The UnMuseum, written by Stuart Taylor
In November 2020, BSWN hosted a virtual workshop, Curating Decolonised Cultural Heritage Spaces: Imagining and Exploring a Postcolonial Museum. Facilitated by Tim Kindberg of Matter II Media & Bristol Digital Futures Institute and Jessica Ogden of Bristol Digital Futures Institute. The workshop invited participants to “explore the possibilities” of a decolonised museum or heritage space.
Based on the community’s discussion of an imagined decolonised heritage space, key themes and recommendations emerged for consideration and planning. These included:
Vision – Disruptive and unconventional, shapeshifting with and without walls. Educational and knowledge sharing, representing multiple stories and perspectives. Liberatory, healing-centred and restorative. Sustainable.
Balance of power and community agency – Secure independent financing, community control around development considerations and access. Knowledge, content and curation informed by community perspectives, beyond Eurocentric models of museum culture. Individual community members and groups should be fairly compensated for their contributions to a decolonised heritage space.
Community access and engagement – Providing open access to the facilities and resources of the decolonised heritage space. Incorporating multiple perspectives of narratives and content, that reflects the diversity within the community.
Content – Creating archives and cultural capital. Educational content about African diaspora heritage and pre-colonial African cultures and histories. Contemporary histories of African diasporan migration, settlement and flourishing despite the challenges of racialisation, marginalisation and systemic racism. Performance storytelling and more accessible and diverse forms of language, that better reflect the diversity of communication forms present across Black communities. Including fashion, music, food cultures, literature, performance, storytelling and screen-based.
Technology – Provides for more creative and personalised forms of interaction with the decolonised space’s materials and resources. Considerations around personal data security and intellectual property rights regarding the content drawn from community archives and individuals.
Curating Decolonised Cultural Heritage Spaces. Workshop Summary Report. Black South West Network (November 2020).
Let us proceed then, with some reflections on philosophy from issues posed by it and its creolized hybrid—namely, Africana or African diasporic philosophy—as freedom, justice, and decolonization are central concerns of that area of thought. The reader may be immediately struck by the expression “creolized hybrid.” “Creolized” in this context refers to bringing at times opposing forces into living mixtures or syntheses.
Image taken during the UnMuseum Cultural and Heritage Programme Autumn events.
The focus of philosophy in different parts of the world over the ages varied according to the priorities of where it was practised. Among ancient East Africans, for instance, astronomy, architecture, and medicine offered paths to philosophical reflection, and the complicated negotiation of power among increasingly dense populations occasioned much reflection on balance, justice, laws, right, and truth…History has also shown that Black people, as philosophers and social scientists from the Haitian anthropologist, jurist, philosopher, and statesman Anténor Firmin to the African American economist, historian, philosopher, and sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois and many others have argued, do not always fit into many disciplinary norms except as “problems.” In short, their “fit” is paradoxically one of not fitting…Lewis Gordon, Freedom, Justice and Decolonisation. Routledge & Taylor (2021).
Here then is a beginning, an opening, in contextualising and situating why in 2022, here in Bristol, we are pursuing through an ongoing working group, discussions, arguments, dreaming, and planning for our very own UnMuseum. What you might ask is an UnMuseum? This is a good question, and the purpose of this introductory essay is to begin to address, though (intentionally) not definitively answer this question.
Image of Stuart Taylor facilitating third UnMuseum event, ‘Telling Stories.’
The reason I seek to not definitively answer the question, is that from the perspective of my colleagues and I from Black South West Network (BSWN), our task and our purpose, is to persistently restate and re-examine this question. Through an evolving and iterative, emergent, and organic process of commissioning, production, critique, reflection, and celebration. We focus our attention on the process of honouring Black cultural heritage and contemporary creative production. This route is itself inevitably a culturally, economically, historically, and politically situated process of becoming. A process that we will define through our flights of imagination, critical thinking, and collaborative undertakings with colleagues from across the African diaspora; those based locally, regionally, nationally, globally dispersed, and on the motherland continent of Africa itself.
“Because it is a systematic negation of the other person and a furious determination to deny the other person attributes of humanity, colonialism forces the people it dominates to ask themselves the question constantly: “In reality, who am I?””
By initially offering the conventionally defined popular framing of what constitutes a museum in the Western conception of culture and civilisation, you may begin to see the implicit and only recently stated problem(s) in this typical framing of culture and heritage. How it imposes a distinct perspective on what is, or should be valued, as significant examples of human civilisation. We continue to ask who determines the content, items, and forms that should or shouldn’t be honoured, valorised, preserved, celebrated, and memorialised for current generations and future generations as significant?
“There are no separate systems. The world is a continuum. Where to draw a boundary around a system depends on the purpose of the discussion.”
