A sequence from Matthias de Groof’s documentary film Palimpsest of the AfricaMuseum (Belgium, 2019), which follows the packing and transportation of the entire collection to external storage rooms in preparation of the large-scale renovation of the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (2013-2018), shows workers cleaning empty display cases. They are wearing white protective suits, breathing masks and nitrile gloves, a comprehensive equipment that protects them from toxic dust. Behind the glass of dioramas and display cases, which for more than a century had held objects as in time capsules, artifacts from Congo were treated with biocides to prevent material decay and insect damage. These treatments were administered for decades to extend the material life spans of the objects. The substances have for some sedimented into the materials and can still deploy agency. Their toxic afterlives can possibly interfere with the present and future uses of the artifacts, obstruct physical contact and tactile practices with them, and require the implementation of protective measures on several levels.

This journal issue is part of an ongoing research (Arndt, forthcoming) on toxic modernity and museum collections. It opens a dialogue with academic and artistic works engaging with related topics. The issue takes the collections that were constituted in a colonial context as a starting point for discussing toxicity in a double perspective. On the one hand, it refers to the material, political and epistemological consequences generated by certain conservation methods that were elaborated in Europe, and subsequently applied in many museums around the world. The practices that intoxicated lastingly some of the objects in the collections (Odegaard/Sandogei 2005) are then interrogated in the context of the modern promise of endless progress, limitless life, and boundless productivity, that colonial policies and globalized capitalism defined as the sole possible horizon (Ohman Nielsen 2015, Vergès 2017, Alampi 2019).

The contributions in the present issue situate museum collections and conservation practices developed in Europe in the history of the classification and hierarchization of living worlds (Boumediene 2016). They interrogate modern conservation practices in museums as a cultural technique emerging in Europe in the nineteenth century (Caple 2000), alongside the disciplinary structuring of the sciences and the consolidation of the opposition between nature and culture (for a critique, see Latour 1991, Ingold 2013, Haraway 2016). This technique is developed simultaneously to the transposition of objects into the museum, a place that allows the fabrication of stable conditions of preservation over time. Indeed, museification aims to extend the material life of these perishable objects made of organic materials, which coincided with their removal from the cultural environments they were part of. The journal strives to understand the practices of museum conservation and their unpredictable long-term effects in the broader context of the uses of chemicals in modern times, carried by the belief in technological progress.

Kapwani Kiwanga, Forms of Absence, vidéo, couleur, 6’08 min, 2014 © Adagp, Paris, 2021. Courtesy: l’artiste et la galerie Jérôme Poggi, Paris; Tanja Wagner gallery, Berlin et Goodman gallery, London, Johannesburg et Cape Town. Pour une discussion de la toxicité et des collections coloniales dans le travail de Kapwani Kiwanga, voir Arndt 2021.

Rather than isolating museums, and in particular so-called ethnographic and natural history museums, from their social context, the contributions question the links between museum practices and the far-reaching and often violent social and economic transformations provoked by colonial and capitalist modernity. It proposes to go beyond the walls of the museum, and to think of these intoxicated collections in the larger frame of an extractivist mode of production deployed on a global scale (Gómez-Barris 2017; Bednik 2019); an economic model that favors the maximization of profit at the expense of the long, patient work of maintenance and care required by multiple worlds, populated by complex, perishable co-habitats (Domínguez Rubio 2015; Beltrame 2018). The practices of conservation are here put into perspective with the unequal exposure of bodies to environmental risks and with the physical and symbolic violence that is integral to a racialized and gendered distribution of contaminations on a global scale (Agard-Jones 2013; Povinelli 2016; Ferdinand 2019).

