Chair: Mareike Späth
Panel: Hidden Objects - Sensitive and Restricted Objects in Museum Collections. Issues Surrounding their Storage, Access, Consultations, and Potential Repatriation
Wednesday, 23 June, 9:30 a.m. - 11:00 p.m. (CET)Profile
Mareike Späth is currently curator for the ethnographic collection at the Landesmuseum Hannover. One of her tasks in this position is to care for the collection in times when open access, transparency, and digitization are frequently called for. Not only does this require deep knowledge about each of the 24.000 objects from all regions of the world and their potentially sensitive nature. It also means constantly negotiating between generalized requirements and particular interests.
Mareike Späth studied Ethnology, African Studies and Public Law at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz. As research assistant at the Institute for Anthropology and African Studies at Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the Department of Social and Cultural Anthropology at Goethe University Frankfurt, she focussed her work on questions of historiography and heritage-making. As part of various academic projects, she worked in East and West Africa, particularly in Tanzania and Madagascar. In 2018, she took up a position as curatorial assistant for the African collection at the Museum am Rothenbaum in Hamburg before joining the Landesmuseum in 2020. She is a member of the Arbeitskreis Provenienzforschung where, since 2020, she acts as spokesperson for the Working Group Colonial Provenances. She is also member of the AG Museums at the German Anthropological Association and the network Colonial Contexts.
Mareike Späth
State Museum Hanover
Member of the PAESE-project