Invisible Inventories: A Collective Outlook
One of the stated aims of the IIP project is to “generate a comprehensive inventory of Kenyan artefacts and cultural objects held in public institutions abroad.”[1]
The database is a core element of the project. The idea of Kenyan objects abroad becomes very real when the numbers of these objects, alongside attendant details, become publicly accessible data. Putting all of this currently scattered and disaggregated information into one document is an ongoing digital effort that mirrors the physical aim of restitution and reparation movements: to gather them and bring those that need to be returned, back home. The creation of this database is also a catalyst for the activation of true and honest knowledge exchanges about these objects and their real-life contexts—without connection to their peoples and countries of origin, the objects remain potentially mis-named, misrepresented and problematically baptised as wrongful ambassadors of the untrue.
In addition to the necessary cultural dialogue regarding the morals and ethics of their contentious possession, the database is also an opportunity for the museum and cultural space to correct the inaccurate narratives that spill over into history classes, racist rhetoric and the imbalanced power dynamics of daily life.
Engaging with the Database as Africans, as Kenyans, as Artists
The database is a digital artefact listing 32,321 objects from thirty institutions in seven countries (as at September 29, 2020). The file’s size—a paltry 84MB—brings together a complex mix of datasets from very different organisations with a multitude of diverse internal data practices, histories, documentation values and commitments to preservation.
It is worth considering the fact that this data has never sat together before, in much the same way that digital existence diffuses the physical realities of the nation-state border into the ephemeral. The evolving technological developments of the world as it is now, and the ease with which information can be requested and shared, has allowed these datasets to be aggregated. The public nature and designed reciprocity of digital and social media has also given rise to an implied accountability. This has been accompanied by the ability of cultural institutions to be shamed or made irrelevant due to a lack of engagement with, or poorly constructed discourse around, difficult topics. This has been a major reason for increased transparency about famously closed archives.
Moreover, a commendably shifting attitude amongst museum professionals about the role of data and information sharing has had its own role to play. The universal museum is not just a tacit competition to see who owns the most or rarest objects in the largest, most technically controlled basements (such a race being itself a relic of colonial imperialism), but one which has the most to share, teach and, additionally, the most to learn. Cultural activism has, for decades, given rise to these wider shifts around the role of museums in the world, and acknowledgement of these museums’ difficult histories.
The existence of this database, therefore, represents a shift in world power dynamics, which is made even more stark following the worldwide anti-racism protests of 2020. It also throws open the door to an unprecedented level of access to knowledge about the inner workings of the museums of the Global North. What can this new level of access and permission bring to the table, especially for Africans?
For us as the Nest, a Kenyan collective with Kenyan members, this is data about objects that were presumably subtracted from us as a people, even as we also consider the violent definition of our ancestors as ‘Kenyans’ via the drawing of arbitrary lines by a gang of colonialists. The effect of this subtraction on our cultural, societal and personal histories understandably affects how we enter these processes as arguably aggrieved parties. Because IIP is a partnership exercise, the ways in which the feelings of the individual partners differ remain on the table for discussion. This inevitably gives rise to some unavoidable tension. One partner, the National Museums of Kenya, is a Kenyan state institution (a state that is often framed as the objective, unchanging eternal, devoid of emotion). The other partners are European, and they perhaps relate to the data as the descendants of oppressive parties. The feelings that come from these challenging positions are also key, such as possible guilt, or a desire to find a way to ‘fix’ this long broiling situation.
Our choice to focus on visualising the database relies on a modified version of our usual methodology, wherein we create cultural works based on the research of lived experiences. We are thus creating ways for ourselves and our publics to easily engage with, reflect on and respond to this affective data. This database isn’t the kind of conceptual research question to which we commonly apply our hive mind—it came to us simultaneously as a hyper-historical and hyper-digital object. After much consideration, we settled on the idea of engaging with it as its full documentary self, and diving intentionally into its depths to see the secrets, contradictions, scandals and shadows it held within.
