In June, AVReQ Post-Doctoral fellow Dr Sophia Olivia Sanan participated as a delegate in the ‘Global Cultural Assembly’, hosted by the Humboldt Forum in Berlin. The week long gathering brought together scholars, activists, artists, community organisers, researchers and museologists from all over the world, to share their own work, but also to collectively propose a new paradigm of collaborative museology between the Humboldt Forum and the global community who have connections to its collections. The Humboldt Forum acknowledges (as few European institutions are willing to do), the deep colonial roots of museology, and supported the GCA (financially and symbolically) to establish a framework for more ethical, sustained and critical engagements between majority world thinkers and practitioners and some of Germany’s largest colonial museum collections. However, given the uneven playing field of the international cultural economy, and the predicaments and contradictions of the Humboldt Forum in particular, this ambition is fraught with complexity. Here are some of Sophia’s reflections on the week-long gathering and the potential roads ahead.

This reflection and critique is personal and embodied. Being in Germany as a white South African with German immigrant heritage, I felt quite strange and complexed. I am both someone who belongs to the Global South, to Africa, and to the Global North. I am part of a society that is still emerging from centuries of violent racial subjugation and oppression, in which I am both part of processes that perpetuate legacies of this oppression and attempts to heal from them. These compromised positions create a lot of uncertainty and ambivalence, and it is from this unsettled position that I analyze my experiences in the Humboldt Forum and the Global Cultural Assembly, which I was lucky enough to be a part of.

Screenshot from the Humboldt Forum website.

The Humboldt Forum is a contentious, state sponsored public heritage project in the heart of Berlin. A reconstructed Prussian Palace1 replete with a cupola inscribed with a gold-adorned statement by Prussian King Frederick William IV – 1795-1861 that calls for the submission of humanity to Christianity. The Humboldt Forum houses and displays some of the German state’s oldest and most extensive colonial era collections (cared for by the SPK – the Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation) from around the globe. Of the hundreds of thousands of precious artefacts, (or as my fellow delegates insisted at the Global Cultural Assembly, ‘entities’ or ‘beings’), only a fraction are on display in the glossy and impossibly new exhibition chambers of the enormous three storey Humboldt Forum castle. The majority, in keeping with museum protocols around the world, remain in storage in various other locations mostly in the Berlin suburb of Dahlem. As such, despite not claiming to be a universal museum, and in fact to be more than a museum, the Humboldt Forum looks and feels very much like the British Museum and the Louvre and many more around the world.

A rooftop gathering at the Humboldt Forum celebrating the start of the GCA, the notorious cupola in the sunset light, the courtyard of the Humboldt Forum (photos by author, 2025).

However, upon opening in 2020, German Minister of State for Culture Monika Grütters presented the project as a new kind of museum: “(w)ith the opening of the Humboldt Forum, we are handing over to the public … a new type of museum that, in the spirit of the Humboldt brothers, creates a tangible experience of the traditions of the Enlightenment and the ideal of peaceful dialogue between cultures. In so doing, Germany offers itself as a world partner wherever the unfamiliar is greeted with a spirit of curiosity, rather than one of rejection or denigration.” The precious belongings from communities, kingdoms, households, people from all over the world are now held and displayed in a spirit of curiosity, rather than rejection. This bold contention seems worth unpacking.

To me, the Humboldt Forum appeared as a dazzling Baudrillardian puzzle. The building is at once old and ‘heritage’, carved from Bavarian sandstone, and yet completely new: fitted internally with all the 21st century capitalist comforts of climate control, escalators, etc. Three expansive floors house global treasures, neatly cartographised in imperial cultural categories, in a maze of well-lit cabinets and plinths. At first glance, the permanent exhibitions indicate absolute fidelity to the imperial aesthetics of the universal museum – think of the colonial trade fairs and add dramatic mood lighting and some flat screen ethnographic interviews.

Upon closer inspection, the viewer encounters a network of what South African scholar Leslie Witz (2010) calls the dilemma label (which he found to be a pervasive aspect of post-apartheid South African museology as it grappled to change its largely white-washed conventions of public historicization). Many of the Humboldt Forum dilemma labels flag questionable provenance histories of particular parts of the collection. As such, they create a lot of ambiguity in the space. The dilemma labels make evident the need for the institution to present a historical (and ethical) consciousness, but while doing so they risk making a public admission of the unethical nature of retaining ownership of these collections.

