The Catalogue of Speculative Translations is a long-term collaborative project by Cosmo Whyte, Kareem Johnson, and Abigail E. Celis that critically examines the display of African material culture in French museums. The project stages moments of flight from the architectures of colonial capture, using visual translation and archival fragmentation as methodological tools. In doing so, it disrupts museological systems that reduce human lives and material bodies to objects of naming, knowledge production, and extraction.
Abigail E. Celis is an assistant professor in Art History and Museum Studies at the Université de Montréal, with a background in cultural studies. Her research focuses on the afterlives of colonialism and decolonial imaginaries as witnessed through contemporary visual culture, artistic practice, and museum norms in the French-speaking world, with a focus on France and Senegal.
