This issue explores expressions of intangible cultural heritage – from culinary arts to sculptures – which speak of past, contemporary artistic productions, and cultural restitutions between Italy and Cameroon, delving into a series of events and activities carried out at the Museum of Civilizations with the support of the Servizio Relazioni Internazionali of the Ministry of Culture.

The contributions, curated by Johanne Affricot and Eric Otieno Sumba, reflect on forms of recovery and innovation of food-related traditions and knowledges in West Africa through the work of Fulani Chef Fatmata Binta and Chef of Nigerian origins Immaculate Ruému. The immaterial dimension is also a key element in the productions of material culture made by African artists and artisans both in the past and in contemporary times. Victor Fotso Nye reflects on this theme in Suspended Identities, starting with works and objects of African provenance and questioning their presence in Western museums as well as their perceived absence in the education of new African generations.   

According to Édouard Glissant, opacity is the right of every human being to not see his or her identity subjected to the one-sided classifications of colonial barbarism, repairing the complexity of contemporary human relations. What rhetoric can we trace in colonial forms of exploitation and annihilation of resources and knowledges? Is it possible to challenge them and build alternative narratives and forms of resistance? Wissal Houbabi, in dialogue with the associations Tezetà and Questa è Roma, places some ethnographic objects from the collections inside the phonomuseum.rome, a museum of the future imagined as a domestic space where mother tongues oppressed by colonial languages can be preserved. The performance by Senegalese griot and artist Bocar Niang presents an oral narrative – transcribed here – of a Somali necklace from the Museum’s collections, evoking the multiple possible stories of those who wore it and thus freeing it from the ethnographic narrative which followed its musealization. The CLIMAVORE assembly, by the artistic duo Cooking Sections, investigates and reflects on the relations between the climate emergency and the way we eat, starting from the capitalist and colonial roots of the food industry – a theme that was foreshadowed also by the commodity aspects of the former Colonial Museum, for example in relation to the exploitation of the doum palm which is explored in Rosa Anna Di Lella’s article.

Objects, works and documents decontextualized from their places of origin and preserved in museums acquire the status of “cultural property,” therefore placed in collections and subjected to preservation, study and enhancement activities. The process of musealization has often distorted their purposes, functions and the values for which they were conceived, made and acted upon in their original contexts. How do we restore to objects the complexity of their life prior to the time of acquisition?

In this issue, we reflect on this theme and on some paths of re-reading works and objects. Musician Dudù Kouate, at the invitation of visual artist Justin Randolph Thompson to sonorize live a screening of his film From the Campidoglio to the Zoo, has re-played some musical instruments from the collection of African arts and cultures.

Adelita Husni Bey’s contribution, on the other hand, develops out of the permanent workshop A Collection in Turmoil, which began in 2022 at the invitation of LOCALES and in collaboration with the Museum of Civilizations. The workshop proposes a critical reflection on the collections of the former Colonial Museum and on the possibilities of thinking of them as composed of subjects and not only as objects without will. Finally, artist Gala Porras-Kim, during her research fellowship at the Museum of Civilizations, reflected on the relationship between curators and the objects they care for, creating a video installation that seeks to materialize this relationship.