Contribution short abstract:

In this on-going project I explore if and how ethnography, audiovisual documentation, archival research, curatorship, and exhibition can make visible the production and circulation of racist images of Afro-descendent people without reinforcing racist social structures in Colombia.

Contribution long abstract:

In my work as anthropologist, curator and researcher, I have engaged in a methodological exploration looking for ways to use ethnography, audiovisual documentation, archival research, curatorship, and exhibition to show and make visible the ways that images of Afro-Colombian, Black, Palenquero and Raizal people have been and still are produced, accumulated and circulated without reinforcing racist social, geographic and knowledge structures in Colombia. Focusing the National Museum of Colombia, and its 2008 exhibition Velorios y santos vivos (Wakes and living saints), developed as an initial step for the inclusion of Black, Afro-Colombian, Raizal and Palenquero people in the museum’s narrative, collections and exhibitions, I investigate ethnographic and visual methods that make it possible for me, an anthropologist who is locally identified as white, or white-mestizo, to counter or question racism and invisibilization of people who have been racialized as “black”, “mulato”, “niche”, “moreno”, among other local denominations. A key issue in this methodological exploration, which is also an ethical one, and that is still unresolved, has to do with the fact that ethnography, archive work and museum exhibition have been instrumental in the production and reproduction of racist representations in Colombian society.