This focus on the toxic survivals of colonial collections also reacts to another current conjuncture: Following the Report on the Restitution of African Cultural Heritage (Sarr/Savoy 2018), the debate on restitution has intensified, notably in Europe and Africa. It is now frequently pursued at the state and diplomatic levels, but it is then often disconnected from the activists who have prepared and carried these claims for many years or decades. However, the recently declared ambition of a certain number of museums to « decolonize » collections and practices will not simply erase with a wave of the hand the tenacious effects of the consequences of the hierarchical classification of humans and living worlds, which were notably established by scientific institutions and museums. As Sumaya Kassim points out, « the legacies of European colonialism are immeasurably deep, far-reaching, and ever-changing, and so resistance and decolonial work must take a variety of forms and methods and evolve accordingly. » (Kassim 2017).

In order to react to the ongoing power over objects exercised by museums, some resort to direct interventions: In June 2020, the pan-African activist Mwazulu Diyabanza, together with a group of allies, attempted to remove a slender 19th-century wooden funerary post from Chad, exhibited at the Quai Branly Museum in Paris, while broadcasting the predictable failure of the attempt live by phone on social media. This mode of mediatization, repeated in other actions in several European museums afterwards, points at the rigidity of the legal ownership of the artifacts, which is little shaken by the state’s piecemeal transfer of a few selected objects as a ‘consoling exception’ (to use Delahaye’s term, coined in 2021 for selective class mobility). Among the large number of symbolic and artistic events relating to colonial collections in recent years (see, for example, Haeckel 2021), this action, which the group calls « active diplomacy », has sparked outrage among many museums, as it actively appropriates decision-making power on how objects in these collections are used.

« Diplomatie active » de Mwazulu Diyabanza et allié.e.s. au Musée du Quai Branly, Jacques Chirac, Paris, juin 2020. Voir pour une documentation des actions : Allan Clarke, Lisa McGregor, « The man snatching Africa’s ‘stolen’ treasures from the museums of Europe », abc net, 8 Sep 2021.

It is in this context that the slow awareness of the possible or proven intoxication of objects in storerooms and exhibitions is interfering with the processes of restitution and the questioning of a renewal of museum practices. Their diasporic location (Peffer 2005) in European museums has lastingly transformed these artifacts, but also the societies from which they originate and those who present them in the display cases. The prohibition of touching the objects in the museum, and the neglect of the involvement of these « mutants » (Diagne 2020) in living practices are at issue (Deliss 2020), at a time when some institutions are proposing to shift the focus from « conservation to conversation » (Snoep 2020). While many museums are now deciding to better protect their employees and implement less invasive conservation methods that do not permanently alter the material condition of objects (such as the so-called « Integrated Pest Management » that operates without the use of pesticides, Pinninger 2015), testing (one-off or generalized) of objects for suspected toxicity, and decontamination treatments, this issue aims to explore some of the epistemological and political issues at stake in the cultural history of poisons used in collections. If poison is an agent operating in the long term, imperceptibly interfering with bodies and cultural relations mediated by objects, it can warn against an overly technical, too rapid and too restricted conception of future restitutions. It allows us to consider the transformative power of toxicities that act (often painfully) in bodies by blurring their boundaries with the environment (Chen 2012). It is then a matter of admitting their violence, of recognizing the embarrassing affects they provoke (Dibosa 2021), and of refusing an external and uninvolved stance. The issue is also to take responsibility for the ever-renewed, modern promise of clean technologies, without environmental and human costs, and to blame it’s uncontrollable, sometimes deadly and always unevenly distributed consequences (Alaimo 2016).

Several contributors to this issue self-critically interrogate their work conducted in transnational structures between Africa and Europe. Like them, most of the editorial board of the journal Trouble in the Collections is based in Europe; French institutions provide the little funding that the journal perceives. The multiple and complex issues for researchers, artists, museums, and institutions on the African continent, in Europe, and around the world raised by this situation require to take into account the many risks of re-conducting structures of domination or symbolic profit (see Liepsch/Warner/Pees 2018) and calls for self-reflexivity. « Staying with the trouble », in the sense that Tahani Nadim gave to this Harawayian idea during her performative research in the storerooms of the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin (Bureau for Troubles, Museum of Natural History, Berlin), does not promise simple solutions for structural asymmetries and their consequences but forces to rethink the conditions of transnational collaborative work so that it can become transformative.

