Technospheric Curation and the Swedish Allah Ring: Refiguring Digitisations and Curatorial Agency as Ecological Compositions, and Eco-curating as Planetary Inhabitations

In this chapter I unravel human-centred understandings of digitisations working with the digitisation of a silver-alloy finger ring inscribed in Arabic Kufic writing with the words “il-la-lah” (“For/to Allah”) and re-theorise it through a novel ontological, new-materialisms, posthuman, ecological mode of thinking (Cameron, Fiona R. 2018. Posthuman Museum Practices. In The Posthuman Glossary, ed. Rosi Braidotti and Maria Hlavajova, 349–352. London/New York: Bloomsbury Academic; Cameron, Fiona R. 2019. Theorizing Digitisations in Global Computational Infrastructures. In The International Handbook of New Digital Practices in Galleries, Libraries, Archives, Museums and Heritage Sites, ed. Hannah Lewi, Wally Smith, Steve Cooke, and Dirk vom Lehn, 55–67. London: Routledge). The ring is significant as evidence of interactions between Viking and Islamic worlds and as an artefact directed to promoting intercultural respect during the Syrian refugee crisis and the rise of far-right anti-Muslim sentiments. Significantly, the ring digitisation also becomes planetary in reach and distribution as an unruly, more-than-digital ecological composition in which curatorial agency is refigured as radical, eco-systemic processes involving the action and vitality of many different coordinates in their unfolding (Cameron, Fiona R. 2021. The Future of Digital Data, Heritage and Curation in a More-Than-Human World.