Mining Colonial Museums: Data, Archives, Storerooms

What a piece of quartz or a dinosaur's bone can tell about colonial practices of silencing the past.

During the imperial era, museums played a pivotal role in the often violent extraction of cultural heritage, natural specimens, and raw materials. In the last decades, artists, scholars, and activists have critically assessed this history, calling on museums to engage with their colonial legacies and take a stance against racism.

Surrounded by thousands of rocks exhibited in the Mineral Hall of the Berlin Museum für Naturkunde, we ask ourselves: what histories can these objects tell us? In the next room, we can see one of the most controversial examples of natural history: the dinosaur skeleton of Brachiosaurus brancai.

We wonder: are the collection practices of minerals and fossils comparable? Who collected them? How did they end up in the museum? These questions direct our attention to the provenance of the objects and the entanglements between natural history, colonialism, and extractivism. Departing from the history of minerals, our four interventions explore different historical contexts of colonial extraction in Africa, from Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia to Tanzania and Cameroon.

Drawing on pioneering work by Fred Wilson and Clémentine Deliss, this interactive workshop asks the question: What is not visible in this room?