museology

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.

In this podcast, we sit down with transdisciplinary researcher and curator Yaiza Hernández to get to the heart of her deep-dive research into what she has coined Terminal Tourism. Drawing upon the long tradition of academic scholarship, but also from a situated perspective as a native from the Canary Islands, Yaiza unpacks the constellation of problems orbiting the travel industry, from environmental degradation to rampant gentrification and the subsequent disruption of local infrastructures, and a whole host of other socioeconomic inequalities.

Anthropologist and researcher Alana Osbourne works at the crossroads of anthropology, critical geography, postcolonial thought, and Black studies, tracing how histories of empire continue to shape contemporary ways of seeing, knowing, and organizing the world. Her work is attuned to the subtle but persistent afterlives of colonialism, that extend beyond obvious political or economic structures into cultural institutions, scientific practices, and even imaginaries of the future. In this podcast, Osbourne reflects on how these layered histories demand new critical tools and interdisciplinary approaches capable of holding together questions of race, space, materiality, and power.

We dig up some unreleased fragments of our conversation of our conversation with Mapuche filmmaker and lecturer Francisco Huichaqueo and Mapuche activist Catalina Alvarado-Cañuta. Drawing on memories of everyday racism, Mapudungun silences, and dreams in the revived language, Huichaqueo weaves together stories about human remains and Mapuche ‘artefacts of memory’ held in European and North American museums, restitution processes, and small acts of institutional disobedience. Art becomes a spiritual and political tactic for exercising one’s rights, opening up display cabinets, accompanying stolen objects, and sowing the seeds of the future in long-term struggles.