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Museums across the globe have come under scrutiny for their collections of objects from other parts of the world and from Indigenous populations within their territories. Though their presence in these institutions is often justified as a way of preserving culture, these objects are sometimes not even researched and are often kept not on display but in storage, not to mention the questions they raise about how they were acquired in the first place. Directed by the German filmmaker Elena Schilling and the Kenyan filmmaker Saitabao Kaiyare, If Objects Could Speak follows their journey from the Linden-Museum in Stuttgart, Germany, to Nairobi and smaller towns in Kenya to uncover the meaning of a Kikuyu artefact – from Kenya’s largest ethnic group – taken into the museum in 1903. What they discover not only restores its story but also opens a conversation about how the past can be preserved in ways that honour the communities it belongs to.
