Developing a Digital (Un)Museum of Black Culture & Heritage!

Developing a Digital (Un)Museum of Black Culture & Heritage!

Over the last 10 years, BSWN have been working with Black artists, cultural producers, archivists, and activists in exploring notions of identity, belonging, history and heritage for Black and Minoritised communities across the South West of England. There is a need for truths to be told through the voices of Black and Minoritised communities within spaces and through mediums that are designed, owned, curated, and managed by Black and Minoritised communities.

Through this work, we have begun to explore the concept of a Black Memory and Culture Institution as a decolonial ‘museum’. The discussions have been wide ranging and encompasses thoughts and reflections of many people on a physical space, a digital space, and the ownership, management, and curation of the content and of the space.

Our collaborators in this work indicated that the physical and digital ‘spaces’ should be ‘disruptive and unconventional’. They should constitute a ‘third space’ that sits in between what is and what can be, connecting these elements through telling truths; a space in which Black and Minoritised people can hold their full humanity in a way that breaches and exceeds the narrow, White colonial view of human experience.  

By creating spaces for cultural creation and curation, and for liberatory conversations and expressions, the concept of a Black Memory and Culture Institution defies popular colonised thought. It centres Black and Minoritised stories and voices in re-thinking ways to express and learn about one’s heritage, which can be a reparative source of freedom. The creation of a Black Memory and Culture Institution provides the opportunity to articulate and curate Black and Minoritised conceptions of identity in a manner that resists the disinheritance from both the true past and from the communities’ heritage today; a disinheritance that is effected by the imperial lens of traditional museums.

Whilst these discussions have begun to develop a conceptual framework for the Black Memory and Culture Institution, there is a need to prototype and test a digital platform that can meet the needs and aspirations of Black and Minoritised cultural producers, organisations, and consumers. To this end, BSWN have been working with BDFI and Auroch Digital in developing conceptual, technical aspects of an interactive platform for the digital aspect of the Black Digital Memory and Culture Institution. In tandem with this, BSWN are working with the Heritage Lottery Fund to draw together a group of Black and Minoritised cultural producers, archivists, academics, and community members as the Steering Group for the design of the physical space within the Coach House, and to commission content for both the physical and digital spaces.

Issues of ownership of the work of cultural producers, particular in digital formats, and the avoidance of extractive relationships with mainstream organisations are critical in decolonial cultural practice. In light of this, BSWN are working with Exeter University to explore the digitisation of collections and the implications of Intellectual Property Rights for Black and Minoritised producers and heritage organisations in the UK.

Over the next two years, BSWN will pilot a prototype digital platform, develop a decolonial digitisation and IPR framework for Black and Minoritised cultural producers, commission a range of content, and, ultimately, launch the Black Memory and Culture Institution as a site through which Black and Minoritised heritage is articulated and expressed outside of an imperial framing, whilst moving forward with a sense of uncontested belonging to both their Black and British identities.