Yohannes Mulat Mekonnen and Jun.-Prof. Dr. Julia Binter will be presenting at the upcoming conference of the German Association for Social and Cultural Anthropology (DGSKA) in Köln. Their talk, Is Less Still More? From Taxonomies to Entanglements, will take place in the panel Uncommoning in Curatorial Practices.
Building on Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung’s analysis, they highlight how one of the pressing problems of museums today is a kind of “indigestion”: institutions have collected more cultural belongings than they can meaningfully process, creating what he calls a “choke,” an experience of epistemological overload. Rather than adding to this clutter, Mekonnen and Binter argue for the curatorial potential of exhibiting fewer objects.
They show that working with fewer objects can become a strategy of resistance; resisting colonial taxonomies, foregrounding individuality, and fostering richer entanglements with audiences. Drawing on their curatorial practice at the Lab, they reflect on the concepts and methods that guide this approach. Their work demonstrates how curating less opens up new ways of engaging, not through fixed categories or rigid taxonomies, but through the entanglements and contexts in which heritage thrives.