Leonor Faber-Jonker
Leonor Faber-Jonker (1987) is an author and artist. In her work, she investigates the relation between objects and memory in practices surrounding statues, heirlooms, photographs, and collections. Her interests include the colonial history of Southern Africa, the workings of collage, and 1980s counterculture. In 2012, she published No Future Nu (Lebowski), a cultural history of punk in The Netherlands.
In 2015, she graduated with honors from the research master Modern History at the University of Utrecht, with a thesis about the practices surrounding twenty skulls of Herero and Nama victims of the genocide in German South-West Africa (1904-1908). Using a material approach, she analyzed how these human remains acquired layers of meaning as trophies, anthropological specimens, museal objects, symbols, evidence, and ancestral remains. She was the scientific curator of an acclaimed exhibition on the Namibian genocide at the Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris (25 November 2016 – 12 March 2017).
In 2021, she was awarded a fellowship at the Research Center for Material Culture. She is currently working on a book about the Southern African heirlooms that she inherited from her grandmother and is an external PhD candidate at the African Studies Centre Leiden.
L.A.
(Leonor)
Faber-Jonker
L.A. Faber-Jonker's profile on the Leiden University website
PhD candidate
L.A. Faber-Jonker's profile on the Leiden University website
Project status:
Ongoing