Sensing Loss – Uni Köln goes r e t u r n: 60 Minutes AnthroLab.

Donnerstags 16:30-17:30Uhr 

Prof. Dr. Franz Krause (Köln): Sensing Loss im Mackenzie-Delta: Auf der Suche in den Sedimenten vergangener Zukünfte

What remains of a future that never came to pass? In the Mackenzie Delta in Canada’s Northwest, we encounter numerous such remnants: a sunken oil barge, abandoned camps, a decommissioned radar station, contaminated soil. They are part of a landscape into which past visions of the future have been inscribed—from the development of the delta as a major oil and gas field to the military securing of the Arctic.
The lecture takes these traces as its starting point and follows the people who live with them today. The Gwich’in and Inuvialuit do not simply encounter the remnants of earlier projects as ruins of a bygone era. Some become landmarks on journeys, some become workplaces, and others become burdens that must still be dealt with decades later. At the same time, dilapidated houses and camps point to more profound changes in ways of life, relationships, and landscapes.
The ethnographic observations show that loss in the delta does not arise solely where something disappears. It can also lie in the fact that anticipated futures fail to materialize or that past possibilities continue to shape the present. Thus, the sediments of past futures become starting points for new plans—but also obstacles that block certain paths to the future.

————

Die Diskussionsreihe Sensing Loss bringt ethnologische Forschungen aus der Universität ins Museum. Sozial- und Kulturanthropolog:innen aller Karrierestufen berichten aus ihren aktuellen Forschungen, wie Menschen Verlust erfahren und Verlusterfahrungen bearbeiten. Sensing Loss fragt, wie Verlust begegnet, verkörpert und verräumlicht wird – und wie aus Vertreibung, Enteignung und vergangenem Unrecht neue Zukünfte gewonnen werden können. Erfahrungen des Verlusts (loss), ihre Konfrontation und Aufarbeitung [r e t u r n] sind dabei so vielfältig wie die Situationen, in denen Menschen Kolonialismus, Marginalisierung oder Gewalt begegnen. Die öffentlichen Vorträge diskutieren Formen des Sensing, über die Menschen Verlust gewahr werden, und Sense Making, d.h. die Frage, wie Menschen Verlusterfahrungen eine Bedeutung verleihen. Trauer, Verlust und Erinnerung können zur Quelle werden, Ansprüche an die Gegenwart zu artikulieren und zwischen Menschen und Orten, Vergangenheit und Zukunft neue Verbindungen zu erarbeiten. Im Sinne der Ausstellung r e t u r n  beschäftigen sich die Vorträge mit ganz unterschiedlichen Momenten und Formen der Trauer, der Nostalgie, der Erinnerungsarbeit und des gemeinsamen Aufbruchs. 

————

The lecture series Sensing Loss connects anthropological thinking across university and museum spaces. Social and cultural anthropologists at all career stages discuss their ongoing research to explore how people sense and make sense of loss. Sensing Loss asks how loss is experienced, embodied and spatialized – and how displacement, dispossession and past injustices can become sources for new future-making practices. Experiences of loss, their confrontation, and the ways in which people try to come to terms with them – and find ways to r e t u r n – are as diverse as the situations in which people experience colonialism, violence or marginalization.

The public lectures discuss how grief, loss and remembrance can become resources for articulating claims on the present, and for shaping new connections between people and places, past and future. In resonance with the exhibition r e t u r n at the RJM, the lectures engage with diverse moments and forms of grief, nostalgia and memory work, as well as with joint departures into new futures.