Reframing Colonial Legacies

The return of the Benin Bronzes by Germany to Nigeria in 2022 marked a symbolic step towards decolonization and sparked debates about ownership and cultural responsibility. The calls for the restitution of stolen artefacts, such as those made by Ghana’s Asantehene, highlight the urgent necessity of reassessing colonial legacies.

The academic training project ‘Reframing Colonial Legacies’ explicitly addresses colonial legacies and their lasting impacts as a current debate in foreign cultural policy. The project provides participants with skills to critically examine and reframe colonial legacies, decolonial memory culture, and power-critical international collaboration. It also promotes the transfer of knowledge between academia and practice. By fostering sustainable international cultural cooperation, the project encourages transcultural dialogue and supports active engagement with colonial legacies. The aim is to discuss new approaches to proactively shape social debates and enable alternative processes of decolonization that contest existing power dynamics between academia and cultural practice.

The following topics will be addressed and discussed in the training:

• Colonial history and memory culture between Ghana and Germany (including field trips to slave castles and museums in Ghana)
• Germany's foreign cultural policy with regard to colonial legacies
• Restitution of cultural properties
• Feminist approaches in memory culture and cultural policy
• Decolonial international cultural relations
• Cultural mediation of colonial objects and architecture with augmented reality (AR)
• Colonial gaze and transcultural production and cooperation