Translation and Memory in the Humboldt Forum: The Alternative Museum Space in Priya Basil’s Film Essay “Locked In and Out”

Abstract

The film essay “Locked In and Out” by Priya Basil, created for and premiered at the digital opening of the Humboldt Forum in December 2020, reflects on Basil’s own positionality in relation to the contested museum project, situating the Forum within a transnational framework. Basil’s text creates an alternative museum space in which she not only intermingles colonial histories with narratives of resistance across time and space, but also exposes the mechanisms of curation behind the museum, and memory cultures more broadly. Reading the film essay at the intersection of Michael Rothberg’s concepts of multidirectional memory (2009) and the implicated subject (2019), I observe how it challenges the selective memory of the museum, and of the nation, particularly as regards German colonialism. As a series of translations across multiple positionalities, between German and English, and through time, the text facilitates a meditation on the instabilities of national and singular frameworks for approaching colonialism, which are often propagated by museums and the narratives they construct. This paper seeks to untangle the translations and memories in Basil’s film essay, bringing it into conversation with the contemporary debate on museums and (de)colonisation in Germany to consider how the text complicates national memory discourses which are re-emerging and being re-evaluated in the wake of the Humboldt Forum.