As Never Before, As Never Again: On Not Knowing

Abstract

ABSTRACTA process of questioning, be it within artistic practice or ethnographic research, necessarily starts from a state of “not-knowing”. In this account of an artistic intervention in an ethnological museum, I would like to repeatedly return to a state of not-knowing, of remaining confused or provoked, and see it as a valuable way to both engage with a historically and politically complex site and reconsider our encounter with the inanimate world of objects that remain confined within institutions of knowledge production. In a descriptive and inquisitive mode of ethnographic writing I tentatively consider how the not-knowing manifested itself in the various audio-visual, material, and performative outputs that were part of this time- and site-specific project, and how this might then contribute to ideas around (new) forms of representation, (new) materialism in relation to (new) technologies, and how the introduction of 3D printing into this context might relate to troubled concepts such as (digital) repatriation, ownership, and authenticity.