Chemical Modernities: Contemporary African Art and Colonial Legacies of Toxicity

About the seminar:
The 7th edition of Lubumbashi Biennale, held in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) in October 2022, was organised under the theme “Toxicity.” The biennale brought together both Congolese and international artists to “reflect upon the link between contemporary life in the postcolonial urban setting of Lubumbashi […] and the impact of a number of industrial, economic, ecological, social and cultural processes that have historically contributed, for better and for worse, to the shape and dynamics of urban life in this and other parts of the world today.” Twelve years earlier, the 9th edition of Les Rencontres de Bamako (2010), a photography biennale held in Bamako, Mali, explored similar questions through the theme “For a Sustainable World,” with African and diaspora photographers from across the continent addressing themes such as extraction, overconsumption, and waste dumping. At Bamako, Pieter Hugo and Nyaba Leon Ouedraogo’s photographs of Agbogbloshie, an infamous e-waste processing zone in Accra, Ghana, were displayed alongside one another to much critical acclaim. In July 2021, Agbogbloshie was demolished following a decade of intense media scrutiny and interest in the contemporary art world, raising questions about the efficacy of photographic documentation for exploring colonial and neo-colonial legacies of toxicity.

In this conversation, Jacob Badcock (UCL) and Lotte Arndt (Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) consider the notion of “Chemical Modernities,” attempting to think from Africa and contemporary African art about the planetary question of how to live with the enduring and oftentimes harmful traces of pollutants and toxic chemicals produced by capitalist-colonialist extraction.

Lotte Arndt (Paris) is assistant professor at the research center for Cultural and Social History of Art (HiCSA) at the University of Paris 1, Panthéon-Sorbonne. Between 2021 and 2025, she has been working on the international research project Reconnecting Objects. Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and beyond Museums, as part of Bénédicte Savoy's team at the Technical University Berlin. Her research focuses on toxic collections, extractivism and the antinomies of conservation in so-called ethnographic and natural history museums. More broadly, she accompanies as a writer and curator the work of artists who question the postcolonial present and the antinomies of modernity from a transnational perspective. Between 2014-2021, she taught at the École supérieure d'art et design Valence Grenoble. She is the co-founder of the online journal Troubles dans les collections, and co-curated recently Unextractable(Kunsthalle Mainz, 2023/2024) and Branching Streams. Sketches of Kinship (Ifan-Museum Dakar, 2024). Among her last publications:  “Spreading the “scientific approach”: The chemical turn in conservation from the Musée d’ethnographie du Trocadéro to colonial museums in the French Empire” (with Ariane Théveniaud), in: Museums & Social Issues, DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/15596893.2024.2397345 ; “Poisonous Heritage: Chemical Conservation, Monitored Collections, and the Threshold of Ethnological Museums”, Museums & Society, Vol 20, No 2 (2022), The toxic afterlifes of colonial collections, Troubles dans les collections, no. 2, 2022.

This event is being organised by Early Career Researcher Jacob Badcock and is supported by the UCL Anthropocene initiative.