About

The online journal Troubles in the Collections was founded in the frame of a research project, financed by the Fondation Maison des sciences de l’Homme, Paris (2019-22). It brought together Lotte Arndt, Emmanuelle Chérel, Marian Nur Goni and El Hadji Malick Ndiaye, and was managed by CRENAU (Centre de Recherche Nantais Architectures Urbanités linked to the AAU laboratory). It is within this framework that the first five issues were published between 2020 and 2023. In 2022, anthropologist Julien Bondaz joined the editorial committee which still seeks to expand its membership and contributors. In 2023, the journal obtained support from the CNAP for the conception of a new website and, in 2024, joined the InVisu incubator (CNRS/INHA). Since 2020, the magazine has published more than 70 written, visual or multimédia contributions.

Troubles dans les collections favors a heterogeneity of approaches and contents questioning colonial classifications and their ongoing afterlives.

Two thematic issues are published per year. The section « En débat/debating » allows for the publication of articles outside the time frame of the issues, or reacting to current events.

For any further information or proposition please write to : troublesdanslescollections@gmail.com

Marian Nur Goni is a historian/art historian and assistant professor at Université Paris 8. Her work focuses on the history of collections from East Africa. By reconstructing their dispersed trajectories, she raises questions relating to the uses of the past, the writing of history and the processes of transmission and reparation in diasporic situations. Her work has been published in various journals such as Cahiers d’Études africaine, Politique africaine, Global Africa and her latest publications include a contribution to the collective books L’Afrique et le monde. Histoire renouées (ed. François-Xavier Fauvelle, Anne Lafont, 2022) and Colonisation. Notre histoire (ed. Pierre Singaravélou, 2023).

Emmanuelle Chérel, doctor in Art History, HDR, is a member of CRENAU (UMR 1563 CNRS) of the National School of Architecture of Nantes. Currently, her work focuses on the issues of postcolonial and decolonial approaches in the field of art. As full professor at the Nantes Saint-Nazaire School of Fine Arts, she led the research projects Archipelago Thoughts (2009-2014), Thinking from the Border (Thinking From the Border, Dis voir, 2018), and between 2018-2022, Epistemological disorders workshops with the Théodore Monod Museum- IFAN (Dakar) linked to the educational project Dakar: Presences of the Future initiated in 2015. She has written numerous articles, published The Memorial of the Abolition of Slavery of Nantes – Issues and controversies (PUR, 2012), and with Fabienne Dumont, The History of art is not given: art and postcoloniality in France (PUR, 2016). She co-directs the “Contemporary Arts” collection at Presses Universitaires de Rennes and is co-founder of the online journal Troubles dans les collections. In 2022, she co-curated the international exhibition Teg Bët Gëstu Gi presented at the T. Monod museum of IFAN during the Dakar Biennale. Currently, she is leading the Beaux arts de Nantes project “The ocean as a method” with, in particular, Euridice Zaituna-Kala.

Lotte Arndt (Paris, Berlin) is assistant professor at the Cultural and Social History of Art (HiCSA) research center at the University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. Between 2021 and 2025, she has been working on the international research project Reconnecting Objects. Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums, as part of Bénédicte Savoy's team at the Technical University of Berlin. Her research focuses on toxic collections, extractivism and the antinomies of conservation in so-called ethnographic and natural history museums. More broadly, she accompanies the work of artists who question the postcolonial present and the antinomies of modernity from a transnational perspective. Between 2014-2021, she taught at the École supérieure d'art et design Valence Grenoble. Selected publications: “Spreading the “scientific approach”: The chemical turn in conservation from the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro to colonial museums in the French Empire” (with Ariane Théveniaud), in: Museums & Social Issues, pp. 1-27, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15596893.2024.2397345 ; “Poisonous Heritage: Chemical Conservation, Monitored Collections, and the Threshold of Ethnological Museums”, Museums & Society, Vol 20, No 2 (2022), The toxic afterlifes of colonial collections, Troubles dans les collections, no. 2, 2022; Candice Lin. A Hard White Body (with Y. Umolu), Chicago University Press, 2019; Les revues font la culture ! Négociations postcoloniales dans les revues culturelles africaines à Paris, Trier WVT 2016; Crawling Doubles. Colonial Collecting and Affect (ed. with M. K. Abonnenc and C. Lozano), B42 2016; Hunting & Collecting. Sammy Baloji (ed. with A. Taiaksev) 2016.

Proposals for contributions and contact

Bi- or multilingual projects, the use of sound documents, video files and artistic contributions (videos, photographs, literary or poetic texts) are encouraged.

Please find writing guidelines for contributors below

And guidelines for issue editors below

ISSN number : 2778-2913, Paris/France.