Franziska Moosmann

Contradictory Artifacts: Missionary Collections Between Colonial Knowledge Production and Decolonial Counter-Archives 

The research project examines colonial missionary artifacts as carriers of contradictions in order to explore the material and epistemological heritage of missionary collections. These artifacts combine elements of colonial oppression, spiritual meanings, Christian reinterpretations, resistant agency and intrinsic material logic. The contradictions inherent in them cannot be resolved, but rather form a productive point of departure for analyzing the ambivalences of colonial entanglements. They are conceived as empirical constellations of contradiction – in tension with the ordering figure of contradiction – with the aim of questioning the colonial knowledge produced through missionary activity. 

The first part of the project undertakes a historical analysis of the artifacts and the networks in which they were embedded. It examines the relational entanglements of the artifacts with actors, institutions, knowledge orders and practices. In this perspective, they appear as active components of historical constellations, assuming the role of actors and contributing to the stabilization of colonial meanings and power relations. 

The second part moves beyond the epistemic boundaries of the missionary archive to investigate decolonial and artistic practices that may be understood as counter-archives to the colonial archive. The contradictory relationship between colonial-influenced knowledge in the missionary archive and such counter-archival practices is conceptualized, within the framework of Contradiction Studies, as an epistemic principle that enables the decentering of Western-influenced orders of knowledge in (mission-)historiography.