Parrot Terristories: Rethinking More-than-Human History, Conservation, Care, and Colonial Legacies

The panel examines how African grey parrots create culture in the wild - through complex social behaviors, cognitive abilities and adaptability - and how captivity disrupts these processes. This commodification of the parrots serves as a lens for larger historical contexts of resource exploitation and the ethical challenges of conservation.

The panel also addresses the role of indigenous knowledge and practices in rethinking conservation. It emphasizes the need to decolonize these approaches against the backdrop of intertwined human and non-human histories.

By criticizing the colonial origins of natural history collections, it shows how power structures have shaped the ethics of conservation and interpretation. In linking these perspectives, the panel also examines visionary concepts for fair conservation and museum practices that focus on shared responsibility between species and cultures.

With

Nancy Jacobs, Brown University, Providence, USA

Katja Kaiser, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin

André Krebber, University of Kassel

Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, Bindura University, Zimbabwe, and Humboldt University of Berlin

In conversation with

Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger

Moderation: Felix Sattler, TA T

Procedure:

5 p.m.: Guided tour of the exhibition with the artists Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger

6 p.m. - 8:15 p.m.: Roundtable discussion

The event will be held in English.

Participants

Nancy Jacobs, Brown University, Providence, is a historian and author of the book The Global Grey Parrot: The Worldwide History of a Charismatic African Animal. She is deeply interested in animals as historical actors and parrots as political, cultural and world-shaping beings. She is also interested in human efforts to improve the lives of parrots in captivity and to preserve their existence in their native forests.

Katja Kaiser, Museum für Naturkunde Berlin, is a research associate in the project “Guidelines for dealing with natural history collections from colonial contexts.” She has collaborated with Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger on the work One of Thirtysix, which traces the provenance of a single African grey parrot specimen from the museum’s collection.

André Krebber, visiting scholar in cultural history and theory at the LeipzigLab of the University of Leipzig and lecturer at the University of Kassel. He researches cultures of knowledge and their interactions with human-nature relationships, with a particular focus on the role of nonhuman animals in addressing the current environmental crisis. In his upcoming book The Forgotten Animal, he develops an aesthetic practice of animal remembrance that makes the recognition of animal self-determination the basis of a non-exploitative relationship with nature.

Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, lecturer in cultural and heritage studies at Bindura University, Zimbabwe, and research fellow at inherit. heritage in transformation at Humboldt University in Berlin. His research interests include the decolonization of conservation practices, African archaeology and museology.

Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger, professors of multispecies storytelling at the Cologne Academy of Media Arts, Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger have themselves lived in a multispecies household with African grey parrots for over 20 years. Their installations, videos and sculptures deal with relationships between humans, animals and machines and open up both critical perspectives on changeable social constructs and utopian visions of equal treatment of one another. In 2014, Hörner/Antlfinger founded the interspecies collective CMUK with the African grey parrots Clara and Karl, which also contributes artistic works to the current exhibition.

Felix Sattler, director and curator of TA T - Animal Anatomical Theater at the Center for Cultural Technology at Humboldt University in Berlin. His curatorial strategy aims to promote dialogues between different communities. Topics of his projects include the art and design history of single-cell algae, an archaeology of multiple pasts, and postcolonial controversies surrounding museums and human remains.

(IN ENGLISH)