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- Convenors:
-
Chiara De Cesari
(University of Amsterdam)
Wayne Modest (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam National Museum of World Cultures)
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- Formats:
- Panels
- Sessions:
- Wednesday 22 July, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Lisbon
Short Abstract:
This panel explores how museums in different contexts respond to the (post)colonial condition. In what ways are museums colonial institutions, how do they represent colonialism, and what does it mean, practically, theoretically, to decolonize them?
Long Abstract:
The question of the colonial has recently exploded across diverse museums at a time when they attempt to reposition themselves as fora for public debate and emancipatory social tools. Different museums are increasingly trying to address their colonial legacy and to engage the political problems that go with curating colonial collections. Such attempts at decolonizing museums are part of a larger campaign to decolonize Europe and to counter exclusionary modes of conceiving European identities. Often under second generation activists and social movements' pressure, curators have begun to act upon the multiple forms of structural, racialized violence that sustain the museum institution. Propelled by social media, these movements—from Decolonize this Place in the USA to Museum Detox in the UK and Decolonize the Museum in the Netherlands—extend beyond national borders and yet respond to specific (post)colonial formations embedded in distinctive national landscapes and imperial histories.
This panel explores how museums in different contexts respond to the (post)colonial condition. In what ways are museums colonial institutions, how do they represent colonialism, and what does it mean, practically, theoretically, to decolonize them? More specifically: What is the exact content of the 'colonial' in decolonizing collections? What do museums' narratives of colonialism look like and why? How are broader postcolonial issues negotiated in and through museums? How do museums attempt to be spaces for recognition and (re)conciliation? What is a postcolonial museum vis-à-vis a decolonial one? How to counter the risk of decolonizing moves being recuperated by neoliberal logics?
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Wednesday 22 July, 2020, -Nuno Porto (University of British Columbia)
Paper short abstract:
This presentation focuses in the UBC project to decolonize its African collections while training students on a museum research experience. In the context of a university located in "unceded land" of the Musqueam first nation I explore the socially situated nature of the notion of decolonization.
Paper long abstract:
This presentation focuses on work in progress within the UBC funded project to decolonize its African collections while training undergraduate students on a museum hands-on research experience. I will follow an ethnographic account of the implementation of the project highlighting specific situations that point to the sense that the notion of decolonization - even if restricted to museum work - does not cover a unified field of practice. In views of this, the project - that covers four academic terms and allows recruiting eight students per term - is itself engaged in incorporating practices locally perceived as decolonial gestures, such as a bottom-up, participatory, management 'structure', a permanent, by consensus, decision making process, and deliberate and systematic communication of the working process with peers and the broader academic community.
I begin by exploring the matter of fact-ness that Canada, and, for that matter, UBC, located in "unceded land" of the Musqueam first nation, does not see itself as an imperial nation. Its usual formulation of the notion of 'decolonization' is consistently articulated in tandem with the notion of 'reconciliation', an ongoing political process that does not include Africa, nor Canadians of African descent, as it addresses internal colonial histories regarding Canadian First Nations.
I then explore instances in which the project is fertilized by disparate notions of decolonization formulated by students while re-describing the collections and criticizing the museum catalogue strictures, and how, at a second level, these provide perspective into our current colonial situation both at the university and at the city of Vancouver.
Damiana Otoiu (SNSPA, Bucharest)
Paper short abstract:
Based on about 36 months of anthropological fieldwork conducted in France and South Africa, I will address the manner in which questions of ownership and representation have been approached by French and South African (post)colonial museums with regard to collections of physical anthropology.
Paper long abstract:
In April 1996, the South African National Gallery organized the exhibition entitled "Miscast. Negotiating Khoisan History and Material Culture", curated by artist Pippa Skotnes. By exposing anthropometric photographs, plaster casts, and archival documents, the curator advanced the idea of museum collections as revealing colonial practices and political uses of anthropology. The exhibition was followed by a series of symposia and public fora, where members of the communities represented in the exhibition had been invited. The exhibition had generated a huge scientific, artistic (and political) controversy on the representation of indigenous groups in museums and on the ownership of San and Khoi Khoi human remains.
