What We See. Reconsidering an Anthropometrical Collection from Southern Africa: Images, Voices, and Versioning

Book title: What We See
Subtitle: Reconsidering an Anthropometrical Collection from Southern Africa: Images, Voices, and Versioning
Editor: Anette Hoffmann
Publisher: Basler Afrika Bibliographien
Basel, Switzerland 2009
ISBN 9783905758108 / ISBN 978-3-905758-10-8
Softcover, 22x26 cm, 233 pages, illustrations, photographs

Description:

“I did not hear anything, my eyes were blocked, and what was being played I ...., but I could not breathe with my mouth, ears were blocked, ears were sore, sore, sore, sore, that is how it was and I sweated, wet, wet, wet from my sweat (laughing), and when it was lifted from my face, I was able to get my breath back.”

Petrus Goliath spoke these words into a phonograph just after he had gone through the painful and offensive experience of casting, measuring, and photographing in the Witpütz policestation in southern Namibia. The German artist Hans Lichtenecker created this bizarre archive of racial types in 1931. Soon afterwards, the casts of faces and body parts, voice recordings on wax cylinders, anthropometrical photographs and other physical representations were exhibited in at the colonial exhibition in Köln, Germany (1934) and, again in the 1980s in the Namibian capital of Windhoek.

This book, which accompanies the exhibition What we See, engages with the anthropometrical archive and its canned voices theoretically, visually and artistically. Its essays reconsider anthropometric collections and their representational claims through bones, skeletons, casts, masks, and photography.

Content: What We See. Reconsidering an Anthropometrical Collection from Southern Africa: Images, Voices, and Versioning

Contents
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Making of Casts
Anette Hoffmann: Widerspenstige Simmen - Unruly Voices
Ruth Sonderegger: What one does (not) hear
Approaching canned voices through Rancière
Esther Peeren: Seeing more (Hi)Stories:
Versioning as a Resignificatory Practice in the What We See Exhibition and the Work of Sanell Aggenbach and Mustafa Maluka
Portraits: Andreas Goliath, Haneb, Lena, Wilfred Tijiueza and Isaak Witbooi
Anette Hoffmann: Finding Words (of Anger)
Showing of Casts
Udo Krautwurst: The Joy of Looking:
Early German Anthropology, Photography and Audience Formation
Martin Legassick & Ciraj Rassool: South African Museums and Human Remains
Fiona Clayton: Bones of Conflict
Biographical Information
List of Abbreviations
Visual Material
Bibliography