This month I've participated in a short course, promoted by Porto city hall, entitled "The Time(s) of The Contemporaneity 2: Decolonising the Culture". According to the program, the course "brings together artists and intellectuals to discuss the relationship between art, race, institutions and the legacy of colonialism. It addresses decolonization in the broadest sense of the term: as an acknowledgment of colonial legacies in the present, as an ongoing system of oppression, and as a practice of affirming different forms of repressed knowledge. The invited speakers will explore decolonial methodologies in the museum and gallery, ways to critically interact with the colonial past, and how third world feminisms have used revolutionary socialism." Even though I considered the tuition price too expensive (50eur is a considerable amount of money if you live in Portugal), I was interested in the subject and on the invite speakers, and also knew a couple of friends who would participate too, so I decided to sign up. The first day was funny. You know, when you gather a bunch of random people in a fancy room and everyone is a bit awkward, people have to introduce themselves and there's this mix of curiosity with fear of embarrassing yourself in the air... And also Claire Bishop, one of the course tutors, was not present due to a delayed flight, and I'm sure things would feel different if she was there - she has a great presence and truly knows how to engage the audience on debates, as we learned on the second day onwards (to be continued on part 02 - stay tuned). But let me go straight to what matters on day 01: Françoise Vergès was there. And what a presence, my friends. What a presence. With the title "The Im/possible Decolonisation of the European Museum", she presented some case studies as starting points for the discussion on decolonialism, such as the Africa Museum in Tervuren (Belgium), and the exhibition Black Models - From Gericault to Matisse, presented at the D'Orsay Museum in Paris (France) this year. We talked a bit about the concept of race/racism in museum contexts and also about representation, restitution, and reparation as common attempts to decolonize contemporary european institutions - museums, academia, etc. Starting with the obvious, we all (should) know that museums are European inventions. And that they promote Eurocentric visions and interpretations of art, history, sciences, technology, and everything else that exists in the world. So if we decide to discuss the issue of decolonizing the museum, the question we must ask is how can we decolonize an institution that has colonialism on its roots? The title of Vergès presentation - "im/possible" - makes us think if this task is even reasonable. Can we create new ways/institutions for producing, showing and debating art - decolonized from its conception - or can contemporary museums be fixed - I mean, decolonized? Vergès commented on some ways that different institutions are moving towards a decolonized posture. One possibility refers to REPRESENTATION: we all know that main art collection are predominantly (99.888%) composed of european male artists - and we are not even talking about classical art collections, with works produced in a time when they were the only ones allowed to create art. Not many contemporary art collections, museums, galleries, and auction houses can claim to present a truly diverse set of artists. Some may even have works from a "black woman" artist, or maybe a "south american queer" artist, but the need to present them always accompanied by a label of differentness signs that they are always seen as "the other". Or have you ever been to an exhibition admittedly entitled White European Man Artists? And even in a more basic level, regarding museum staff, how many people of color do you usually see working on museums and other art institutions? (We are talking here about a European context since the course was held in Portugal and this is a predominately white country, but the question can easily be applied to other countries, like Brasil, for instance) - and by working I mean high-level positions, not just cleaning and security staff. How can we normalize this absurd? Françoise mentioned the work of Patricia Kaersenhout and her performance The Clean Up Woman:
Representation is not enough. Nowadays, museums are questioned with the issue of displaying objects that were stolen during colonization. Entire museums made up of plunder items, sometimes even entire monuments were taken and re-placed inside neoclassical buildings across the sea. And now, years after those massacres happened, they are considering if they should give the objects back or not... If the RESTITUTION of stolen objects to their countries of origin is the best thing museums can do, are we really talking about decolonization? I mean, giving back something you STOLE sounds pretty basic, right? While kids on 2nd grade are taught not to steal the toys from their colleagues, european and north-american museologists, art historians and curators are still debating among them what they should do with their huge collections of stolen objects. And they don't even ask the stolen countries if they want their objects back. So how about REPARATION, another fashionable term among open-minded sections of the art world? I mean... How can years and years of colonization be repaired? And more particularly, how can this be done inside the museum walls? As Vergès showed us, some museums and curators are trying (but man, are they far from enough). Take the case of the second example she brought to the discussion, the group exhibition Black Models - From Gericault to Matisse, presented at the Museum D'Orsay. The whole idea of this show was to present "the evolution" of black people as models for artworks from the time of slavery abolition to present times. To me, personally, this doesn't sound like a strong curatorial statement - in fact, sounds racist to bring together artworks just because of the skin color of their models, disregarding the whole social/conceptual/aesthetic context of each individual work and artist. Some artists painted black models because they owned slaves, so should this really be presented as a harmless relation between model and artists? Anyway, the curators aimed to go further, so they did some research on the models and find out some historic information about them, sometimes even their names. That's the case of the following painting, renamed Portrait of Madaleine but formerly known as Portrait of a Negress: Apparently, renaming the model seemed to be enough. The poor woman now has her dignity back! We did it! Yay to us!
But as pointed by Vergès, the issue of changing a slave's name goes much deeper than just finding out their "European" name. I mean, you didn't think a woman born in any of the former French colonies during the first colonial empire would be named Madaleine, right? So why museums and curators tend to adopt this reparatory attitude, like they did something important to repair a historical dept, instead of educating visitors on the true depth of the issue? Why most museums continue to address social issues superficially, treating paintings like some type of band-aid covering a ridiculous fraction of a much bigger and still-open wound? WHY ARE MUSEUMS STILL SO AFRAID? I mean, I can't blame museums. People are still afraid of talking about racism, imperialism, colonization - these are almost forbidden topics to debate here in Portugal. But as Françoise Vergès said, decolonization starts with yourself, and we must decolonize our gaze before proposing new ways of understanding the world. I'll continue to share my impressions on this course in the hope to continually decolonize my world view and keep on questioning others.
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The exhibition Eco-Visionaries: Art and Architecture after the Anthropocene was inaugurated on April 11th 2018 at MAAT - Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology, in Lisbon. Curated by Pedro Gadanho and Mariana Pestana, the show presents works of more than 35 artists, architects and designers that critically reflect on environmental changes and how human activity is affecting the planet.
Anthropocene is a concept created by the atmospheric chemist and Nobel Prize-winner Paul Crutzen. During a conference in 2000, he announced the end of Holoceno - the geological period that the human race is being living for the last 12 hundred years - and presented the ideia of this new era, characterised mainly by the impact of the human action on the planet [2]. While the term is still on discussion between geologists, it is already on use and debated on other fields. Eco-Visionaries is the second "manifesto-exhibition" produced at MAAT and was organised in collaboration with several museums in Europe, being the "first and most wide-ranging of the four exhibitions that will appear simultaneously in Portugal, Spain, Switzerland and Sweden" [1]. Climate change, mass consumption, environmental crisis and ways of surviving are some of the topics explored by the selected works, which are divided into four sections: Disaster, Coexistence, Extinction and Adaptation. The show occupies the Main Gallery of the museum and I would say that is necessary at least 2 hours to explore it - but you can easily spend way more time if you want to read everything. The concept of the show, the selected artists/works and their distribution is the exhibition space are all very well done. It had been a while since I liked a group show that much. Mixing artists and architects under the same conceptual scope is one of my biggest interests and it was refreshing to visit Eco-visionaries. Here are some of the artists/architects/designers I discovered in the exhibition and examples of their works (with links):
Source: Goodman Gallery.
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