Decolonising the museum
Françoise Vergès
In this podcast, Françoise Vergès unpacks the social and environmental politics of cleaning and waste, charting and questioning temporal and spatial interactions that create a neutral site of deprivation, exhaustion and exploitation. She sheds light on the economy and politics of exhaustion, pointing out the role of racial capitalism in the climate crisis. Vergès suggests a political re-reading and understanding of vital needs and natural elements through notions of cleaning, hygiene and medicine, and raises revolutionary questions about the prefabricated assumptions of justice and social transformation through re-thinking the museum.
Elvira Espejo Ayca
Elvira Espejo Ayca is an indigenous artist, weaver, writer, poet and researcher. Her work brings to light collective strategies that resist monoculturalization, moving back and forth between the rural and urban, between ancestral practices and the colonial gaze, between the sentipensamiento (feeling-thinking) of indigenous peoples and the predominance of academic Eurocentrism. In this podcast, we take a deep dive into the actions of the National Museum of Etnography and Folklore (MUSEF) of La Paz (Bolivia) in search of mutual understanding and respect, while weaving and reweaving the historical gaps and bridges between two worlds.
Clémentine Deliss
Clémentine Deliss, director of the Weltkulturen Museum in Frankfurt, talks about about the possibility of a post-ethnographic and post-colonial museum, and about the strategies that she has tested in recent years to counteract the ideology of conservation. These include the “remediation” of objects in the collection, fieldwork in the museum, and opening up spaces for work, production and research that go beyond storage and exhibition.
Walter Mignolo
The Argentine semiotician Walter Mignolo talks about the relation between the construction of history and the perspective of power, as imposed by the West.
Deleted scenes #2
We dig up another unreleased fragment of our interview with the philosopher and activist Beatriz Preciado.