Paper short abstract:

I will discuss possible aesthetic relationships between the set-up and design of a travelling exhibition about Afro-Colombians' spirituality, and the audiovisual materials produced and used by its organizers, in a context of both form and content (desired) widening in museums.

Paper long abstract:

The exhibition Velorios y santos vivos. Comunidades negras, afrocolombianas, raizales y palenqueras (Wakes and living saints. Black, Afrocolombian, Maroon and Islander communities), open to the public in the National Museum of Colombia from August to November in 2008, showed how a lot of Afro-Colombians celebrate their mourning rituals and vigils to patron saints. It displayed videos and photographs collected during fieldwork and from archives in television screens and walls, next to several objects and seven altars designed by members of those communities. Later on and to the present, a travelling version began to go around Colombia in the form of 21 panels with photographs and texts, some objects, videos and printed materials, most of the times including new altars designed and constructed on site. Furthermore, local coordinators of the exhibition continuously and independently use audiovisual tools to document its development.

Amidst these politics of representation (Kratz, 2002), what possibilities arise from productions which may many times be perceived as inappropriate or ad hoc (Deger, 2006)—both the local exhibition versions and the audiovisual materials Afro-Colombians involved produce to document Velorios y santos vivos? What do they have to offer to the use of audiovisual material in museum exhibitions and to the participation of previously absent groups, particularly in the National Museum of Colombia? What alternatives do these appropriations (Schneider, 2006)or idiosyncratic practices (Geismar and Tilley, 2003), offer if, following Bennett (2006), museums help shape ways of seeing, as well as understanding what is seen, and who knows what and how to see?