Visiting the Amsterdam Museum: Studying Visitors' Responses to Decolonial Practices

Abstract

This report was developed within the Horizon2020 project ECHOES: European Colonial Heritage Modalities in Entangled Cities as part of its work package 3 on ‘City Museums and Multiple Colonial Pasts.’ This work package conducts in-depth, qualitative, comparative analyses of three city museums, each representing distinct positions within colonial history. The Amsterdam Museum forms one of these three case studies. The aim of this third report on the Amsterdam Museum is to assess visitors’ responses to a selection of the museum’s decolonial practices. In part, practicing decoloniality is dealing with direct colonial heritages and objects. However, decoloniality as a whole is “a process and a mode of through that goes deeper into untangling the current-day colonial hooks from the museum” (Ariese & Wróblewska Forthcoming: 1). Thus, as the core of this report will show, there are many ways in which the Amsterdam Museum can practice decoloniality, not always necessarily directly related to ‘colonial’ objects