Publications

Yip, A. 2023. ‘Re-sounding the museum instrument collections through artistic experimentation’. In: Monika Żyła (ed), Glissando. Series ‘Diversity. Curating’, vol. 43. Warsaw : Fundacja 4.99, pp. 98-103. (PR)

Chapter in an edited book / Article in an edited book

The article will discuss the methodological approach of an ongoing pilot project ReSoXy: Re-sounding the Manza Xylophones Collection of the Africa Museum, Tervuren (Belgium). Mostly performed in the Azande regions and the north of Democratic Republic Congo, the manza xylophones are (were) owned by chiefs and notables, and performed in court ceremonies. The instruments were acquired by the colonizers of Belgian Congo in 1911-13; and in spite of being the symbols of authority political power, these instruments have been on the decline for decades (Girogetti 1951, Michiels 1986). ReSoXy seeks for an approach that enables us to configure ‘a different same’ for these captured objects, and restore to these objects and their source communities the meanings that once belonged to them, but now erased and reshaped irreversibly by a plurality of semantic, symbolic, and epistemological systems for more than a century (Njami 2018, 2019; Sarr & Savoy 2018: 30). In ReSoXy, we would like to resound and rediscover the musical practice of the manza xylophones through artistic experimentation, and carry out participatory creative actions as the preferred approach of repatriation, albeit returning the musical objects only. The manza xylophones are not mere objects kept in museum vitrines and storage rooms, but agencies of the disappearing/ disappeared court music traditions in Central Africa. ReSoXy aims at organizing co-creation and co-experimentation with the source communities to revive the declining tradition, as well as educational activities to share and communicate research results with the general public. In spite of continuing the contexts of colonialism, and the colonial practices of collecting and displaying (Van Beurden 2015: 145), the xylophone collection is considered as the agency of ‘re-centering’ Africa (Mbembe 2015), a medium for the source communities to voice their cultures and worldviews at both global and local levels. The project will lead us to reconsider the issues of restitution, and the roles and ownerships of museum collections in the post-independence world.