Ambivalent pasts: colonial history and the theatricalities of ethnographic display

In the twenty-first century, museums holding ethnographic collections have come under scrutiny for their implication in colonial history, and many have started to address this problematic legacy, often in conscious attempts to move beyond the colonial as “post-ethnographic” spaces and forums for intercultural dialogue. This essay uses a contemporary artwork, Peggy Buth’s installation “The Warrior as Multiple, “exhibited at the Frankfurt Museum of World Cultures in 2014, as a starting point to develop a taxonomy of dominant curatorial strategies at work in ethnographic museums today: self-reflexive contextualization, inversion or reversal, indigenous curation, visible storage, and the turn to live performance—all of which are used to address colonial history. Approaching these strategies from the perspective of theatre and performance studies, the essay analyzes their “theatricalities” of display—the “doing” of ethnographic objects, as well as the “spectacularity” of dioramic settings—through a series of case studies, including the American Museum of Natural History in New York City, the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center in Connecticut, and the Tropenmuseum Amsterdam. It argues that despite their critical potential, these strategies run the danger of being complicit in a working through (in the Freudian sense of the term) of colonial history, which might ultimately “liberate” ethnographic museums from their problematic legacy. Instead, the essay proposes an insistence on ambivalence, understood as the simultaneous co-existence of at least two conflicting meanings, in order to resist such an erasure

Statistical Analysis of Structural Transitions in Small Systems

We discuss general thermodynamic properties of molecular structure formation processes like protein folding by means of simplified, coarse-grained models. The conformational transitions accompanying these processes exhibit similarities to thermodynamic phase transitions, but also significant differences as the systems that we investigate here are very small. The usefulness of a microcanonical statistical analysis of these transitions in comparison with a canonical interpretation is emphasized. The results are obtained by employing sophisticated generalized-ensemble Markov-chain Monte Carlo methodologies.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, Proceedings of the 22nd Workshop on Recent Developments in Computer Simulation Studies in Condensed Matter Physics, Feb 23-27, 2009, Athens, Georgia, US

Not out of context: Eric Magassa's 'The Lost' series

The article analyses a series of contemporary photographs by Swedish multi-disciplinary artist Eric Magassa and places them within the larger context of postcolonial practice. Focusing on Magassa's use of masks and the relationship, in his photographs, between sitter and environment, it argues that the political value of his work is to disrupt colonial legacies of Modernist thinking

Contact-Density Analysis of Lattice Polymer Adsorption Transitions

By means of contact-density chain-growth simulations, we investigate a simple lattice model of a flexible polymer interacting with an attractive substrate. The contact density is a function of the numbers of monomer-substrate and monomer-monomer contacts. These contact numbers represent natural order parameters and allow for a comprising statistical study of the conformational space accessible to the polymer in dependence of external parameters such as the attraction strength of the substrate and the temperature. Since the contact density is independent of the energy scales associated to the interactions, its logarithm is an unbiased measure for the entropy of the conformational space. By setting explicit energy scales, the thus defined, highly general microcontact entropy can easily be related to the microcanonical entropy of the corresponding hybrid polymer-substrate system.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, Proceedings of the 23nd Workshop on Recent Developments in Computer Simulation Studies in Condensed Matter Physics, Feb 22-26, 2010, Athens, Georgia, US

Wanna Play? Dries Verhoeven and the Limits of Non-Professional Performance

In October 2014, Berlin’s Hebbel am Ufer (HAU)—one of Germany’s most influential performance venues, programming and often co-producing work by artists such as Rimini Protokoll, Jérôme Bel, Meg Stuart and Gob Squad—opened its new season with a festival called Treffpunkte (meeting points).1 Conceptually, the month-long festival was located at the intersection of some of the major trends in contemporary Western theatre and performance, particularly the interest ‘in curating intimacy in public’ (Walsh 2014: 57; Read 2008), the renegotiation of theatre’s place in the public sphere (Balme 2014; Haedicke 2013) and the relation of socially engaged performance, in the broadest sense, to late global capitalism (Jackson 2011; Harvie 2013). Its explicit aim was to explore, through the means of performance, ‘the status of the private in the public sphere’ (den Status des Privaten in der öffentlichen Sphäre) and to find out whether ‘intimacy’ (Intimität)—equated with an authentic ‘communication between people’ (Kommunikation zwischen Menschen)—was still possible ‘in an age where the public space has been entirely pervaded by market conformity’ (im Zeitalter der totalen Durchdringung des öffentlichen Raumes durch das Marktförmige) (Vanackere 2014: 2).

Conformational phase diagram for polymers adsorbed at ultrathin nanowires

We study the conformational behavior of a polymer adsorbed at an attractive nanostring and construct the complete structural phase diagram in dependence of the binding strength and effective thickness of the string. For this purpose, Monte Carlo optimization techniques are employed to identify lowest-energy structures for a coarse-grained hybrid polymer-wire model. Among the representative conformations in the different phases are, for example, compact droplets attached to the string and also nanotube-like monolayer films wrapping the string in a very ordered way. We here systematically analyze low-energy shapes and structural order parameters to elucidate the transitions between the structural phases

Conformational Transitions of Non-Grafted Polymers Near an Adsorbing Substrate

We have performed multicanonical chain-growth simulations of a polymer interacting with an adsorbing surface. The polymer, which is not explicitly anchored at the surface, experiences a hierarchy of phase transitions between conformations binding and non-binding with the substrate. We discuss the phase diagram in the temperature-solubility plane and highlight the transition ``path'' through the free-energy landscape.Comment: 4 pages, revtex.cls, 10 postscript figures, author information under http://www.physik.uni-leipzig.de/index.php?id=2

Adsorption Phenomena at Organic-Inorganic Interfaces

The qualitative solvent- and temperature-dependent conformational behavior of a peptide in the proximity of solid substrates with different adsorption properties is investigated by means of a simple lattice model. The resulting pseudophase diagrams exhibit a complex structure, which can be understood by analysing the minima of the free-energy landscape in dependence of appropriate system parameters.Comment: 3 pages, 1 figur

Chain-Growth Simulations of Lattice-Peptide Adsorption to Attractive Substrates

Based on a newly developed contact-density chain-growth algorithm, we have simulated a nongrafted peptide in the vicinity of different attractive substrates. We analyzed the specificity of the peptide adsorption by focussing on the conformational transitions the peptide experiences in the binding/unbinding processes. In a single simulation run, we obtained the contact density, i.e., the distribution of intrinsic monomer-monomer contacts and monomer-substrate nearest-neighbor contacts. This allows a systematic reweighting to all values of external control parameters such as temperature and solvent quality after the simulation. The main result is the complete solubility-temperature pseudo-phase diagram which is based on the corresponding specific-heat profile. We find a surprisingly rich structure of pseudo-phases that can roughly be classified into compact and expanded conformations in both regimes, adsorption and desorption. Furthermore, underlying subphases were identified, which, in particular, appear noticeably in the compact pseudo-phases.Comment: 8 pages, 3 figure