The Database as a Complex Record of a History of Violence, Imperialism and Protectionist Archiving
The process of acquiring this data was a set of digital negotiations, emails and relatively friendly engagements. These belie the darker history that the data represents. We were quite bemused by the faulty idea of the neutrality of this data, which stood as a record of historical violence, imperialism, racism, and a Eurocentric obsession with the ownership and classification of things as a way to dominate them.
As IIP, we made a group decision, after much deliberation, to ask for relatively benign data about the Kenyan collections of the museums we contacted. We thought that this would increase the chances of them participating in our endeavour and sharing this data with us. We didn’t want the museums to feel we were making a legal demand on their stores in this first letter from complete strangers. As a result, critical provenance data was framed as extraneous and optional.
This was an obvious gap, as provenance is ideally not something that the project should shy away from questioning. However, this is also a topic and inquiry that has been inflammatory for decades. Further still, one of our IIP partners, the National Museums of Kenya, as a public institution, is understandably governed by several unspoken rules about not purposely engaging in activistic behaviour and seeks to maintain diplomatic relations with any other museums of interest. The thinking behind ‘frightening off institutions’ by asking for data deemed more sensitive was thus based on multiple compromises. In retrospect, this was a costly compromise with regard to creating a comprehensive database.
Luckily, of the institutions that have shared data with the project, a good proportion have made provenance data available. For EU institutions, however, the enactment of the General Data Protection Regulations (GDPR), which came into force on May 25, 2018, has made sharing data on living collectors and donors unlawful.[2] In addition, we have encountered museums that have resisted granting access to any of their data and—in one sordid case—have shared records that exhibited a crude deletion of provenance data from their object records. One wonders about the motivation behind such manipulation. Was this pseudo participation in the database intended as conscience laundry? As a result, the database suffers from looming gaps of missing data about long dead collectors and donors.
Stepping aside from the technicalities (the aforementioned project design, data privacy and data manipulation), the intense sensitivities around the provenance column in the database have been interesting to observe. If there is no shame in the institutional ownership of these objects, why conceal their previous benefactor, unless it is now a badge of dishonour to be listed as having donated 6,000+ objects?
Another evolving data need is that of the financial value of the objects listed in the database—which is a data point the IIP team regret not requesting for in our initial partnership inquiries (it too was considered to be a sensitive ask). The tiptoeing around the question of the financial value of objects is very much a standard practice within museum circles. As one museum professional euphemistically describes the situation: “there’s a bit of unwillingness to discuss the financial value of objects.”[3] This sensitivity is sometimes communicated in the following ways:
- Shrewdly: “that all museum collections should be treated with the same respect and value.”[4]
- Unhelpfully: that “objects are not valuable as such, but their value is in the fact that objects are evidence of phenomena.”[5]
- Perhaps more convincingly: that, in addition to security concerns raised by the widespread knowledge of the financial value of objects, there is a tendency amongst councils and governing bodies to sell valuable museum objects to fix budget gaps (Freedman, Carnall).
- Ridiculously: that “to measure the value of an object, we can easily work out the ‘joy’ one may get from it”.[6]
More practically, the financial value of objects is only considered when acquiring new material, deaccessioning material or dealing with insurance valuations for exhibitions and loans (generally calculated as the cost of replacing that loaned item if there was any damage, which, in the case of irreplaceable objects, is priceless). Moreover, the cost of moving an object—which entails careful packing, transport in appropriate climatic conditions, storing and then exhibiting them as prescribed—is much higher than that of insuring it, even at values which may or may not be inflated. We are left with the reflection that a museum’s process of ownership was generally designed to be irreversible: an object, once accessioned, cannot easily leave—much like a life prisoner.
It is worth noting that this high cost of movement, even within the less politicised framework of exchange between museums, is a key factor preventing the movement of Kenyan objects held by the IIP German museum partners to Nairobi for the purposes of the IIP “Invisible Inventories” exhibition. Further, an exchange arrangement mediated by cost of object movement immediately puts African and Global South museums at a disadvantage as they do not have the kind of state and philanthropic financing that can allow them to curate exhibitions and move objects on demand.
