What We See

Petrus Goliath spoke these words into a phonograph just after he had gone through the painful and offensive experience of casting, measuring, and photographing in the Witpu¨tz policestation in southern Namibia. The German artist Hans Lichtenecker created this bizarre archive of racial types in 1931. Soon afterwards, the casts of faces and body parts, voice recordings on wax cylinders, anthropometrical photographs and other physical representations were exhibited at the colonial exhibition in Köln, Germany (1934) and, again, in the 1980s in the Namibian capital of Windhoek.
Today, the ghostly voices, concealed on the fragile medium of wax cylinders, can be heard again. They transmit a stern critique on the anthropometric project and provide assessments of the colonial condition and the circumstances, often under duress, in which the men and women experienced the theatrical terror of scientific documentation.
This book, which accompanies the exhibition What We See, engages with the anthropometrical archive and its canned voices theoretically, visually and artistically. Its essays reconsider anthropometric collections and their representational claims through bones, skeletons, casts, masks, and photography. They reflect on voices and voice archives and, importantly, provide transcriptions of many of the recorded texts.