The Catalogue of Speculative Translations, Act II : Fugitivities

As part of a larger project that takes a critical look at the exhibition in French museums of objects removed from African material culture, The Catalogue of Speculative Translations, Act II: Fugitivities creates escapes from the architecture where colonial captures are locked up, thereby short-circuiting the museological device that, through its sampling, labeling, and imposed knowledge, seizes human lives and material bodies. Act II, Fugitivities, is intended as a response to the Musée d’Arts Africains, Océaniens, Amerindiens (MAAOA) in Marseille, located in a building that once served as a transit center and infirmary for soldiers seconded to or recruited in the French colonies. The objects held in the MAAOA, like the men who preceded them, were called upon to serve the French colonial empire both economically and in terms of representation. Considering that museums and archives are places of erasure, the Catalogue invents strategies of obfuscation, repetition, fabulation, translation, and transposition. It is about reviving memories and knowledge specific to diasporas that are at the heart of the practices of fugitivity—this flight to places of possibility that are still unknown. And this, not with the aim of making visible what has been erased, but in the hope of creating new zones of sensory and narrative opacity.