Disorder and Errors
The IIP concept paper notes that existing inventories of Kenyan objects abroad “sometimes lack information or contain data errors with regards to acquisition modalities, context and purpose of the objects. Due to the lack of a sharing framework amongst institutions and between institutions and researchers, these data errors perpetuate misrepresentation and mis-attribution of these cultural objects.”[7]
The IIP project also attempts to address data errors, misrepresentation and misattribution to create some order in the chaos of datasets that reveal differing levels of attention, care and capacity within the museums. The data sets sent in contained formatting errors and incorrectly translated words, which are perhaps natural by-products that arise from the movement and conversion of data. More problematic was the presence of spelling errors (Maasai? Massai? Masai?) and anthropological and misattribution errors (generally around ethnicities introduced by anthropologists; for instance, the continued use of derogatory terms such as ‘Kavirondo’ or ‘Kitosh’ to refer to the Luhya and Luo people of Kenya).[8] [9] [10]
It has been a particular curiosity of the Nest Collective to consider the question of errors in museum data. What does it mean for these institutions—these celebrated halls of posterity, these vaunted archives of cultural artefacts on behalf of humanity—to harbour erroneous information within their archives, particularly around collections from other societies?
An oft-repeated defence against the return of objects—the ‘capacity’ of African museums to preserve objects professionally—is put severely into question by the remarkably poor quality of data in the database. This demonstrates massive bureaucratic lapses and obvious low priority, beyond the entry of erroneous data. What honest conversations can be had when these institutions are confronted by the demonstration of their own systemic errors?
Process and the Challenge of Presenting Complexity to An Audience
The IIP database is technically administered by the Nest Collective in their role as partners in the programme, while the datasets included in the database have been requested, negotiated for, and collected by individuals within the IIP grouping (Simon Rittmeier and Marian Nur Goni from SHIFT Collective, Juma Ondeng’, Philemon Nyamanga and Lydia Nafula from National Museums of Kenya). This started off with the archives of the two German museums participating directly in the IIP project, the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum and the Weltkulturen Museum. At the end of the project, the database will be handed over to the National Museums of Kenya, to be held in trust for the people of Kenya.
Two years of negotiating with this data, for a group of such diverse origins and interests, begets a process where old knowledges build on and contend with new ones, and where multiple experiences sit amongst and have discourse with each other. In a situation like this, positions and opinions are bound to change.
We face the persistent challenge of how to communicate this learning, experience and complexity to exhibition visitors in a way that invites engagement while illustrating their many nuances and layers.
Additionally, the very questions of object movement have been, for a long time, and continue to be, hotly debated: IIP is just one of multiple contemporary continuations of this dynamic conversation. We, therefore, also had to consider how to introduce newer audiences, and re-engage experienced stakeholders with universal questions that are decades old.
The Database Visualisation Process, and Resulting Artworks
In April 2020, during an IIP workshop in Nairobi (held online, due to COVID-19 restrictions), Sidney Ochieng a Nairobi-based data consultant at InteliPro, guided the team through an exercise to think through what the database could concretely be useful for. This included, how to communicate the findings of the project to a wider public in Kenya and Germany, as well as more specific audiences of researchers, cultural activists, communities and more. This exercise created the framework for the team to critically analyse the questions to which the database objects could provide answers to.
Questions regarding the paths of movement, financial and material object values, collector biographies and interests, and the sociocultural gaps created by missing objects came to the fore. These provided the following foundation for the Nest Collective to create visual works as a contribution to the “Invisible Inventories” exhibition:
The number—in which we visualise the number that sits at the heart of the database activity: the total number of object records hosted in the database, currently at 32,321 (as at September 29, 2020). We are intent on visualising this number for the sake of keeping it in mind. The gravity of this subtraction may perhaps assist audiences to really consider the scale and breadth of object movement, and the question of what it really means to take away this number of objects from a society.
Collector biographies—in which we highlight the life histories of persons named as collectors and/or donors of objects in the database (where they have been named), and consider their presence in Kenya, their object interests and how these interests shaped the ways that Kenya is archived in museums.
The question of value—in which we compare the financial values of objects (acquisition price, institutional value and insurance value) and consider the effect of movement, acquisition and contemporary availability on this value.
