Re-Entanglements is a core part of the Museum Affordances Research Project, focused on revisiting and re-engaging with the remarkable ethnographic archive assembled between 1909 and 1915 by the colonial anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas in southern Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The project approaches the archive from a creative and multidisciplinary perspective to reactivate and decolonise it, by both understanding the historical context in which it was gathered, and by examining its significance in the present in different and sometimes experimental ways.
In this talk Carmen will present her work as the UCL’s project conservator, getting objects ready for exhibition, and working within a multidisciplinary agenda and with varied groups that included artists, youth groups, conservation students, other project partners and researchers, origin and diaspora communities and, unfortunately, COVID. She will explore what she thinks conservation can afford to multidisciplinary projects such as this, as well as some of her own evolution as a conservator as a result of her involvement in the project and of trying to find ways in which to address the colonial past of objects in World Collections.
The talk will be followed by a Q&A session.
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