Entering into the Africa section of the Ethnographic collections, Rwandan scholar and activist Assumpta Mugiraneza giving a tour to Humboldt Forum visitors, relating entangled stories between German colonialism and the Rwandan genocide (left photo by author, 2025. Right photo taken from the Humboldt Forum social media, 2025).

Beyond the dilemma labels, there is also a clear attempt through accompanying wall texts, visibilised research, multi-media installations and documentaries, to emphasise white culpability, past injustice and (somewhat more vaguely) continuities between colonial and imperial oppression and the current state of the world. The visual interventions that I describe suggest that the Humboldt Forum is attempting to make space for with what Corinne Kratz and Ivan Karp¹ called the ‘museums frictions’, where “disparate communities, interests, goals and perspectives … produce debates, tensions, collaborations, [and] conflicts of many sorts” (2006). However, the space for this friction is very carefully moderated and controlled. The actual sharing of authorial power, not only in what text ends up on accompanying labels, but more fundamentally in terms of what is displayed and how – this still seems some way off.

That being said, various initiatives by the Humboldt Forum (including the project that I am a part of), indicate not only an awareness of the shaky ethical foundations of universal museology but also potentially a willingness to do something about them through (as yet less visible) research projects and interventions underway. A few examples of these are publication projects that invite decolonial critique; research projects such as ‘Intertwined Memories’ which is one of many that fall under the ‘Collaborative Museum’ – a three year project aimed at ‘intensifying the decolonisation of all aspects of collection-related museum work at the Ethnologisches Museum and the Museum fur Asiatische Kunst’; events programs such as Objects Talk Back, a rich engagement between authors from around the world and objects in the Humboldt Forum collection, and finally in fact the Global Cultural Assembly itself.

The Global Cultural Assembly is an attempt to create a long term, collective engagement between the Humboldt Forum (and by extension the German publics) and individuals and communities from around the world who have claims to and interests in the Humboldt Forum collections. As a result of the week spent together in June 2025 (which itself followed from a large initial gathering in 2023), the GCA now has a formalised group of global representatives (all women incidentally), who act as the conduit between the larger collective and those in positions of power at the Humboldt Forum. The road has been paved at least a little way into the future, for the deepening and expansion of this bridging work – between various worlds – Northern, Southern, hybrid, diasporic. The little gap in the door between the inside and the outside has been widened ever so slightly, and the fight for potentials of inclusion, dialogue, dissent has for now been successful.

Fellow GCA delegate and scholar Imani Tafari Ama reflects on what she perceives the small victories of the GCA: “in the final analysis, the GCA delegates drafted a memorandum of understanding to bear witness to the importance of patient and persistent practices of talking back to institutional power. Delegates emphasised that a shortcut to access will be the digitisation of the massive collections. This finesses the reluctance of the Humboldt Forum to part with the physical entities, which are still imbued with power and value” (2025). I think that these small changes of relational dynamics, carving out little inroads of access to engage with the collections, to think with European curators about the ethics of storytelling, to find some (circumscribed) ways of inviting different ways of knowing, feeling, remembering into a space like the Humboldt Forum should not be dismissed because they fall short of the program of radical re-ordering. However, I think we should be very clear that this is a project of co-operation and collaboration, of epistemic bridge building and the (potential) creation of new languages of respect but certainly not something we can claim as decolonisation or radical re/disordering. The horizon of social justice remains rather uncertain.

I had set off to Berlin from Cape Town with some doubts about the pleading and possibly obsequious nature of the concept of an ‘indigenous people’s embassy’ to an imagined center of the (all) powerful universal museum. Isn’t this a way of reinscribing the legitimacy of those colonial cartographies, the violence of settler identities and their imbrication with our existing concepts of indigeneity? Can new relational possibilities be brokered when those outside the centers of power still refer to themselves as ‘the collected’ and the powerful Europeans as ‘the collectors’? How can we birth a new paradigm from within this harsh binary? Isn’t it too much to expect the collections, and their (im)possible return, reinterpretation, re-imagination to do all this difficult healing work? Haven’t they for too long acted as proxies? What is the new relational ethics that we keep positing on the museum horizon?