At the same time, the representatives of different indigenous South African groups, such as the Griqua National Conference, were formulating claims against European museums. Their first international claim concerned the repatriation of Sarah Baartman's remains, a Khoisan woman whose skeleton was displayed at Musée de l'Homme in Paris until the 1970s.
Three decades after this first claim, when le Musée de l'Homme re-opened (in 2015), its curators decided to make extensive use of the physical anthropological collections and to display 19th-century plaster casts as a way of "celebrating human diversity". But le Musée de l'Homme (like many other European museums) was (and continues to be) faced with repatriation requests for certain collections, including those of physical anthropology. How do museum curators in both countries answer questions such as: who has the right to expose physical anthropology specimens (human remains, anthropometric photographs, plaster casts) and why?
Ana Rita Amaral (University of the Free State)
Paper short abstract:
Debates about decolonisation and museums have often been broad. Nevertheless, this paper aims to change scales and consider collections research. Taking the case of missionary collections from colonial Angola, it explores the limitations and potential of that research for the mission to decolonise.
Paper long abstract:
Debates about decolonisation and museums have been often and perhaps necessarily broad. While acknowledging their political and public relevance, this paper aims to change scales and bring to the debate what researching a collection entails. Which questions do we ask collections? How far can we go in accessing museum objects and archives? Is it relevant or possible to use methods such as fieldwork or oral history? How can we productively combine museum, archival and field research?
This paper proposes a reflection on these issues. It is based on the case study of two collections assembled by Catholic missionaries in Angola during the colonial period, which are currently in anthropology museums in Portugal. These collections are at the same time colonial, missionary, ethnographic, artistic, etc. They do not tell a single history, either about the mission or about the colonial. They can tell multiple stories and be curated in multiple ways. Collections associated with missionary activity have particular potential. Considering the Spiritan Fathers Angolan collections, we highlight two aspects. Firstly, they are extraordinarily diverse and less conditioned by anthropological and art-historical canons. They were assembled by different missionaries, in several regions, including from the famous Kongo minkisi minkondi to handicrafts. Secondly, they resulted from an activity which, with significant transformations, is still happening. The Spiritan Fathers still work and live in Angola.
This paper addresses the challenges of researching collections in critical ways, stressing their impure and plural character. It explores their curatorial potential within the debates around the decolonising mission.
Vittoria Caradonna (University of Amsterdam)
Paper short abstract:
This paper looks at the relationship between Amsterdam's Tropenmuseum and the Black Archives: a neighbouring grassroots archive focusing on colonial legacies. Can this proximity engender a space for recognition beyond the 'incorporative project' of neoliberal multiculturalism?
Paper long abstract:
This paper seeks to explore the question of what would representation and recognition look like in a museum committed to more than symbolic decolonisation.
While at present several museums in Europe have started to grapple with their colonial histories, fewer are reasoning in terms of 'coloniality within': the practices and procedures through which the institution produces and replicates structural inequality. Not all museums possess the same resources and competences, therefore calls for decolonisation have resulted in a multiplicity of responses - some more coherent than others.
In addition, the gap between symbolic and material decolonisation is not closing: while the demands for better representation and real recognition are turned into buzzwords, what remains confined to the margins of the debate is the redistribution not of 'multicultural belonging' but of actual 'belongings' (Tandiwe Myambo 65) - meaning for instance that while most cultural institutions strive for a more diverse audience, almost none creates the conditions for long-term and sustainable diversity within their staff.
Using findings from my fieldwork at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, I look at how this ethnographic museum is formulating its own definition of decolonial practices. In particular, this paper will examine the museum's relationship with the Black Archives, a neighbouring grassroots archive focusing on colonial legacies and anti-racist activism. What does this proximity mean for the museum? Can it engender a space for recognition beyond what Povinelli calls the 'incorporative project' of neoliberal multiculturalism?
Aleema Gray (Museum of London)
Paper short abstract:
How can we use the London, Sugar & Slavery gallery as a launch pad to rethink curatorial practice and contemporary collecting? What contemporary objects & experiences can help us understand the multiplicity of Blackness in London? & What does it mean to 'represent' & to 'know' in Museum displays?