Objects of national importance—in which we examine objects that have been listed as “Objects of National Importance” in presidential directives, meaning that they are objects whose repatriation the Government of Kenya is actively seeking.
Material values—in which we present findings of a study of the database records related to object materiality. What materials (e.g. wood, leather, stone, precious metals) have been used to fashion objects contained in the archives, and how are these materials spread out amongst institutions, attributed communities, years of manufacture and collection, and individual collectors?
Lost Communities—in which we explore facts about lost communities whose artefacts are listed in the database. These communities were ‘lost’ either by ethnographic misrepresentation, or swallowed by larger ethnic groupings as part of the colonial effort to organise and classify the natives[11], or bred out by intermarriage and intermingling with neighbouring communities.
[1] “About IIP” (2019), see: https://www.inventoriesprogramme.org/about-iip.
[2] The GDPR creates rules regarding exporting personal data beyond the EU, meaning that any activities, such as collaborative research projects like IIP’s, that involve personal data travelling beyond the European Economic Area, will require additional checks and safeguards. (White, B. “Don’t panic over the GDPR”, Museums Association, April 30, 2018, see: https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/opinion/2018/04/01052018-dont-panic-over-the-gdpr/).
[3] Viscardi, P. “The financial value of museum objects”, NatSCA (Natural Sciences Collections Association), November 17, 2014, see: https://natsca.blog/2014/11/17/the-financial-value-of-museum-objects/.
[4] Freedman, J., Carnall, M. “The conversation: Should we tell the public the financial value of museum objects?”, Museums Association, November 3, 2014, see: https://www.museumsassociation.org/museums-journal/opinion/2014/11/01112014-the-conversation/.
[5] Vilkuna, J. “Museum value or museality: only a theoretical concept or a concrete, practical tool?”, IR Information Research, vol. 21 no. 1, March, 2016, see: http://www.informationr.net/ir/21-1/memo/memo1.html#.X6rCMNvjJ-V.
[6] An argumentum ad absurdum presented by Jan Freedman that used the equation “Value = Smiles + Awe + Interaction + Excitement”, where ‘smiles’ is the length of time (in seconds) a smile is held for whilst talking about that object, ‘awe’ is the length of time (in seconds) the eyes open widely and the mouth drops, ‘interaction’ is the number of interactive questions asked about the object, and ‘excitement’ is the number of excited responses elicited by observing the object (e.g. ‘wow’, ‘noooo’, ‘that’s amazing’, etc.). (Freedman, J. “The real value of museum collections”, From Shanklin, September 12, 2014, see: https://fromshanklin.wordpress.com/2014/09/12/the-real-value-of-museum-collections/).
[7] International Inventories Programme, “Concept Paper”, see: https://www.inventoriesprogramme.org/concept-paper.
[8] Kavirondo, though an innocent-sounding term, is derogatory. It comes from the Swahili kaa virondo (sit on the heels) because the first European adventurers to reach the Nyanza areas seem to have noticed that those people had no stools to sit on and liked to squat on their heels: Ekitibwa kya Buganda, “Is calling someone ‘omudokolo’ or ‘Jaluo’ or ‘anyanya’ an insult?”, April 25, 2010, see: https://ekitibwakyabuganda.wordpress.com/2010/04/25/is-calling-someone-omudokolo-or-jaluo-or-anyanyaan-insult/. Kavirondo is also said to mean ‘dark skinned people’. See the object biography of the Kondo Headgear: “Chief’s Crown of the Kavirondo” in this magazine, which addresses derogatory terms in the databases.
[9] Kitosh is a reference to an insulting term meaning ‘warlike’ that the Kalenjin used to describe the Luhyas during their frequent war skirmishes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: Wasike, C. J. “Textualizing Masculinity: Discourses of Power and Gender Relations” in Manguliechi's Babukusu After-Burial Oratory Performance (Khuswala Kumuse), pp.18-19, 2013.
[10] Cattell, M.G., “Abaluyia”, Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, 2004 edition, see: https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007%2F0-387-29907-6_24.
[11] Sneath, D. “Tribe”, The Cambridge Encyclopaedia of Anthropology, 2016, see: https://www.anthroencyclopedia.com/entry/tribe.