International Inventories Programme

How can Kenyan cultural heritage held by cultural institutions in places such as Europe and the USA be made accessible in Kenya as well? This was the focus of the ‘International Inventories Programme’, for which the artists’ collectives The Nest and SHIFT joined forces with the National Museum of Kenya in Nairobi, the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne, the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt am Main and the Goethe-Institut. Together, they catalogued the Kenyan objects in a database to create greater transparency in museum archives. The database comprised over 32,501 objects from thirty different institutions that had made their archive data available. In May 2021, the database was also made accessible to the public. To accompany this, public discussions took place in Kenya under the title ‘Object Movement Dialogues’. In addition to addressing restitution issues, a forum was created in which intellectual and emotional engagement with individual objects took place. As Njoki Ngumi from The Nest asked in one of these dialogues: “Who are the people who left the object behind? And if the object is to return to a society from which it was taken, who are the people with whom the object will come into contact?”

This long-term collaborative and interdisciplinary process resulted in several publications as well as the exhibition “Invisible Inventories”, which was shown in three different versions in 2021. The exhibitions were funded by the German Federal Cultural Foundation. Artistic direction was collectively provided by the team behind the “International Inventories Programme”.

Further information is available at: www.inventoriesprogramme.org