DECOLONISING MUSEUMS

DECOLONISING MUSEUMS
Decolonising Museums is the second thematic publication
of L’Internationale Online; it addresses colonial
legacies and mindsets, which are still so rooted and
present today in the museum institutions in Europe
and beyond. The publication draws from the conference
Decolonising the Museum which took place at
MACBA in Barcelona, 27-29 November 2014 1, and
offers new essays, responding to texts published on
the online platform earlier this year. In different geopolitical
regions, there have been various degrees
of work to reconsider the colonial past ever since
the 1960s, the painstaking process of decolonisation
and the institutionalisation of multiculturalism.
Scrutinising the complex European context, one can
talk about belated processes taking place in France,
Belgium and Holland, the generational
divides in the discussion
around ‘identity politics’ and the
obvious dichotomies between the
South and the North. Especially in
times when dealing with waves of
refugees struggling for their lives
1. Among the contributors
to this thematic
issue, Clémentine
Deliss, Daniela Ortiz and
Francisco Godoy Vega participated
at the seminar
Decolonising the Museum
at MACBA.
has become one of the most urgent civic and individual
responsibilities in Europe. Calling upon cultural
memory and half-gone history seems to be of utmost
importance to oppose the often politically-guided
amnesia and ignorance.
When proposing the ‘decolonisation’ of the
museum the first thing to clarify is what the ‘de’ in
this term actually means. As formulated in our own
research brief, ‘decolonising’ means both resisting
the reproduction of colonial taxonomies, while simultaneously
vindicating radical multiplicity. These are
two forces drawing in different directions: understanding
the situation museums are in, critically and
openly, and identifying those moments that already
indicate a different type of practice that overcomes
or resists the colonial conditioning. The term ‘decolonisation’
itself can appear somewhat forced to
describe these two movements as it suggests the
return to a pristine state ‘before’ colonialism, yet to
name this double movement seems more adequate
than the common ‘postcolonial’. The current moment
is not ‘post’, when it comes to museum practice and
L’INTERNATIONALE ONLINE – DECOLONISING MUSEUMS – 5