Host and concept: Claudia Buess, Head of Educational Events, Mission 21
Event in German with simultaneous translation into English.
Cultural anthropologist Isabella Bosza shows how the Basel Mission brought objects to Basel and how missionary collecting was entangled with colonial and scientific networks. With the cultural scholar Kokou Azamede, we will discuss questions of restitution and the challenges of dealing appropriately with non-European cultural artefacts in Western museums.
Isabella Bozsa is a provenance researcher at the Museum der Kulturen Basel and a doctoral candidate at the Chair of African History at Leibniz University Hanover. She researched the history of the Basel Mission's collection from Cameroon and India and worked at the Städtisches Museum Braunschweig and in Cameroon as part of a project on provenance research into non-European collections. She studied Cultural Anthropology/European Ethnology, Tibetology and Religious Studies at the Georg August University in Göttingen.
Dr. Kokou Azamede teaches at the German Department of the University of Lomé in Togo. He received his doctorate from the University of Bremen in 2008. His research focuses on transcultural studies, German missions and German colonialism as well as German colonial photography from West Africa. He is currently researching human "remains" and colonial objects as well as missionary collections from German Togo in German museums, and the question of colonial heritage. He is the winner of the Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm Prize 2022 of the German Academic Exchange Service.
