Members of the CHEco team are actively involved in teaching at BA and MA level in the Department of Arts and Culture at the University of Amsterdam. This provides opportunities to bring the project into the classroom in various ways.
Tessel Bauduin is programme coordinator the MA Heritage and Memory Studies. In July 2024 she will lead a summer school for OSK on the curiosity cabinet.
Colin Sterling is programme coordinator of the BA Global Arts, Culture and Politics.
Mariá Suárez teaches on the course Global Politics and Power.
In 2025 Tessel Bauduin co-coordinated the OSK Summer School The Curiosity Cabinet. Critical Perspectives on Art, Nature, Knowledge, and Display.
The curiosity cabinet is not only an early modern phenomenon but also a critical point of reference in the modern and contemporary periods. Places of marvel and wonder, cabinets contained objects of art and nature. They are furthermore sites of knowledge formation and dazzling conspicuous display, sourced in the exploits of global trade, imperialism and colonialism. Contemporary artists make use of the cabinet format or its aesthetic regime to decolonize the gaze as much as collection practices, even as museums reposition their own heritage of having – or even having been – a cabinet or curiosity collection and its attendant ideas about who gets to acquire, collect, order, and display the natural and cultural world, exotic or otherwise.
During the summer school we analysed together case studies of the curiosity cabinet from the past and the present, taking a transhistorical approach. We will critically assess histories, theories and legacies of the curiosity cabinet and its inherent epistemological assumptions. While aspects of the nature and impact of the displays, the knowledge patterns resulting from the mixing and ordering of objects, and networks of collectors, artists, scholars and curators are our main focus, broader thematic issues such as artistic approaches, transformations in scholarship, museological questions, global markets and capitalism will be addressed too, as well as colonialism and decolonization.
The programme consisted of several excursions (to locations in the Netherlands), sessions with guest speakers, and seminars to debate recent literature on the topic.
16 May, 16-20 June, and 10 July, 2025.
Critical Heritage Ecologies 