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the visitor talks back. performance at Albertinum. Dresden. 2024
reading the comments of the spectators selected from the visitor's cards, listen to these voices that otherwise remain on the institutional reports as numbers on the performance reports, act as evidence of public engagement provided for funding application, stage a scene as a proof that museums provide democratic public spaces letting the visitors to participate in the discussion opened by the institutional agenda. In these comments on the other hand, we see a public discussion that does not fit into the institutional definition of a utopian and idealistic "public sphere".

as part of Transcultural Academy’s field trip we visited the Menschen (an)Schauen exhibition at Dresden City Museum. The show reflected on the human zoo at the Dresden Zoological Garden between 1878 and 1934. This human exhibitions served and created images of the “colonial other” “that still have an effect today in racist clichés and ideas of the “us” and the “other”, the exhibition text read(https://stmd.de/programm/ausstellungen/menschenanschauen). When visiting the exhibition, what struck me most was the visitor’s comments.

The cards were displayed as part of the exhibition on a board with the title “my point of view”. These cards demonstrated how the exhibition's main theme, the practice of displaying the colonial other as an object of curiosity, fear and desire in the format of the human zoo resonates today with the visitors. The visitors reflected on the colonial violence documented by the exhibition, responded to each other’s comments and posed questions in regards to everyday racism today. In these comments one could at times witness very direct, unprecedented and sometimes blunt responses and questions to one another. Some visitors would cross over another visitor’s comment because they find their opinion unacceptable, some would voice their surprise or write down their rage directly on that person's card.

In the book “White Fragility” Robin DiAngelo considers such responses as typical reactions showing the difficulty white people experience when addressing everyday racism. At this point I began to delve more into “whiteness studies” and try to find parallels with my personal experience. I had the chance to exchange our experiences with Manu. Even at a distance through a language that is distant, non-native and unfamiliar to both of us, this desire to understand one another, the two stranger trying to close the distance allowed me the space to reflect on these voices and how they resonate with me.

Another leeway I tried to access these comments has been through the shifting definitions and design of the ethnographic museums. I had the chance to visit the Werld museum the former Troppen museum in Amsterdam, the World museum in Vienna and some of the collections at Humbold Forum. For me, again these shifts in the agendas of ethnographic museum also reflect the ethics and politics of encounter, how institutions cope with deeply violent histories of colonization. When I asked Manu, what she thinks about these shifts, she said she cannot comment on these because she has been avoiding such museums for decades. And this made me wonder whom these institutional statements address. What are we doing here holding these cards, reading the responses of the visitors. Whose voice we are listening to?
And what am I doing here?
And what am I doing here?

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