These are some of the questions at the heart of our inquiry into imagining, visualising, articulating and establishing a physical and virtual space for engagement with and production of Black cultural heritage, in as wide and diverse a range of manifestations as we can conceive of. A range of representations that centres, foregrounds, privileges and celebrates dimensions, facets and perspectives of Black heritage and creativity that have been historically marginalised as a consequence of colonial or postcolonial cultural norms. These Eurocentric norms privilege whiteness and a wilfully amnesiac version of deep history and recent history; centring Western European ideals of culture as the apex of human expression. So this process of beginning, of opening and creating a space for creating generative cultural explorations, is our response to the historic and contemporary phenomenon of structural and systemic racism in regard to Africa and its diasporas. Our pivoting in this endeavour aims to offer meaningful, respectful and decolonised representations of this deep history of human civilisation, from an Africentric perspective, notwithstanding the 500 year glitch through the European colonial era and the subsequent continuing inequalities between the Global North and Global South.
Rather than attempt to exhaustively review the substantial literature critiquing the extractive pillaging and Western exceptionalism that has been for so much of the last 400 years at least ‘normalised’, we feel there is a better and more exciting, liberatory and abolitionist decolonial-oriented approach to embark upon. This approach is one that centres, foregrounds and privileges Blackness and Afrofuturist perspectives. An unapologetic and celebratory immersion in and participation with Black cultural production centered around healing, restorative, and joyful practices.
This assertive dance with Black culture in all its anarchic, sensual, carnivalesque, formal, popular, refined and academic manifestations. From the street to the internet, from the dancehall to the kitchen, from the catwalk to the silver screen, from your mobile screen to the page and all the spaces in between.
“Women have always paid a price for their desire for personhood. There have always been, and there continue to be, times and places when to express personhood was a dangerous and oftentimes lethal deed for women. The control of women’s reproductive systems, the imposition of male lineage, the denial of rights and education, the objectification of women’s bodies, violence, rape, and sexual harassment, the denial of positions of power, of erotic agency, of goddesses, have all served the same agenda to deny women personhood subtly and overtly. This is true when women have refused to worship an empyrean patriarchal God and it is the case when they expose sexual violators in a campaign such as Me Too. It is still absolutely the case in the modern world and even in the most progressive of societies…”
We are minded that the patterns of oppression that Black populations in Africa and in her diasporas have suffered historically and in the contemporary era, have their continuing and deep impact in the ways in which we have developed our understandings of ourselves. We take seriously the decolonial project and how this informs our sense of gender relations and power dynamics at the domestic, community, professional, governmental and societal levels systemically. Woven into these scales of reference, exploration and lived-experience is the production of culture, and the fact that the very processes of cultural production and reproduction perpetuate or challenge, collude with or resist the received definitions of ‘normal’, desirable, and worthy of celebration. Our contention is that for too long these definitions have been Eurocentric and insufficiently challenged or contested. Although the UnMuseum is not seeking to be a direct counterpoint to this tradition, we are intent on pivoting, in order to better focus our creative and entrepreneurial energies on creating a new space; creating generative cultures that are the expressions of a decolonised, liberatory, healing-centred expression of Afrofuturity.
“Embrace diversity. Unite—Or be divided, robbed, ruled, killed
By those who see you as prey. Embrace diversity
Or be destroyed.”
This is the seed of our vision of a space and spaces that offer access to local, regional, national and international collections, exhibitions, projects, programmes, and exhibits of Black culture, drawing on the infinite riches of the African diaspora, historic, contemporary and future. This is to say, cultures beyond the gaze or approval of white curators, gallerists, academics, programmers or institutions. Perhaps you are familiar with the expression “For Us By Us” (FUBU)? If you weren’t previously, now you are. So here you can appreciate where we are coming from, and the liberatory trajectory we are embarked on.
Image taken during the UnMuseum Cultural and Heritage Programme Autumn events.
“Kindness eases change. Love quiets fear. And a sweet and powerful Positive obsession
Blunts pain, Diverts rage, And engages each of us In the greatest, The most intense
Of our chosen struggles.”
We hope you feel as excited and energised as we do at the prospect of this adventure, this inquiry into a culturally rich future that genuinely and unapologetically champions Black cultural heritage and contemporary Black creativity in all its expansive and manifest forms, and all those that have yet to be discovered, realised, invented, shared or named.
There are a number of recent and emergent projects in the UK, Europe, the USA and Africa that we convivially align ourselves with and draw inspiration from. These projects serve as illustrations of the wider field of creative, liberatory, decolonial movement - bold expressions, of the temper of our times.
We will be deepening our exploration of the potential of the UnMuseum and will be writing more in the near future. These further writings will reflect upon the four Roundtable events held at BSWN this autumn as the UnMuseum Cultural Heritage Programme, which provided space and time for facilitated dialogues that focused on the following themes:
Screening of The Meaning of Zong
Digitisation & Disruption
Telling Stories &
I am Witness: The Role of Testimony in the Reparatory Justice Process
Each of these public events included members of the wider Black community and regional arts, culture and heritage communities. The events were facilitated and involved members of the UnMuseum working group and other allies from across academia, the arts and activist communities.