical research life that are “not mediated by and dependent on the destruction of earth and relational worlds?” During a plenary program curated by Maastricht University, KABK Den Haag and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, participants are invited to respond to podcasts and short videos that presenters distributed online. The seminar will be developed into a white paper.

This seminar also relates to the online exhibition ‘Day Zero / Ground Zero Cape Town. A Decolonial Walk along the Liesbeek River’, which reflects on the water crisis in this South African city through the lens of colonial occupation of the Cape. This exhibition by Dr Christian Ernsten (FASoS) curated as online exhibition in collaboration with Erik Wong (Gerrit Rietveld Academie), Dirk-Jan Visser (KABK Den Haag) and students from Maastricht University. ‘Day Zero / Ground Zero Cape Town. A Decolonial Walk along the Liesbeek River’ reflects particularly on two early 18th century illustrated works from the UM University Library’s Jesuits Collection. Illustrations and fragments from the ‘Naauwkeurige beschryving van de Kaap de Goede Hoop (1727)’ (The present state of the cape of Good-Hope) by German travel writer Peter Kolb (1675-1726) are juxtaposed with the contemporary work on the Cape by photographer Dirk-Jan Visser. Taking this exhibition as a point of departure, the seminar concerns a hybrid seminar that intends to contribute further to an understanding of links between the colonial collections, the climate urgency and issues of representation. In particular, the seminar will explore the value of colonial collections as part of a reflexive or decolonial turn on the histories of the natural sciences.