Eleventh International Conference on The Inclusive Museum

Abstract

Sara Baartman (a.k.a Saartjie Baartman or the “Hottentot Venus”) was a woman of Khoekhoe origin who was presented as a live exhibit in Europe in the nineteenth century. Preceding and after the return of her remains to her native Southern Africa she has become an icon of decoloniality, intersectionality, African feminism, and many other ideologies and positions in identity politics. Ongoing representations and re-representations of her continue to attract debate and elicit heated emotions. This paper explores some of the ethics, politics, and dynamics that come into play in the creation and display of digital surrogates, derivatives, and simulacra of her person, using as a starting point a project created by a group of postgraduate students in Digital Curation which was facilitated by the author as convenor of the course. The definitive discontinuity of digital signals in media and formats enforces a remove at several levels from the physical object and natural identity of a person or representations of them, thus entailing a conscious or unconscious mediation of meaning and identity in the political act of curation. In any museum display the shared gaze is mediated and interrupted, resulting in discontinuities of heritage; further discontinuities in representation and sharing arise in the online world, enforcing removes that question and re-frame the nature of heritage itself.