Desire in Representation, a two-part artist’s book by Peggy Buth, explores the colonial imagination through the lens of museal display and historical narrative.

Based on extensive research at the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, the publication combines documentary photography, archival material, and literary sources to interrogate how colonial power structures shaped representations of Central Africa and its people.

The first volume, Travelling through the Musée Royale, presents photographs of exhibition rooms, displays, and transitional zones, revealing layers of curatorial revision and institutional memory. It documents both the permanent collection and the temporary show Memory of Congo, highlighting moments of rupture and reconfiguration within the museum's visual rhetoric.

The second part, O, my Kalulu!, focuses on the figure of Kalulu, a young African boy who accompanied explorer Henry Morton Stanley. Drawing on Stanley’s travelogues and his fictional novella My Kalulu, Buth examines how myths of masculinity, servitude, and desire are embedded in colonial narratives. Through juxtapositions of text and image, the book traces how these fantasies inform broader structures of representation.

An extensive appendix links both parts through additional materials, photographs, and sources. It functions both as documentation and as a critical reflection on modes of historical referencing and the legacy of colonial display.

Design: Till Gathmann.
Part I: Softcover with silkscreen; Part II: Faux leather with gold embossing. Both volumes richly illustrated in b/w and colour.