Material culture production and its representations: Reflections around an exhibition about rural dwelling in Northern Ghana

Using the example of an exhibition I have built around dwelling in rural Northern Ghana, my contribution offers a reflection on the challenges of representing cultural productions of domestic space and material culture. Rural dwelling in Africa is very often exhibited as the exotic, pristine manifestation of human being’s harmonic relation with the natural environment. In the conception of our exhibition, we have intended to create a kind of meta-language that surpasses the one-to-one translation of the qualities of dwelling, or the all too exotic representations of its meanings, by building an interactive video-installation with clips of ethnographic videos on dwelling and making use of unexpected interfaces. In this way, the scenography of the exhibition tried to create a multisensory embodiment of culture, not just as a visual representation of experience, but as a multimedia installation and incorporation of sound, image and rhythm. The sensuousness of the house was not represented in a kind of simulacrum, but through auditory geographies and haptic visualities.status: publishe