Letter to Lagat (2015) is a parable about ownership and loss. The book speculates about the vanishing of an entire collection from a museum in the North and asks what would remain behind.

The book is the beginning of an exchange of letters with Dr. Lagat from the National Museum of Kenya (NMK). The conceptual starting point is the imaginary, sudden disappearance of a collection of African art and Ethnographica from a European institution. The actual site which inspired this fable is the Iwalewahaus a space for modern and contemporary African art in Bayreuth, Germany. The institution had recently vacated its former building, leaving it empty, yet full of traces. The floors of the empty archive rooms register the traces of the collection showing the former locations of cabinets and showcases and even the footpaths of the employees.

Letter to Lagat meditates on the power of objects in Postcolonial collections of the Global North. Do these objects produce encounters? Are they (partially) agents of their own movement? Furthermore, what are the implications of the increasing verisimilitude of digital reproductions? By gathering and analysing the traces the objects left behind the artists managed to produce replicas of the lost works of art.

But what do these facsimiles mean, and what is their relationship to the original? These empty and uncanny replicas seem to function as memorials to an absence, rather than substitutions for an original. The replicas allude to a blank space, a historical break, a zaesur.

Thanks to: Hannes Wiedemann (Photos) Nieves de la Fuente Gutierrez (3D Replicas) Kitso Lynn Lelliot (Essay), Iwalewahaus, Bayreuth. Supported by: Kulturstiftung des Bundesfull project