The object matter of museums: designing otherwise

O debate teórico e ético contemporâneo em torno dos museus está profundamente enredado no mundo e é construído a partir de um envolvimento intra-ativo com ele. Como consequência, o museu tende a abordar o emergente e o urgente através de práticas situadas que analisam e respondem coletivamente às circunstâncias do mundo. Ao fazê-lo, o museu contemporâneo procura criar condições para o envolvimento dos visitantes, permitindo que as suas vozes não mediadas sejam ouvidas. Este texto pretende explorar o espaço crítico entre a aparente vitalidade decolonial do museu e a forma como as práticas difrativas podem ser concebidas num contexto pós-crítico e pós-representacional, argumentando que as abordagens baseadas em processos artísticos e de design de fabulação especulativa (como a Cultura do Design) são úteis para pensar e agir nestes espaços de experiência. De forma pragmática, destaca três modos de envolvimento especulativo (moderado) do design com o presente e o futuro para ajudar os museus a libertarem-se da sua cegueira ontológica e a concretizarem o seu potencial crítico e transformador.The contemporary theoretical and ethical debate on museums is deeply entangled in the world and built from an intra-active engagement with it. As a consequence, the museum tends to address the emergent and the urgent through situated practices that collectively analyse and respond to circumstances in the world. In doing so, the contemporary museum seeks to create conditions for visitor engagement by empowering their unmediated voices to be heard. This text aims to explore the critical space between the apparent decolonial vitality of the museum and how diffractive practices may be designed in a postcritical and postrepresentational context, arguing that approaches based on artistic and design processes of speculative fabulation (as Design Culture) are helpful for thinking and acting in these spaces of experience. Pragmatically, it highlights three modes of speculative (moderated) design engagement with the present and the future to help museums to break out of their ontological blindness and fulfil their critical and transformative potential

Decolonial Public History in Practice: A Collaborative Project on the Role of Indigenous Women in the Fish Wars of Washington State of the 1960s and 1970s

During the 1960s and 1970s, the waterways of the Pacific Northwest played host to fish-ins held by Indigenous communities as they sought to protect their way of life and ensure the continued recognition of their treaty rights to fish on and off their reservations. The Treaty of Medicine Creek of 1854 and Treaty of Point Elliot of 1855 guaranteed the fishing and hunting rights of Indigenous groups of the Pacific Northwest in “all usual and accustomed grounds and stations.” Due to impacts from hydroelectric dams, a growing lumber industry, sportsmen fishing, and other stresses on the waterways, salmon populations declined drastically. The conservation policies set forth by states restricted Indigenous fishing methods and sites, thus infringing on their rights. In response, Indigenous fishers actively defied the regulations and began to organize in the early 1960s, leading to what were called “fish-ins.” Although some scholars have described the overall Fish Wars as “women-led” demonstrations, historians have given the role of Indigenous women little scholarly attention. To expand the scholarship on the experience of Indigenous women of the Fish Wars in the 1960s and 1970s, this project seeks to combine public history and decolonial methodology into three main components: an exhibit, which includes content and design; a grant application for a mobile humanities unit; and an article on student-led decolonial public history projects. The goals of this project are: 1) Recover the stories of the Fish Wars, a series of Indigenous-led demonstrations to protect fishing and treaty rights, and the roles and experiences of Indigenous women, creating a more complete story of the Pacific Northwest’s past; 2) Democratize the modes of knowledge production by increasing their accessibility to ordinary people and communities through a mobile humanities unit; 3) Design a project grounded in decolonial public history methodology, adhering to principles of collaboration, relationality, and shared authority

Methodological toolkit

This document represents the ‘Methodological toolkit’ for the Horizon2020 Project ECHOES; European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities. The ECHOES Project brings together scholars from a wide range of disciplines and nationalities and entails cases in cityscapes from Asia, Africa and South America and from Northern, Western, Southern and Eastern Europe. ECHOES focuses on various forms and levels of engagements with colonial heritage from local street performances to EU political discourse. The overall aim is to investigate decolonial heritage practices outside Europe in former colonized territories with multiple and different histories of colonialisms as well as to look at decolonial practices inside Europe while keeping in mind the very different trajectories of the different European colonial projects. The fact that Europe’s colonial past is simultaneously present as an undeniable heritage in its cities, institutions and international relationships, and also constantly ‘echoed’ back to it from the former colonized ‘outside’ constitutes both the challenge and the promise of the ECHOES project; to look for way in which to engage a decolonized future by seeking inspiration in how the colonial past is managed, transformed and worked on by various artistic, political, heritage or civil actors in cityscapes within and beyond the with European continent

Practicing Decoloniality in Museums

The cry for decolonization has echoed throughout the museum world. Although perhaps most audibly heard in the case of ethnographic museums, many different types of museums have felt the need to engage in decolonial practices. Amidst those who have argued that an institution as deeply colonial as the museum cannot truly be decolonized, museum staff and museologists have been approaching the issue from different angles to practice decoloniality in any way they can. This book collects a wide range of practices from museums whose audiences, often highly diverse, come together in sometimes contentious conversations about pasts and futures. Although there are no easy or uniform answers as to how best to deal with colonial pasts, this collection of practices functions as an accessible toolkit from which museum staff can choose in order to experiment with and implement methods according to their own needs and situations. The practices are divided thematically and include, among others, methods for decentering, improving transparency, and increasing inclusivity

New media art: curating social justice in contemporary art museums and arts organizations

My research project includes case studies in which I interviewed nine new media art curators and directors whose curatorial practices offer historical analyses and theoretical perspectives that address the dynamics of social justice by using new media art. I investigate the ways in which social justice is presented in museums and arts organizations. Central to this project is an examination of museum practices where the use of new media art becomes a central platform to showcase issues of social justice

The Anthropologist as Sparring Partner: Instigative Public Fieldwork, Curatorial Collaboration, and German Colonial Heritage

Anthropological fieldwork is a collaborative practice, based and reliant on interactions and relations of trust and exchange. Yet, it is limited and enabled by the openings and closings, the stability and instability of relations between interlocutors, fieldworkers, and the many things that matter in-between and around these relations. This article reflects on a series of public conversations called gallery reflections, which were instigated as a collaborative ethnographic practice with and within the gallery of the institute of international cultural relations (ifa) in Berlin-Mitte. The series addressed the legacies of German colonial heritage and the public role of anthropology against the backdrop of the construction of the Humboldt Forum and museum transformations. Investigating the notion of the anthropologist as sparring partner, this article probes into possible ways of conceiving curatorial-ethnographic collaborations as ‘instigative public fieldwork’.This article was written up during a postdoctoral fellowship of the European Consolidator Grant project 'Minor Universality. Narrative World Productions After Western Universalism', which received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant Agreement No. 819931)

Maye Ma Leka – Reframing Congolese-Swedish Colonial Entaglements

This article will discuss an artistic research project exploring a repressed part of Swedish colonial history by unboxing and unfolding a hidden trove of photographs and films amassed by Swedish Missionaries in Congo. The transdisciplinary and transnational research project explores how material traces of Swedish colonial history can support contemporary discourses, processes, and practices of recovery from the colonial period's devaluation of indigenous knowledge systems.  By developing a participatory practice based on artistic research methods, the project contributes new perspectives on critical re-examinations and future knowledge in artistic research.