I have just come out of a lecture by Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe at the University of London (Birkbeck), where he delivered a meditation worth sharing.
We tend to look at our museums as symbols of our material history and pieces of collective memory that embody past events and experiences.
However, if we consider the history of these museums and how they developed in communion with the development of national states, we realize that in general they belong to the project of justifying the existence of a people, nation or even a language.
Looking at European museums, Mbembe notes that they are also a kind of zoo of objects. Sequestered objects (generally from other continents and other cultures) and that remain retained in a frame that removes them from their context of production and use.
Considering only the case of Congo, it is estimated that there are around 60 thousand objects removed to museums, or to the basements of Belgian museums, of which that country was a colony. The case of Egyptian and Greek plays is even more dramatic.
The problem has attracted the attention of psychoanalysts and psychotherapists, as it is homologous to a series of situations felt as a kind of kidnapping, captivity or exile of a part of the history of a person, family or community.
This is the case of disappeared bodies, silenced mourning or losses that are imposed and processed according to a certain “official” narrative in which the person who suffered the loss does not recognize himself.
The homology between the pieces taken to other countries and our fragments of history, kidnapped by imposter narratives, leads us to the fundamental concept of reparation. That is, how museums and psychotherapies can become devices for returning experiences to their initial potency, use or function.
In the clinic, as in museology, it is not enough to return the thing to its owner.
For example, the government of Benin recently received a significant amount of bronze pieces from French institutions, which created an immediate problem: how to conserve, care for and regulate collective access to such objects once their original context no longer existed?
Many kidnapped objects are mostly from Africa. Throughout the colonial process, they were appropriated by Western institutions as trophies of war. There they were archived, cared for, tracked and made part of a story told by the victors’ side. The very path of these objects to the museums is very difficult to reconstruct.
Interestingly, they represent the inverse of our contemporary problem with borders, walls and condominiums. They are objects that were forced to immigrate after we put on a masking mask to mislead our gaze. Such objects return as ghostly specters forming our paranoid imaginary about the Other: barbaric, dangerous and uncivilized.
Mbembe proposes that, instead of devolution or compensation, the task of universal museums (or, as he says, “truly universal”) would be to recover their expressive power, through a planetary system of circulation of these objects.
Such imprisoned objects demand new modes of display. They should be treated as “flexible living beings”, some endowed with magical-healing properties, others high-capacity memorials, others cognitive or language puzzles.
In Africa, there are museums of living forms. I myself have visited some in Namibia, Tanzania and Egypt. Let us remember that the recovery of the use function of art objects was also part of the platform of Brazilian artists such as Lygia Clark and Hélio Oiticica.
The restitution of these objects is the recovery of the “capacity for truth” that such objects possess, the power necessary for the construction of a new type of universal consciousness, based on the recognition of finitude.
The durability of the Earth needs to be perceived in common, by all. This needs to be assimilated by identity policies, environmental policies and a new type of governance that takes into account the category of care.
In this way, an itinerant museum would no longer be a collection of past demands, which justify our present, but a projection of future worlds, formulated from a precarious present.
Such museums would be museums of the unusual, not in the sense of denying what is common, but as an affirmation of what, because it does not belong to anyone in particular, will belong to all of us.
