Résumé

The Palais des Nations was built in the 1930s as the headquarters of the then League of Nations and is now the European headquarters of the UN. Following the construction of the first office of the International Labour Organization in Geneva, the League of Nations had officially invited its member states to offer gifts for the Interior of the Palais des Nations as early as 1932. While paintings, reliefs, wall coverings, sculptures, carpets, tables, chairs or lamps bear witness to these national representations to this day, stored, disappeared or displaced objects whisper of changing aesthetic and political views. Archived correspondences (from the 1920s to the 1940s) between donor states, the League of Nations, architects and craftsmen's companies illustrate the processes of agreement that accompanied the donations, some of which lasted many years. In the utopian attempt to jointly create places of assembly and debate, these letters reveal - often between the lines and words - not only divergent aesthetic ideas, but also the latent competition between nations, economic imbalance or colonial power relations. In our chapter, a script-like text emerges that uses speculative methods to express the unspoken and thus also opens up the question of "who" or "what" is speaking. We contend that the speculative techniques that we develop can be used to question the relationship between aesthetics, materiality and diplomatic power structures in order to revisit history and open up spaces for the invisible and unspeakable.

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