Paper short abstract:

Using a case-study of a collaborative museum display co-created by a London-based Brazilian supplementary school and myself (as an artist/anthropologist), this paper considers what lessons public museums in the UK can learn from migrant communities about preserving intangible heritage in migration.

Paper long abstract:

Given some of the challenges public museums have in helping to safe-guard intangible heritage, this paper turns to supplementary schools in the UK to consider how they preserve heritage in migration.

In the UK, public museums have developed sophisticated techniques to preserve and protect the material culture of vulnerable communities across the world. Yet a great deal of the cultural heritage that the communities themselves regard as valuable and seek to protect falls under the category of 'intangible heritage'- that is, heritage which is immaterial, based on practice, tacit and embodied knowledge. Despite having little space to display and store their material artefacts, supplementary schools in the UK make spaces and use embodied means by which to teach children their cultural heritage in diaspora.

As part of a larger museum-and-migrations PhD study, I facilitated the making of a collaborative museum display entitled ‘The Whispering Forest’, together with Brazilian supplementary school children, their parents and teachers, in which Portuguese-speaking trees tell folk stories of landscapes disturbed by humans and protected by mythical child-heroes. In this Brazilian supplementary school, set up to help children retrieve their cultural roots in diaspora, tree symbolism is used to recall Brazil and describe children’s connection to it. Children are seen as seeds with potential for their latent Brazilian heritage to grow, given the right circumstances. In 2019 the school turned to the Museum of London in an effort to help them celebrate their Brazilian identity.

Recalling the making process of a museum installation and other performances by parent-teachers, and reflecting on the longer, troubled history of community performances in museum spaces, I use the case-study to address deeper issues around ‘the politics of temporality’ (Feldberg), and ask what lessons public museums in the UK can learn from migrant communities in preserving intangible heritage in migration.