As I left Berlin, I was thinking less about what museums can and cannot do – this will always fall short of expectation because of the nature of institutions and their embeddedness in the material and symbolic architecture of the status quo. Rather, what do our expectations about museums and how we want them to change tell us about the kind of world that we want to see emerging in our current state of planetary collapse? It is in this sincere expression of a desire to present a different way of relating between people and things, people and land, people with (and not on) the earth; that can be located in indigenous people’s struggles, in the collective aesthetic projects emerging under the rough umbrella of global southness, in the global galvanization against war, suffering and genocide.

What exactly are the stakes in these concepts: possession and belonging? This arrangement of cultural relationships? Why is it so hard to imagine a world in which there are different arrangements, possibilities of belonging? Responses to these questions started to take shape for me after a week spent in the company of such diverse people, emerging from life-worlds spread across the globe, with different vocabularies, blind spots, worldviews. The small overlaps of consensus – shared histories of pain, displacement, longing, nurturing, forgetting – these could be grasped and sketched out on sheets of paper as some mark of commonality. I left with new ideas about belonging as opposed to possession, of non-linear understandings of time as opposed to closed chapters of history.

Katrin Antweiler beautifully describes the possibilities that emerge when our dominant historiographic modes (inscribed so strongly by traditional museology) are not bound by linear conceptions of time. She urges us to “think of time in more relational terms to raise an awareness of the impacts that people and events that came before us might still have; so that we do not close chapters of history but are instead always, in some ways, connected to and affected by them. To assume that the past is something that is over and behind us allows for the notion of progress, which holds the prospect of redemption or atonement for wrongdoing rather than the continuous responsibility for new relations” (Anweiler, 2023: 267). This responsibility is also painful, time consuming and slow work.

Moments and people at the GCA, June 2025 (photos © Stiftung Humboldt Forum im Berliner Schoss (Valerie von Stillfried)

I recall Sandra Benites, the legendary Guarani activist and curator from Brazil who would clear her throat and request the microphone in the midst of these long and tense deliberations of the Global Cultural Assembly. With the help of her translators, she would slow down the pace of this collective effort to organise, to formalise, to project into the desired future. She would remind us, through protracted and poetic musings, that time itself is relational, our bodies are territories, we arrive both laden with pain and expectation, that we expect both too much and too little from each-other.

The GCA felt like a moment of collective mobilization, across North and South, crucially from within the Humboldt Forum (and mostly women leading this process) and most expressly from without. It was a beautiful, delicate, perhaps always already compromised experiment in cross-cultural communication. Some of the questions that arise for me as I move my mind into the future of this collaboration with the Humboldt Forum are: how do we lay new frames of debate in a globalized context of studying museums and museology, when these frames of debate have been so historically uneven, both by an imbalance of economic might and related epistemic dominance? How do we create transnational spaces of debate in which all speakers have the right to self-identify, to bring to bear their own perspectives and world views? The week of dialogue, tentative and painful listening, feeling so much tension in the body, and releasing it so wildly in dance, song, togetherness through music: it made more tangible these possibilities. The world is a force that moves through us, with us, and our collective ideas about how we might shape our future remain undefined and as yet full of potential.

1 Part of the contention is around the aesthetics of the rebuilt castle, as Nora McGreevy wrote for the Smithsonian Magazine, “the museum’s sprawling, $802 million complex is a partial reconstruction of the Berlin Palace, an 18th-century neoclassical building that once housed Prussian kings and other German royalty (…) East Germany’s communist government demolished the original palace in 1950 and replaced it with a Modernist structure that was subsequently torn down to make way for the Humboldt Forum”

2 Corinne Kratz and Ivan Karp, ‘Introduction: Museum Frictions: Public Cultures / Global Transformations’. In I Karp, C.A. Kratz, L Szwaja and T Ybarra-Frausto, with G Buntinx, B Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and C Rassool (eds), Museum Frictions: Public Cultures / Global Transformations (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006)