Those who are dead are not ever gone

The very strange thing about choking is that one can choke even while eating the most delicious of foods out there. Maybe, especially with such foods, as the greed to devour that delicacy rapidly—with little focus on mastication, more on consuming—might lead to the diversion of a piece from its track towards the oesophagus into the trachea…

The institution of the ethnological museum or world museum seems to be in the midst of a serious crisis of choking. The delicacies that most of these museums have acquired, which is to say co-opted, which is to say ingested, seem to have collectively missed the track to the oesophagus and got stuck in the respiratory tract. They have been stuck there for as long as the history of mass collections, acquisitions and looting, for as long as the ruthless and ongoing extraction of cultural property has occurred in the former colonies of Europe.

A twelve-act essay on the maintenance of supremacy, the ethnological Museum and the intricacies of the Humboldt Forum.