Counter-Inventory

The inventory has historically served as the quintessential epistemic device of the colonial museum: a tool for numbering, classifying, and reifying objects and artifacts while erasing their origins and trajectories. Counter-Inventory seeks to overturn this logic. Starting from one or more elements of material culture, each installment reconstructs their biographies, tracing their uses and meanings in their original contexts, their colonial extraction, museum acquisition, and subsequent reactivation within contemporary artistic practices. These histories unfold through the voices of diaspora artists and, whenever possible, through primary sources and interviews. For matter is never neutral: it absorbs, preserves, and redistributes relations of power, memory, creativity, and narrative. Counter-Inventory is a column curated by Giulia Garzione.