BLACK LAND, RED LAND – RESTITUTE is an interdisciplinary festival that will critically examine the operational mechanisms and knowledge systems of museums and institutions. Via discursive and artistic processes, participants and audiences will gain a new intimacy with artefacts and narratives from the “holdings” of the Egyptian Museums of Berlin, Germany and Turin, Italy. Across four days from 21 to 28 December 2023, methods developed by the festival team, artists and participants will be shared and discussed with audiences at Silent Green, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Palais am Festungsgraben, and in public space.
ÄM 53’s body, a so-called “mummy,” was removed from Egypt together with its coffin and brought to Berlin back in the nineteenth century; Jean Henry Benjamin Menu, a Prussian officer also known as Freiherr von Minutoli had “acquired” it in the course of an “expedition” supported by Friedrich Wilhelm III, Kaiser of Prussia. Minutoli’s passion for antiquity had been key to the establishment of the Egyptian Museum and Egyptology in general throughout the German-speaking countries. Numerous “objects” Minutoli had shipped to Berlin to form a “collection” are now forever lost after the ship transporting them sank close to its destination of Hamburg; ÄM 53, however, travelled overland to Berlin, a city whose Egyptian Museum proclaims ÄM 53’s coffins to be among the “highlights” of its “collection.” Like ÄM 53’s body, they are now kept in the museum’s Berlin storage depot.
ÄM 53, a commemoration in public space, as part of
BLACK LAND, RED LAND – RESTITUTE
Interdisciplinary Festival 21 – 28 December
silent green, Kunstquartier Bethanien, Palais am Festungsgraben, public space
Per ancient Egyptian belief, the body of a deceased person was connected to the other parts of their personality. ÄM 53’s body was in a state of transfiguration after having entered eternity and overcome death, accompanied by several precautionary measures that sought to ensure the transition would pass unimpeded: items from the local burial site, funerary goods, the coffins, rituals for the deceased, and the calling of their name, both in memory of their person and as a means of ensuring that they would live on during their “coming forth by day.”*
To commemorate ÄM 53 is to memorialize in distorted form; it is an attempt to establish contact and become more familiar with a person who has lost their place of origin, their family, and their gods. A later system of knowledge and classification gave this person a new name and brought them to a new place: acts which in turn distort, throwing us back upon ourselves.
The distorted (and distorting) commemoration will take place in a present that puts its faith in individualization and division. To share, discuss, and together speak names aloud seems more urgent than ever against the backdrop of THAT WHICH MUST BE FORGOTTEN BECAUSE IT IS NOT PERMITTED TO BE. That which is not permitted to be leads inexorably to self-destruction, but also to the destruction of totalizing certitudes. All that remains is the togetherness of commemoration and solidarity with the dead.
