ABSTRACT
This chapter takes as its starting point a historical photographic collection now held by the ethnographic museum MARKK in Hamburg, Germany, to reflect on the role of ethnographic photography and filmmaking in the colonization of peoples, cultures, and territories. Questions of access and remediation are discussed, using the image collection of the so-called Hamburg South Seas Expedition as an example. By reanalyzing selected photographs from this collection, the author first asks how Western modes of knowledge production, circulation, and archiving can be questioned and decolonized, and then examines how such sensitive ethnographic image collections may be reactivated and opened to different curatorial practices and artistic interventions. In conclusion, the chapter argues for a “decolonial archivology” that accounts for the decolonial potential of other knowledge practices as well as digital media.
