How can an Object’s Integrity be lost in a Museum?

By dissecting it to understand it better? This is the story told by this fly whisk, a propitiatory amulet, taken apart, ripped open and fragmented. For it was divested of its magic power represented, according to the museum’s inventory register in 1953, by a knife blade, a piece of leather and five pages of the Koran. The first two elements have disappeared. The hand-written, unfolded prayers and magic formulae were consigned to a drawer for works in two dimensions. In 2018, the connection was finally re-established between the gapingly wounded fly whisk and these texts still bearing the marks of their original folds, found with no documentation concerning their initial belonging to the amulet they were meant to activate. The original inventory register specifies that the Asante sovereign Kofi Karikari himself was thought to have given the fly whisk to missionary Ramseyer while the latter was his political prisoner in Kumasi (Capital of the Asante Empire in Ghana) between 1869 and 1874. This information is not confirmed by the Journal co-written by the pastors held hostage.

Floriane Morin/MEG