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.

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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.