Transmitting the Intangible
Welcome to the symposium “Transmitting the Intangible: Indigenous Perspectives on Sustaining Memory and Contemporary Culture”!
This symposium considers various forms of indigenous cultural preservation. It is a two-day hybrid event, blending both online and offline components, featuring presentations, workshops, and panel discussions. The symposium is relevant to people who are interested in museological traditions, archival practices, and indigenous perspectives.
In conjunction with the ten-year mark of the Future Library, the symposium Transmitting the Intangible takes place 27–28 May 2024 at the Nordic Black Theatre at Cafeteatret in Oslo. The event is free, but registration is required.
Find information on registration here
The symposium explores traditions of safeguarding and care, cultural preservation, and knowledge transmission outside of- and in resistance to Eurocentric frameworks – centring the voices and perspectives of indigenous people, marginalized people, and people with roots in postcolonial contexts.
Art and other cultural manifestations produced by indigenous people today, increasingly expose the limits of prevailing approaches to conservation, archiving and collections management that are rooted in Eurocentric practices. These tend to privilege objects that can be physically or digitally collected, often overlooking networks of human relations and other cultural manifestations and forms of knowledge, that evade capture and domination by Western museological practices of acquisition and archiving. The symposium deals with such matters and explores new possibilities and perspectives on contemporary museological practices.
Program
Presentations, workshops, and panel discussions. The full symposium program will be announced in April. The event will be live-streamed.
Themes
- Transmitting and activating living heritage, and the intangible and ephemeral aspects of art and cultural heritage.
- Ecological stewardship, longtermism, and intergenerational justice.
- Loss, loss compensation, care, and repair.
- The role and generative capacity of ritual, ceremony, and storytelling.
- The ways in which Indigenous knowledge and cultures are incommensurable with non-Indigenous, colonial logics and methods of musealization, conservation and archiving.
Confirmed Speakers and Panellists
This symposium will bring together Sámi, Māori, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders, First Nations, Mixe, and other Indigenous and non-Western artists, archivists, conservators, curators, library and museum professionals, thinkers, and creative practitioners working, both in and outside of academia.
- Yásnaya Elena Aguilar Gil
- Jo-ann Archibald
- Coby Edgar
- Liisa-Rávná Finbog
- Gunvor Guttorm
- Juanita Kelly-Mundine
- Jérémie McGowan
- Anne May Olli
- Joel Taylor
- Nina Tonga
- Marita Isobel Solberg
- Elin Már Øyen Vister
- Solomon Ratt
- Dylan Robinson
Organizers and Program Committee
The symposium is organized by the National Museum of Norway, RiddoDuottarMuseat, and the Future Library. The symposium is supported by the Fritt Ord Foundation and the Sámi Parliament.
- Brian Castriota, National Galleries Scotland / University College London
- Jina Chang, National Museum of Norway
- Rebecca Gordon, independent researcher
- Ayesha Fuentes, University of Cambridge
- Maren Haugfos, Deichman Library
- Anne Beate Hovind, Future Library
- Anne May Olli, RiddoDuottarMuseat
- Anja Sandtrø, National Museum of Norway
- Asti Sherring, National Museum of Australia / Canberra University
