Nina Samuel – författare

Remnants are a challenge for the museum as an institution. They are ambiguous figures, and their attributions open up and thus contribute to transcending the taxonomic, disciplinary, architectural, and institutional boundaries of museums. They can be found everywhere—in exhibition spaces as well as storage depots, and in laboratories just as in the administration. In each of these contexts, there are respectively different forms of professional self-conception, knowledge, and practical handling that determine the status of remnants. The volume contributes to specifying terms such as remnant, trash, traces, and boundaries more precisely within the context of the museum and to reassessing them for debates in conservation, curating, art history, and museum anthropology.

Waste is political. Waste is social. Waste is economic, ecological, and colonial. It embodies traces of the past and imaginaries of the future. In this book, artists, designers, and art scholars discuss the perception and handling of waste materiality, including practical approaches to coexistence. Exploring transnational narratives of material traces, the contributions examine the interplay of representation, temporality, and technology. Attentive to the accumulated leftovers of previous generations and the unsettling prospect of a ‘new world disorder’, the publication emphasizes interconnectedness and dependency within a more-than-human world. Against the backdrop of a postcolonial understanding of material culture and the implications of the Anthropocene, how could a multi-perspective conception of waste in space and time be embraced?Waste and beyondCaring for planetary conditionsMultifaceted perspectives on materiality

While the nation-state gave rise to the advent of museums, its influence in times of transculturality and post-/decolonial studies appears to have vanished. But is this really the case? With case studies from various geo- and sociopolitical contexts from around the globe, the contributors investigate which roles the nation-state continues to play in museums, collections, and heritage. They answer the question to which degree the nation-state still determines practices of collection and circulation and its amount of power to shape contemporary narratives. The volume thus examines the contradictions at play when the necessary claim for transculturality meets the institutions of the nation-state.With contributions by Stanislas Spero Adotevi, Sebastián Eduardo Dávila, Natasha Ginwala, Monica Hanna, Rajkamal Kahlon, Suzana Milevska, Mirjam Shatanawi, Kavita Singh, Ruth Stamm, Andrea Witcomb.