Therefore, in her paper Worldly Rights from her fundamental book Unlearning Imperialism. Potential History (2019), Ariella Aïsha Azoulay insists on the inextricable entanglement of colonial collections with the heavy consequences on the societies from which the objects emanate: « If what (archives and museums) preserve is taken from living worlds, (…) their study cannot be limited to what they contain, but must include the role they play in this enterprise of world destruction – in the production of what Hannah Arendt calls worldlessness » (Azoulay 2019, pp- 19-20). Her film Undocumented. Unlearning Imperial Plunder (2019), here subtitled in French, claims the right of people, who have been forced to move and whose material goods have been expropriated, to live near the musealized traces of their culture.

In the interview The damage is permanent. Now what are we going to do? Jimmy W. Arterberry, former administrator and historic preservation officer for the Comanche Nation in the United States, reflects on the repatriations he accompanied under the federal Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), passed in 1990. In dialogue with Annette Arkeketa‘s images from her film Muh-duu’ Kee: Put Them Back (2004), he notes the definitive damage caused by colonization and questions the possible grounds for reconstruction.

The next two contributions examine, from a critical perspective, conservation practices in Western museums: in Insecticides as Silent Witnesses in the Collections of the Ethnological Museum Berlin, Helene Tello, conservator of the museum’s American ethnological collections for more than two decades and author of a dissertation on the history of pesticide use in this institution, traces certain practices and uses of chemicals from the end of the nineteenth to the beginning of the twentieth century. In particular, she points out the numerous entanglements between the chemical industry and museum conservation, which led German museums to use in part substances produced for military use during the First World War. Noémie Etienne, professor of history of art at the University of Bern, examines controversial cases in several American and European museums. She discusses the conflicts between the imperative of material preservation of objects imposed by Western museums and the conceptions of representatives of the societies from which these artifacts originate. The author considers conservation to be « toxic when it opposes the expectations of the producers of the artifacts as well as the well-being of the objects » and advocates for the control of the producers and their heirs over the objects and their uses.

In a two-part lecture entitled Killing-Conserving-Bring Back to Life?¹, Lotte Arndt and Samir Boumediene address the practices of colonial collecting and museum conservation that separate objects from the ever-changing environments in which they were collected, and transfer them to institutions that aspire to make them materially stable and durable over time. They trace how plants, artifacts, knowledge, and human remains thus reified and recontextualized in museum settings have been reduced to classified objects available for life sciences or anthropology. Drawing on their respective research on artists’ practices regarding biocides in museum collections and on the history of the patrimonialization of knowledge, they trace the reconfigurations of certain forms of conservation, examine their epistemological implications, and question the possibilities of reviving museumized objects.

The following contributions take place at the heart of the toxicity of racist representations and the destructive potential of images, to ‘stay with the trouble’ (Haraway 2016) and think from affects, such as shame, depression, anxiety and rage. A scholar in museum studies and reader at the University of the Arts, London (UAL), David Dibosa questions the possible positions of cultural institutions at the time of the contestation of imperial representations through the debunking of monuments of the slave trade in British public space. In his paper, he interrogates the potential of embarrassment and shame to engage in depth with cultural institutions. Considering embarrassment as an affect from which to understand the fundamental impact of colonial policies and racism on all aspects of society, it could allow to avoid hasty and superficial measures, which fail to truly transform structures.

Artist Sybil Coovi Handemagnon‘s photographic collages delve into the genealogies of racial representations in Europe, which she is painfully led to confront and traverse, in order to carry out a work of reconstruction. Faced with the crushing weight of colonial collections and imperial representations, she asserts her gaze amidst the acute interferences that these images produce. While they escape her control, they can become « audible » (in the sense of Listening to images, allowing them to be « heard » in reverse of their initial functionality – ID photos, police archives… – outlined by Tina Campt 2017) and participate in precarious chosen filiations, such as they take shape in the work Parce que Hier ne sera pas comme Demain [Because Yesterday Won’t be like Tomorrow].

