ABSTRACT
In Chapter 9, research academics Kate Hennessy and Hannah Turner reflect on the politics of materiality and the possibilities for digital technology to support repatriation and return. Focusing on the creation of Wrapped in the Cloud (2018) by Haida and Kwakwaka’wakw artist Jaad Kuujus (Meghann O’Brien), they discuss how this media work articulates the unbreakable connection between the material and digital, knowledge, and practice, and ancestors and descendants through the past, present, and future. They position Wrapped in the Cloud as a postdigital contemporary artwork that reflects growing curatorial confidences in new media technologies that are not primarily oriented toward the replication of objects or belongings, but to more experimental possibilities for digital to support expressions and practices of reconnection and reclamation, including decolonial curatorial work within both memory and contemporary art institutions. Detailing the multimedia work of the Making Culture Lab and its approach to documenting and safeguarding cultural heritage through collaboration with community, this chapter demonstrates in practice how knowledge, materials, and responsibility transcends institutional and technical boundaries. According to the authors, postdigital museum work is part of a web of relationships that support cultural continuity and extends well beyond the museum space.
