Paper short abstract:

This paper explores emotional investments in museum objects and the repatriation discourse by museum audiences, staff and collaboration partners in a decolonizing museum project. Departing from what emotions do, it looks at the strategies developed to manage the pain of the past.

Paper long abstract:

During the last decades, debates around repatriation has spread outside the involved parties of museums and so-called source communities. A perception of ethnographic collections as “loot” has thus gained a strong foothold in public discourse. Rather than dismissing this perception as a misconception, this paper engages with the emotional experiences of encountering objects thought of as wrongfully located at ethnographic museums. The paper builds upon a case study of the project Ongoing Africa at the Museum of Ethnography in Stockholm. This project seeks to make the African collections relevant to more and new visitors and has an ambition of raising new perspectives on the African continent with and by Swedes of African descent. However, the material which this paper builds upon indicate that this is a target group which for various reasons experiences tensions about coming to the museum – the collections is one of them. Drawing on an ethnographic material consisting of observations of public program activities held under the project and 20 interviews with staff members and collaboration partners, the paper examines questions about provenance and ownership. Focusing on emotional investments in understandings of the past, it addresses the experience of pain and the strategies developed by both staff members and collaboration partners to manage the pain of both themselves and others, as well as the visions of the future.

Paper short abstract:

The Sami cultural heritage are relics that exist after ours ancestors. We can see traces in the Sami cultural landscape, migration routes, settlements, pre-Christian burial sites, Sami holy places, cultural-historical objects, sacred objects such as drums and seitar and Sami human remains.

Paper long abstract:

The Sami cultural heritage are relics that exist after ours

ancestors. We can see traces in the Sami cultural landscape,

migration routes, settlements, pre-Christian burial sites, Sami saints

places, cultural-historical objects, sacred objects such as

drums and seitar and Sami human remains.

The Sami, like other indigenous peoples in the world, have been deprived of theirs

cultural heritage. Much is about power and colonialism.

The right to a Sami cultural heritage is about the right to interpret

and define their history and their past. It is about

also about managing and communicating their own cultural heritage

Sami museums.

It is important to museums, institutions and government

cooperates in the field of objects and human remains.

It's not just about a physical return but it

is about reconciliation. It is also about ethics and morality

and even about ownership.

Paper short abstract:

This paper attempts to discuss what it means to decolonise museums in its transdisciplinary framework and the idea of decolonising knowledge-mechanism, challenging “what do we know” by discussing two experimental exhibitions; one was done in 2018, and another one is in the planning stage.

Paper long abstract:

Decolonising museums is by no means a new topic, not only in the Museum Studies field but also in the framework of other disciplines. Furthermore, it evokes the larger realm of decolonising knowledge-mechanism which is extremely broad, complex and often emotional, as it challenges “what do we know” requiring us to shift our “ways of thinking” and “ways of knowing”. Inevitably, academic institutions and researchers are a part of this issue. However, what are these different ways of thinking and knowing? How can we practice those? This presentation introduces two experimental exhibitions based on UCO collections that aim to reinvent exhibition practices in the vein of decolonial thinking. The first attempt was the Art of the Americas exhibition (March - July 2018), which questioned the categorisation of material cultures into art, ethnographic, anthropological, and archaeological objects. We will analyse its successes and failures. The second attempt is an ongoing project started in December 2021, planning to open in the Summer or Fall 2022 at UCO. We will discuss how this project addresses the failures from the Art of the Americas to further experiment with new ways of curating exhibitions and to answer the question: What does it (actually) mean to decolonise the museum?