Anticolonial Tour

Cover Image: Map^^; Pages: stops

Declassifying the Museum

A museum is an imperial archive of objects.  Oftentimes curators, like archivists, are seen as “the invisible hands of abstract guardians” that order space accordingly (Azoulay 2019: np). Yet the hands leave distinct colonial fingerprints. The way that we might unlearn imperialism in an anti-colonial perspective is partly through an understanding of where we find the largest clusters of these prints, from stolen objects, to paperwork that legitimizes them in the eyes of certain laws, to the way that they are configured for visual consumption.

This tour focuses not on the objects within the museum, but how the museum transforms histories, heritages, and people into objects in the first place. We hope that each pause in the gallery will allow us  to “de-classify” the museum’s contents, in rupturing the ordering schemes that have classified its material, problemitizing the “class” for whom the museum is built, and for finally divulging the secrecy of its operations.

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