COLONIAL NEIGHBOURS — AN EXAMINATION OF THE POST/COLONIAL HERE AND NOW
The project Colonial Neighbours aims at addressing gaps in Germany’s politics of memory and challenging dominant bodies of knowledge by creating an archive of German colonial history. The archive serves as a platform for exchange and discussion and as an information space, in which art, politics and science come and work toge
ther. Personalization of history encourages the deconstruction of threadbare perspectives. Historical and contemporary everyday objects, memorabilia and other artefacts narrating the entangled histories of the imaginary geographies of Germany and its former colonies, should be collected and worked on. The outcome will be a collection documenting and critically investigating the histories of the long-term relations between Germany and Africa, China and in the Pacific, both by analysing (historical) colonialisms and present-day post/colonialities. Following the concept of “entangled histories” (cf. Conrad & Randeria), the project searches to break up historical dichotomies and draw a more differentiated picture of current life-worlds in Berlin. Today, Germany’s colonial past is hardly present in the public sphere. It is rather actively displaced, forgotten about or denied, be it in school, in the media or in museums: German colonialism is continuously portrayed in a romanticized manner, which fails at deconstructing the hegemonic perception of the colonial encounters. The German colonial past is a story of ignorance and concealment (cf. It is yet a story of great impact, not only on those colonized, but also on those colonizing (cf. Comaroff & Comaroff 2002). Colonialism has fundamentally shaped both, “centre” and “periphery”. This is especially true for Berlin, the former capital of a colonial empire. Even though post/colonial constellations continue to be reproduced today, for instance in socio-economic, societal and political respects, they remain invisible. There are other historical events that are ostensibly important for a German self-conception and Germany’s coming to terms with its history. Especially the disastrous happenings of World War II and the fall of the Berlin Wall constitute the central keymarks in German discourse. The fierce political debates evolving around (racist and colonial(istic)) terms, names of streets and places, such as Mohrenstraße, Gröbenufer and the so-called African Quarter, are an indicator of the topic’s explosive brisance; the central issue in these debates being, who may and who may not determine what is to be perceived as racist and/or colonialistic expressions. Colonial Neighbours is a project by SAVVY Contemporary. Founded by Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (PhD). http://www.savvy-contemporary.com
