This event will be held both on-campus and online via Zoom (a link to the online stream will be sent to registered attendees).

This talk will explore how the development of a transnational cultural heritage praxis for new imagined futures can support present-day discourses and practices of recovery from colonial epistemicide and ecocide. In her seminal book Potential History, Ariella Azoulay asks us to unmake the disassociation between people and historical colonial art objects, photographs and documents, instead reframing these as living companions, refugees or missing people. She argues that object restitution is but one aspect of the necessary post-colonial repair; instead, we need to return to the moment during which these objects went missing in order to reconstitute a common world.

Using Azoulay's ideas of the still-present potentialities where objects are seen to hold the memory of the societies they once came from, artists Freddy Tsimba and Cecilia Järdemar have returned to a selection of 'mutilated' Kikongo archival artefacts currently held in the collections of the Ethnographic Museum in Stockholm. Within Kikongo tradition, objects are merely containers that can be imbued with an 'empowering spirit' through which it is possible to communicate with, and seek guidance from, the ancestors. Using archival films, photographs and contemporary photogrammetry copies of a selection of divination containers, the artists explore if and how copies can resume the place of the dislocated objects; as tools for speaking with the dead and returning to lost worlds in a process of participatory critical fabulation.

Saidiya Hartman purports that stories can perhaps be the only form of reparation or compensation historically subjugated people will receive. This project has explored what kind of historiography, and in extension reparation, the archival materials and object copies might engender, during a series of divination workshops and collaborative casting sessions in the Lower Congo. The resulting materials were developed into an exhibition, "Sukadi ye Mungwa" (Sugar and Salt), at the National Museum in Kinshasa during autumn 2023.

Cecilia Järdemar is a senior lecturer in Photography and Lens-based media at the Australian National University. She holds a master and an AHRC-funded PhD in Fine Art Photography from the Royal College of Art, UK. Her work has been widely exhibited, including at Kalmar Museum of Art, Jönköpings Museum, The Centre of Photography, Sweden, The Museum of Contemporary Art, DRC and the National Museum of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Her book, The Opening, won the Swedish Book Art Award in 2020. She was the principal investigator in the Swedish Science Funded artistic research project Reframing the encounter – (2019-2024), and in 2026 a monograph Sukadi ye Mungwa, will be published, to coincide with a new exhibition at Havremagasinet, Sweden.

Image: Reframing the encounter: From repressed colonial pile to a collaborative decolonial counter archive. Cecilia Järdemar and Freddy Tsimba.

The School of Art & Design Seminar series will continue weekly on Tuesdays from 1-2pm, between 17 February and 21 October 2025, co-convened by Dr Alex Burchmore and Alia Parker.