Culture Minister Miquel Iceta has just asked himself the question that serves as the title of this article: “How do you decolonize a museum?” Her statement shows that she is committed to taking this matter seriously; but also that it feels like a titanic task and he doesn’t know how or where to start.
It is nothing new that museums, whether colonial or not, have found themselves in a crossfire as they decide their model, their strategy, their meaning, their name, or their survival today. During these years, attempts have been made to change its meaning, rather than settling down if we choose between franchise museums and those that choose a program from their own project. The former attract crowds of tourists and save on visitor numbers, the latter reject the blockbuster exhibition and rely on a different relationship between the works and those who interact with them. In Spain, through the Guggenheim effect, the Málaga model has consolidated the first line and everything indicates that it will continue to grow. This is what service economies have that ultimately configure service cultures.
But let’s get back to what’s on our minds. “How do you decolonize a museum?” asks the minister, and the truth is, whether he wanted to or not, he hit the nail on the head. For this is not just another question, but the question that every former colonial metropolis must ask itself in order to establish a cultural policy that is compatible with the past, present and future representation of a large part of its citizens. And because this update goes beyond the walls of the museum, going through the uses and origins of its collections, until it affects millions of people who for decades have looked at themselves in a mirror in which they do not recognize themselves. A reflection that stereotypes them as exotic beings given at best a condescending multiculturalism of immutable temples that speak for them but never of them.
How is a museum decolonized? First of all, given the return of heritage to the countries of origin and at the same time the transfer of power in the representation and construction of the discourses and images that have been usurped by the communities from that origin up to now.
As little as Spain is remotely shy and superficial, there has been no lack of initiatives in Europe in these decolonization processes. One of the most notorious was SWICH, which was limited between 2014 and 2018 and had ten affiliated museums.
In the United States, on the other hand, since 2015 the Museum of Afro-American Culture in Washington and a dozen others with similar purposes have been based to claim the cultural influence of black society across the country. From slavery to the Black Lives Matters movement (which sparked these institutional responses), to blues, jazz, civil rights marches, rap, literature and urban art.
If in Europe the transformation is through the revision of colonial terror, in the United States it is through the revision of segregation and slavery. In both cases, the “museum” figure is narrow when it comes to proposing an anti-colonial space whose exhibition or collection function is just one chapter in a program that calls for equal parts archeology and pedagogy, restitution and activism, the reappraisal of old colonial histories and the inclusion of new anti-colonial themes.
It is urgent? Yes, but it requires deep analysis that cannot be carried out lightly or with impactful blows. Is it progressive? Also, but without a broad political and social consensus, it will not work
Of course, only out of demagoguery can it be said that we face an easy task. It is urgent? Yes, but it requires deep analysis that cannot be carried out lightly or with impactful blows. Is it progressive? Also, but without a broad political and social consensus, it will not work. In Belgium, for example, it didn’t take a left-wing government for the Tervuren Museum to embark on a decolonization process (which included a temporary closure to reflect on how to proceed while paying attention to professionals and civil society). In Barcelona, a left-ruled city council has failed to get past the tentative shielding of a space as outdated as the Museum of Ethnology and World Cultures.
And for some museums, this decolonization is like electric car propaganda: in the end we don’t know whether you want to save the planet or the car industry. Just as such museums, instead of decolonizing, only seek to prolong their lives from the most obvious gatopardismo.
Nor is the invasion of “decolonial” jargon in activism emanating from the North American Academy, which is not clear if its intention is to liquefy anticolonialism by deconstructing colonialism, is not very helpful.
Outside of these closed spaces, our cities turn out to be open-air museums of colonialism. But they are also, and increasingly will be, anti-colonialism. And that the current revisionist stream – contradictory and multifaceted – reveals wounds from the past that remain unclosed and frontiers of the present that remain unopened.
It doesn’t matter how much the institutions want to protect themselves, refusing a radical rethinking in the 21st century. And no matter how hard they try to prolong their life from programmed obsolescence, they will not be able to avoid the catastrophe of death without a program.
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