Parrot Terristories:
Rethinking More-than-Human History, Conservation, Care, and Colonial Legacies

Nancy Jacobs, Brown University, Providence, is a historian and author of the book The Global Grey Parrot: The Worldwide History of a Charismatic African Animal. She is very much concerned with animals as historical actors and parrots as political, cultural, and world-making creatures. She is also interested in human efforts to improve life for parrots in captivity and to conserve the birds’ existence in their native forests.

Katja Kaiser, Museum for Natural History Berlin, Research associate in the project “Guidelines for the handling of natural history collections from colonial contexts”. Katja Kaiser collaborated with Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger on their work “One of Thirtysix” that traces the provenance of single grey parrot specimen from the museum’s collection

André Krebber, guest fellow in cultural history and theory at LeipzigLab at Leipzig University and adjunct lecturer at the University of Kassel. André's interested in knowledge cultures and how they shape and are shaped by human-nature relations with a particular focus on the role of nonhuman animals therein to respond to the current environmental crisis. In his forthcoming book The Forgotten Animal, he proposes an aesthetic practice of animal remembrance that makes the recognition of animal self-determination the foundation for overcoming appropriating relations to nature.

Munyaradzi Elton Sagiya, Lecturer, Culture and Heritage Studies (CHS) at Bindura University, Zimbawe and Research Fellow at inherit. heritage in transformation at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His research interests include decolonising heritage conservation practices, African archeology, and museology.

Ute Hörner and Mathias Antlfinger are professors of multispecies storytelling at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and have been living together in a multispecies household with grey parrots for over 20 years. Their installations, videos and sculptures deal with relationships between humans, animals and machines and open up critical perspectives on changeable social constructs as well as utopian visions of equal interaction. Their communal living with non-human animals is characterised by shared social actions and how these produce a shared space. In 2014, Hörner/Antlfinger founded the interspecies collective CMUK with the grey parrots Clara and Karl, who are also contributing artistic works to the current exhibition.

Felix Sattler is head and curator of the TA T – Exhibition Research Space at the Centre for Cultural Techniques, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. His curatorial strategy aims to foster dialogue between a variety of communities. Felix Sattler's projects have addressed topics as diverse as the art and design history of unicellular algae, an archaeology of the multiple past, and the postcolonial controversies surrounding museums and human remains.