A public program realized in the framework of the multi-part project Fragments of Repair

Broadcast live from BAK, Utrecht and New York

Taking place on Thursday 24 June 2021, the fifth gathering of Fragments of Repair/Gatherings, consists of a screening of artist Kader Attia’s The Object’s Interlacing (2020), followed by a conversation between Souleymane Bachir Diagne (philosopher New York/Dakar) and Wayne Modest (material culture curator and researcher, Amsterdam/Rotterdam).

In his film The Object’s Interlacing (2020), Kader Attia interviews different practitioners on the subject of restitution of African cultural artefacts that were violently displaced into western ownership during the era of historical colonialisms. Considered from various contemporary perspectives—philosophical, legal, anthropological, psychoanalytical, and economic, as well as from the viewpoint of collecting and museology—the assembly of voices unfolds an understanding of restitution as a practice of repair that reaches far beyond the matter of simply returning plundered objects to their place of origin. “When you talk about the return of objects,” one protagonist asks, “where are they going to return to?” Do they return merely as goods or are the immaterial qualities they once held reclaimable? If they are “irreparable,” can this “irreparable repair” become a source of creative reinvention, in spite of persisting colonial asymmetries?

Video registration of this program (excluding the film):