Paper long abstract:
In seeking to move away from the invisible, anonymous and often disembodied voices of authority, this paper explores how the lived experiences of Black lives in London can inform our understandings of the (post)colonial condition. Drawing on Curating London, a contemporary collecting programme at the museum, the paper takes a two folds approach to the analysis of London as a site of resistance and reconciliation: firstly, it will discuss the foundations of the London, Sugar and Slavery gallery, opened in 2007 during the Bicentenary of the Abolition of Slavery Act. It will argue that its formation represented a method of radical curation that tried to balance, counter, and decode some of the arguments around slavery, memory and race in London; secondly, the paper addresses how ethical and mutually beneficial strategies of contemporary collecting can offer museums genuine opportunities to deal with the colonial afterlives. That is, how do we create spaces of healing within structures founded on rupture? Through this, this present new to work 'with' and not 'for' communities who have traditionally been silenced and removed from curatorial practices.
Margareta von Oswald (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
Paper short abstract:
How can we theorise the convergences across activism, politics, and curatorial practice with view to trans-European postcolonial reckoning?
Paper long abstract:
Departing from a long-term research and publication project entitled 'Across Anthropology', this paper analyses convergent challenges and reformulations of anthropology, anthropological museums, and their colonial legacies throughout a re-nationalising Europe. Focusing on fieldwork in Berlin (Germany), and drawing on further case studies from Tervuren and Brussels (Belgium), Paris (France), Rome (Italy), Krakow (Poland), Leiden and Amsterdam (Netherlands), this input argues that curatorial practice and theorising has offered noticeable and impactful ways of translating across academic, activist, and artistic knowledges pertinent to the above transformations. In what one could call 'transversal agency', the curatorial has become a field, which - while not seldom inspired by anthropology - crucially offers striking rebuttals and reformulations of what decolonial research and practice in and with institutions could look like. Berlin's Humboldt Forum and its international reception have catalysed the reckoning with Germany's colonial pasts in an ambiguous, and perhaps uncomfortably fashionable, way. This paper unravels and discusses these developments in Berlin with view to curatorial agency and creative refusal of larger hegemonical heritage narratives, both from within anthropology museums and through work in independent art spaces. It thus offers a reflexive and comparative take on curating the colonial across Europe today. The contribution is jointly conceived by Jonas Tinius and Margareta von Oswald, editors of 'Across Anthropology' (Leuven University Press, 2020, open-access).
Lukasz Bukowiecki (University of Warsaw)
Paper short abstract:
Current European debates concerning (mostly ethnographic) museums and provenance of their (mostly non-European) collections affect the narratives and practices of Polish museum sector to a limited degree, but with some insightful interventions into the area which are to be discussed in this paper.
Paper long abstract:
The post-colonial theory and the decolonial approach are applied to the case of Central and Eastern Europe by many scholars. Poland is recognized as both a former 'colony' of neighboring 19th-century regional powers and 20th-century totalitarian states, as well as a former 'colonizer', with its own imperial ambitions, racist prejudices in Polish-Jewish relations, the self-colonizing serfdom system and global colonial entanglements. However, the status of museums as (post)colonial institutions or an issue of ownership of overseas collections have not already been nationwide debated in Poland.
Against this background, the paper is aimed at discussing three cases of critical engaging with European colonial pasts in Polish museums. The Ethnographic Museum in Kraków conducts a research project on its 'Syberian collections', gained in the 19th century from dominated minorities on the North-Eastern edges of the Russian Empire by representatives of another dominated imperial minority (Poles). Thanks to respectful field work, the project is targeted on sharing the authority with descendants of former owners of the museum objects and therefore to reassess the collections with the local knowledge, however without any material restitution nor new acquisition in the agenda. The Asia and Pacific Museum in Warsaw is going to open its new core exhibition this year, called "Journey to the East", in which the visitor will be invited to go on from the critically reflected perspective of a European explorer. Finally, the Museum of Warsaw contributes to the movement of museum decolonization as an associate partner of the Horizon2020 ECHOES research project.
