African Belongings in Museums as Invitations to Re-Worlding Technopolitics, Underlife, and the Limits of Museological Common Sense

This paper examines how African belongings held in museum collections can be encountered as invitations to “re-worlding.” Re-worlding refers to practices that seek to reconnect museum-held belongings to the relational worlds—social, material, and cosmological—from which they were separated, without assuming those worlds can be fully restored. Drawing on collaborative projects, Prisoners of Love and Reconnecting Objects, we explore how handling sessions, digital modelling, and speculative art practices enable alternative modes of engagement that exceed conventional museological frameworks. Rather than treating such materials as discrete objects, the paper approaches them as belongings embedded within technopolitical, cosmological, economic, and social infrastructures disrupted by colonial extraction.

We argue that dominant museum practices are underpinned by what we term “museological common sense,” extending Stuart Hall’s notion of common sense as sedimented ideology. This naturalises extraction, classification, and preservation as neutral acts of care while obscuring the carceral and extractive conditions through which African belongings are contained. In response, the concept of re-worlding names a methodological orientation toward reactivating the distributed relations that persist within and beyond museum collections.

Drawing on Clapperton Mavhunga’s work on technopolitics and Erving Goffman’s concept of underlife, the paper foregrounds forms of relational persistence that endure within regimes of archival and institutional capture and, at times, unsettle their classificatory and interpretive order. Through collaborative, sensory, and speculative practices, participants engage belongings as active nodes within ongoing worlds. These engagements enable modest acts of refusal and world-building that unsettle institutional authority without presuming to resolve its structural limits.

We suggest that such practices open alternative trajectories for African art and museological futures—ones that shift emphasis from preservation and interpretation toward relationality, distributed authority, and ongoing processes of world-making.

• https://ifrepo.world/index.php/Detail/pr...
• https://www.prm.ox.ac.uk/reconnecting-ob...
• https://imaginingfutures.world/projects/...