During the editing of this issue, an unexpected resonance emerged between Coovi Handemagnon’s images and Florian Fischer‘s dramatic text, Toxicide, here translated from German. While the two artists are involved in projects that may seem far apart – the difficult affirmation of one’s own voice in the face of the weight of colonial violence and its contemporary vestiges, for one; the narration of the economic and material dimensions of toxicity in Europe, and its inscriptions in languages and subjectivities, for the other – their work echoes with each other, renders the material haunting and evokes « that animated state in which a repressed or unresolved social violence is making itself known […] when home becomes unfamiliar, when your bearings on the world loose direction » (Gordon 2008, xvi). Based on extensive research bringing together industrial scandals, and the altered sensibilities of bodies through toxicity, Fischer anchors his narrative in the contaminations through language, which involves the narrator in the transmission of fascist and genocidal history. By investing the corrosive charge of language, he scrutinizes the modes of subjectivation, entangling chemical contamination and social damage.

Resonating in many ways with this contribution, the film theorist Anaïs Farine questions filmic representations of chemical pollution and looks at the explosiveness of the Nitrate Archives. Her text gathers snippets of events that are knotted around nitrocellulose, ammonium nitrate and their different uses, from the first cinematographic films to the highly flammable fertilizers that exploded in the port of Beirut in the summer of 2020. She brings together preliminary reflections from her ongoing investigation and employs what she calls « grasshopper effects » as a method for interrogating connections between disasters that, at first glance, seem disconnected.

The issue continues by opening up on social and ecological struggles in the Caribbean. Curator Clelia Coussonnet discusses the transformative practice of artist Minia Biabiany. She describes the convocation of physical and psychic traumas in the artist’s works, as well as the porosity and fragility of bodies. She returns to the resistance to pesticide contamination (specifically chlordecone) transmitted since marooning through generations. The author argues that contamination – not only by chemicals but also by racism and colonial policies – is countered in Biabiany’s artistic work, by gestures and words, carried out in interstitial spaces and opening up potentials of care and attention that enable co-habitations of fragile and interdependent lives.

Finally, three contributions around the association and biennale Picha in Lubumbashi, Democratic Republic of Congo, which interrogate toxicity as a condition of existence that has inextricably affected social worlds, closes the issue. Based on the discussions of the Picha collective, anthropologist Filip De Boeck outlines the intentions of the next Lubumbashi Biennale, scheduled for 2022, and entitled ToxiCité. Accompanied by images from Frank Mukunday and Tétshim‘s film Machini (2019), which reconstructs with stones and drawings the daily mining life of the Katanga region, he connects urbanization to the mining industries that produce the « zero world » (Achille Mbembe, 2014) of the Capitalocene, and in which social and mental damage abounds. This biennial will propose a focus on toxicity as a starting point for the collective elaboration of a critical and transformative take on the social and cultural environment, in Lubumbashi and in the world. In his contribution, Mega Mingiedi Tunga, an artist living and working in Kinshasa, insists on the importance of inter-generational transmission and on the harmful effects of the economic dependency of Europe. His text claims for the right to decide on ones own future, and for the conditions to render this possible. Lucrezia Cippitelli, artistic director of Ateliers Picha, closes the section. In her contribution Towards the symbiotic planet?, she describesthe collective work carried out by the artists gathered in Lubumbashi between the different editions of the biennial. While questioning the economic precariousness of an artistic association without structural funding, she examines the thin line between the extraversion that reaffirms the centrality of Europe in the recognition of artistic work and the elaboration of significant practices on a local scale.

Translations: Mariquian Ahouansou, Lotte Arndt and Sophie Provost. Proofreading: Emmanuelle Chérel (French) and Sophie Provost (English). We warmly thank the authors and artists for their contributions, all the friends that generously accompanied the issue along the way, and Marie-Pierre Groud for the graphic design and technical support.