Alumni Project | On the Surface: Zooarchaeology, Photography and Provenance Research as a Collaborative Process

In 2022, the On the Surface project was born out of an African-European museum exchange between three professionals who met during Module 2 of TheMuseumsLab in Berlin.

Team

Annie Antonites | Natural History Museum Curator, South Africa
Catarina Madruga | Postdoc Researcher, Germany

About the project

“On the Surface” is a multimedia project that examines the complex biographical history of an African elephant skull at the Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin. The severely damaged skull reveals different destructions as well as interventions of restoration and preparation on its surface. A large ink inscription on the skull, in German, reads “Found in an English trench in St. Eloi, France, in 1916. Imperial War Museum”. The inscription hints at a multi-layered “life” as animal, museum object, and war trophy. Initially, nothing was known about the living elephant, or how its remains were found in war-ridden France during WWI - which set the scene for an interdisciplinary collaboration to contextualise the skull.

Artistic close-up of the elephant skull
Photo by Daniele Ansidei

The "On the Surface" project was born out of an African-European museum exchange between professionals who met during TheMuseumsLab 2022 in Berlin. In September 2023, alumni Annie Antonites and Catarina Madruga, together with Daniele Ansidei met again to study the skull from up close. A detailed forensic analysis based on zooarchaeological methods identified traces of human and natural damage that opened new avenues of interpretation.

Informed by these findings, the project explores forensic traces and the interpretive potential of abstraction in “technical” photographic imagery, within broader colonial, scientific, and museological frameworks of representation. The team is currently working on several publication formats to disseminate the research results, which will contribute to the development of interdisciplinary research in natural science collections.

This project was funded by the Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ) through the Goethe-Institut.