Merve Kayikci (KU Leuven)
Paper short abstract:
How is Islam reflected in contemporary museums? How do we see a continuation of a racial narrative and the past reflecting on the present? How do museums write the narrative when it comes to the representation of other heritages?
Paper long abstract:
Especially in the case of Islam, museums in the way they structure the form and content of their exhibitions, skip over the fact that Islam was and is part of the many civilizations they display in their galleries. There is a tendency to embed Islam as a Middle-Eastern religion and restrict its impact on art and culture to the Middle East. There are of course, several reasons for this; reasons that go as far back as to colonialism and the racial outlook on art and culture. But it is interesting that museums up until today, hold on to these historical perceptions. This paper explores how Islam is reflected in contemporary museums. It traces the colonial and racial perception toward Islamic art and how it has come to influence the display of Islam collections today. How do we see a continuation of a highly racial narratives and the past reflecting on the present? How do the visitors - Muslim and non-Muslim - reflect on what they see in the traditional museum? Ultimately, how do institutions such as museums write the narrative when it comes to the representation of other heritages? In what way has this phenomenon evolved over time and taken shape today? This research is carried out with anthropological methodology of interviews and participant observation taking place in more than fifteen different museums in five different European countries; Holland, France, Belgium, UK and Germany. The research is part of the H2020 funded RETOPEA project.
Banu Karaca (Forum Transregionale Studien)
Paper short abstract:
The paper examines the possibilities and limitations in attempts to decolonize museum collections at times of war.
Paper long abstract:
At a time when activists in Germany are forcefully demanding to decolonize Berlin's museum collections and its institutions are faced with a wide variety of restitution claims, this paper proposes to look how these demands are perceived by those in charge of collections of "Islamic art" and those originating from the Middle East in general. Since 2016, the German Foreign Ministry and the German Archeological Institute are spearheading a project that aims to "facilitate identification of looted objects that are being traded illegally on the art market" and the "reconstruction of cultural heritage in Syria." The initiative is called Stunde Null (zero hour); its name is the very term that has been so central to the fashioning of a post-war Germany, to the purported rupture with the Third Reich and the disavowal of the workings of the National Socialist past in the present. The paper proposes to examine the ways in which the discourses of decolonializing the museum are at once integrated and undermined by the institutions that hold the collections of artifacts from Middle East, now turned theaters of war, that are located on Berlin's Museumsinsel. More specifically, it aims to probe how the erasure of memory at "home" (i.e. Germany) is connected to notions of heritage protection abroad (i.e. Syria), and how to what extend museums are able face the contemporary entanglements of historical artifact and art with war and political violence, past and present.
Ferdinand de Jong
Paper short abstract:
One year after publication of the Restitution Report France returned the sabre of El Hadj Umar Tal to the Museum of Black Civilisations. Exploring the potential of restitution to address the effects of colonialism, this paper examines restitution as an act of repair in a neo-colonial context.
Paper long abstract:
In December 2018, the Museum of Black Civilisations finally opened its doors to the public. Realising a project initially launched by the Senegalese President Léopold Sédar Senghor in 1966, the museum is a belated materialisation of his Negritude philosophy. But the museum's realisation is also a timely response to the current restitution debate initiated by the French President Macron. One year after the publication of the Restitution Report, France formally returned the sabre of El Hadj Umar Tall to the Museum of Black Civilisations. Exploring the potential of restitution to address the effects of colonialism, this paper examines restitution as an act of repair in a context of neo-colonial diplomacy.
The notion of repair has recently been adopted by a range of postcolonial authors, drawing largely upon the work of French-Algerian artist Kader Attia. The notion of repair departs from usual models of reparation in that it acknowledges the trauma and does not prescribe a return to the original. Applying this notion to the restitution of the sabre of El Hadj Umar Tall reveals that, whilst alerting us to the possibilities and parameters of restitution, it privileges an ethical dimension to the process or repair, disavowing the politics that inevitably determine the process of restitution. In this case, the process of restitution of a sabre facilitated a conference on peace-keeping. Ostensibly serving repair, the register of restitution was deployed to facilitate the military suppression of a contemporary holy war.