You are looking at a basket made of woven birch roots. Baskets are for collecting. This basket itself is part of a collection—the collection of the Museum of European Cultures (MEK). In the 19th century, it was “collected” by the Prussian ethnologist Wilhelm Crahmer in the Swedish Sápmi region. The term “collecting” suggests a free availability of objects that can be taken without resistance, like berries. However, Crahmer’s collecting trips took place within the framework of ethnological research on the Sami, following a human zoo exhibition in Berlin.

The audio work contrasts the basket in the museum with voices reflecting on the other side of collecting: what we find in a museum in Germany today is absent elsewhere. Drawing on the perspectives of three interviews, the basket is confronted with the traces of its history today.

The objects in the museum do not only tell us something about the culture and era they come from—they also bear witness to the colonial entanglements of German-European history, which persist to this day. The audio piece seeks to make space for different Sami voices that speak about collecting and loss—and thus also about the history of the museum itself.

In conversation with Inga Marie Nymu Riseth, who works theoretically and practically on human rights and democracy promotion in Norway; the Sami reindeer herder and Duodji artist Niká Pitja; and the Sami archaeologist, museologist, and cultural scholar Liisa-Rávná Finbog, the audio feature brings together voices that intertwine with the basket and embed it within a larger context of postcolonial continuities.

Originating from a seminar on the possibilities of narrating postcolonial entanglements, a collaboration between the Institute for European Media Studies and the Museum of European Cultures (MEK) at the University of Potsdam was established in 2020. To complement the exhibition HANDS ON – Braiding, students developed media works addressing the postcolonial entanglements of individual objects