2025/10/30 by Savina TOPURSKA · 1 voice
Arts and Humanities · Social Sciences · #Cultural Identity and Heritage #Diverse Cultural and Historical Studies #Museums and Cultural Heritage
paper · pdf · doi:10.37708/ezs.swu.bg.v23i3.16
openalex created_date 2025/10/30 · openalex publication_date 2025/10/30 · openalex updated_date 2026/05/21
The article presents a research-creative project, which examines the concept of “anonymous narratives” through the study of a woven raffia artifact held at the Théodore Monod Museum in Dakar, Senegal. The absence of an inventory card, documented history, and clearly established provenance transforms the object into a critical case study for understanding the relationship between tangible and intangible heritage within a context where oral tradition remains a primary mode of cultural transmission. The methodology combines oral testimonies, archival research in Senegal and France, and artistic practices such as painting, photography and installation. This interdisciplinary approach enables the construction of hypothetical narrative layers around the object while simultaneously exposing the structural troubles of collections that characterize postcolonial museology: absences, distortions and ruptures of meaning. Within cultural environments where griots and communities transmit genealogies, myths and social values orally across generations, the artifact functions as a mobile narrative, oscillating between visibility and invisibility, presence and absence. The artistic experiments involving layering and transparency in painting, photographic portraiture and the incorporation of everyday objects operate as strategies of critical reinterpretation, addressing the lost transparency of the museum display. In doing so, the project demonstrates the potential of research-creation as a methodological tool for critical museology, capable of countering documentary silences through alternative narrative forms. The study argues that absence should not be approached as a void but as a productive category that generates new possibilities for interpretation and knowledge production at the intersection of language, territory and cultural heritage.