Between past and future emerges another present

The impossibility of returning not only creates (indistinct) complex feelings towards the lost, a connection that is still there but numbly out of reach. It can be an open wound, a generational and communal trauma. Along the rifts of fragmentary remembrance, indeterminable searching and the attempt of creating new connections the exhibition and series of events ask: What does it entail to long for -returning?

How does time, places and personal connections create belonging? What happens when those lifeworlds are left behind, are violently destroyed, become unreachable and superfluous? Stripped of belonging the absence is filled with loneliness, guilt, melancholy and homesickness – but also the tenacity of creating new connections and solidarity.

The artworks discuss unhomeliness and diaspora, colonial violence, its afterlives and continuations. They are tracing processes, that perceive return as fragile and indeterminate and searching for the „we“ that constantly goes astray. Thus, to feel estranged does not appear as a burden but a starting point to multiply ways of encounter and collective inhabitation.

The here and now is pressed by indurated borders that fuel conflicts, militarization and expulsion; fascisms are gaining strength while the climate catastrophe engulfs liveliness. Taking up a planetary perspective, return is not merely nostalgia but inherently political. It urges the acknowledgement of identities, ways of knowing and ways of being, and counters the violence of the denial of this plurality.

Taking place at the so-called ethnological museum – build from the lack of comprehension and what is missed elsewhere - the ambitions of the project return confront the institution with its one historic complicity in-between what isn't returned. The looted, expulged, and silenced didn't become only history, it haunts the contemporary.