Paper Short Abstract:

This paper thinks curation and the curatorial through the appearance of the concept of "curación", an Amerindian Amazonian concept, in three anthropological projects with ethnographic collections in the Colombian Amazon. It will be argued the need to imagine the museum as a cosmopolitical embassy.

Paper Abstract:

Amongst several peoples of the Amerindian Amazon of Colombia (South America), "curación" refers to a way of thinking about and treating situations, actions and relations that bring disorder and discomfort to the world. During a fifteen year span (2008-2023), three anthropological projects with the Ethnographic Museum in the Colombian Amazon led to a profound reformulation of the curatorial through the intense dialogue with practices of "curación". The encounter of these concepts resulted not in a mere replacement of one by the other, neither in an expansion of one into the other. Rather, both terms were continually in an open-ended interaction that both generated and detonated bridges, regarding, for instance, the regime of value of the artifacts, their ontological status and the ways they should be exhibited. In this presentation, I will describe how in these museum projects "curación" and curation became entangled, and the possible outcomes of thinking with this concept for anthropology in and of museums. My main argument will be that through "curación" museums with ethnographic collections could understand themselves not only as contact zones, but primarily as cosmopolitical embassies. As such, museums could reclaim for them a key centrality in world-making projects beyond the framework of identity politics in contemporary multiculturalism, and opening therefore a new way of approaching experimentation with display in the museum scene.