Talking Objects Archive

Review: "The Talking Objects Archive (TOA) is a digital platform that draws on museum objects from Musée Théodore Monod/IFAN (Dakar), the Rautenstrauch-Joest Museum (Cologne), the Museum Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt), the GRASSI Museum für Völkerkunde (Leipzig) and the Museum Europäischer Kulturen (Berlin) whose histories are marked by the legacy of colonial exploitation. This site is part of an ongoing artistic research project that aims to decolonize knowledge and memory by centering both African objects as well as indigenous, African knowledge systems, which includes communal, participatory knowledge creation. This approach enables TOA to be able to provide more expansive understandings of the objects by surrounding the objects with a multiplicity of narratives from some of the many contributors that have worked on the project. Designed for exploration, the digital archive is named "Talking Objects" to emphasize the value of the links between objects (or, objects in conversation with each other) and also to provide a platform where contributors can augment information records with their own perspectives (or, people in conversation with the objects)."