Making & Unmaking Heritage — Why Museums Matter
Skoll Centre for Social Entrepreneurship
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In the face of intractable socioeconomic, political, and ecological challenges, we often turn to traditional solutions informed by science and technology, relegating the arts and humanities. In doing so, we also relegate the space of culture. On International Museums Day , and in the context of this year’s theme ‘Museums, Sustainability and Wellbeing’, it is apt to reflect on the potential power of museums.
My work at the The Pitt Rivers Museum explores the intersections of colonial collections and contemporary art. In this work I am interested in thinking about the development of museum infrastructures in a settler colonial context, alongside other infrastructures that generate and sustain carceral and punitive orientations: the reserve, the camp, the border, the prison.
Rather than merely tending to a ‘contested’ past, this work concerns itself precisely with the enduring afterlives of these histories on the present: racism and other forms of marginalisation; forms of carcerality and punitive orientations in current biopolitical regimes; our approaches to immigration, refugees and borders’ climate change; the cost of living. It asks questions like: how do we imagine our communities to be constituted, and how do we want to share space, both on this planet, and beyond?
Museums of all types, with colonial collections explicitly acknowledged or not, have and continue to have the potential to be spaces for building different forms of communities. Communities which don’t collapse difference or homogenise, who mobilise different histories, and demand social justice driven programming.
Working with international colleagues on transnational projects has provided a constant source of inspiration for how museums can create impactful cultural dialogues. From witnessing the work of District Six Museum in Cape Town, South Africa, to the museums of the Bamoun and Batoufan Kingdoms in Cameroon, Musée de l'Institut Fondamental d'Afrique Noire (IFAN) and Theodor Monod in Dakar, Senegal, these global examples reveal the breadth of cultural storytelling that is possible.
In the United Kingdom, many museums, faced with challenges of funding and staff resources, have made efforts to sustain their relationships with communities and drive social impact. A few examples, encompass work on music, homelessness, grief, migration, and loneliness. In an increasingly polarised world, it’s crucial that we to continue to build museums and other cultural institutions that, in addition to being sites of multiplicity and cultural conversation, also ask difficult questions, record historical truths (however difficult or uncomfortable they may be), and foster the imaginative potential of building equitable institutions and societies.
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How can we support these cultural institutions, so that they are not tied only to convention and tradition, and are respected as sites of cultural process and change in themselves? First, we must recognise the systematic and structural challenges that have historically shaped how museum work can open up space. Second, we must recognise the structural potential that museums could have – in funding, combatting racism and other forms of prejudice, hiring and employment practices, research culture, curatorial practice, and a substantive ethics of care, practiced, not just claimed.
Heritage is not just bequeathed, it is constantly being made and unmade, and we have the opportunity to carefully and cumulatively shape it. Traditions, as inventions, can and must be reinvented, and sustainable cultural institutions that respond to the demand for social justice whilst telling complex stories are not just desirable, but are necessary for the present and the future.?
Examples of Museum Social Impact Projects
Dr Lennon Mhishi is a Project Researcher at Pitt Rivers Museum on the project Reconnecting 'Objects': Epistemic Plurality and Transformative Practices in and Beyond Museums funded by VW Stiftung. He is a 2023-2024 Early Career Research Fellow at the Skoll Centre. He is an anthropologist whose interdisciplinary work spans interests in Africa and its diasporas, the afterlives of slavery and colonialism, and the approaches to contemporary forms of exploitation, forced labour and human rights in different African countries. He has experience in migration and diaspora, heritage, music, and other arts-based, creative approaches to knowledge making and engagement. He is keen to pursue a research agenda, curatorial and museum practice that centres community-engaged, collaborative, antiracist, and inclusive practice.