This workshop is productive of curatorial storytelling, inviting participants to engage the capacity of shifted socio-historical frameworks to provide insight into new narratives, embedded in the materiality and material origins of objects and collections. Looking beyond scientific and art historical façades that overlook epistemicide and the geologics of extraction, contextual frameworks are elaborated that problematize widely naturalized relationships to specific environments and practices of de-classification that distance materials from their origins.
This workshop reflects on collections and programs including those of the Rijksmuseum, the Uffizi the Madre and the Royal Mineralogical Museum of Naples, is designed as an open forum for intersectional dialogue inspired, in part, by Kathryn Yusoff’s meditation in “A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None” on the division of matter into corporeal and mineralogical, active and inert, which underlies racialization as a material categorisation.
The three convenors will each provide lenses through cases from their work. Maria Holtrop will speak about her work on the ‘Slavery’ exhibition (Rijksmuseum, 2021), Justin Randolph Thompson about ‘On Being Present’ and ‘K(C)ongo, Fragments of Interlaced Di- alogues. Subversive Classi cations’ (Gallerie degli Uf zi, 2020-2022), and Kathryn Weir about the ex- hibitions ‘Rethinking Nature’ and ‘Beauty and Terror: sites of colonialism and fascism’ (Museo Madre, 2021-2022).
