About

Museums in Paris and London have been taking initiatives to answer historical demands for change: better representation of minorities, of women artists, of different art histories. They are following the path laid out by decades of work by feminist, queer, Black, Asian, Indigenous, postcolonial and decolonial scholars, art historians and artists. Recent exhibitions — including Hew Locke’s “what have we here?” at the British Museum and Barbara Chase-Riboud’s “Quand Un Nœud est Dénoué, Un Dieu est Libéré” at Le Louvre — show that major institutions in both cities are taking on issues of representation.

But what about the role of major museums in a context of war, structural violence, growing social inequities and the rise of extremist movements? While exhaustivity (collecting as much as possible the same artefact) was a guiding principle for the Western universal museum, what should guide current forms of collecting: collecting what, for whom, for what, how and where? How to exhibit archives and documentation on the social, cultural and economic life of migrant communities, important in both cities, without flattening differences? Artists and youth movements are demanding that the museum addresses genocide, climate crisis, mass migrations, exile, what some commentators are calling “multipolarity”, and the loss of Western hegemony. There are demands are for new practices of conservation, of archiving, of transmission, new pedagogies.

Techno-neoliberalism is offering a futurism, an inclusive agenda that extracts ideas and forms from new social movements in order to revitalize the idea of a hyper-individualized entrepreneurial subject, positioning technological innovation as the centre of social well-being. Their futurism rests on the speed of discoveries in technologies and science that, in turn, rests upon better and more rapid extraction of minerals, faster computing, AI. It translates its dreams of escaping the worst of the accumulated crisis through art.

The answer to techno-neoliberal futurism might be more about the reappropriation of the present than competing with its grandiose, rather masculine, dreams. Occupying the present means imagining and realizing the refusal of what is presented as “natural,” “inevitable,” pushing for adaptation rather than transformation of the structures that produce an uninhabitable and stifling planet.

This programme sought to focus on imagining a present that opens a future, inventing what a “post-museum” might look like.

The initiative began with a preliminary meeting at the Whitechapel Gallery in London on Monday 3rd February 2025. It gathered partnering institutions: the Whitechapel Gallery, Mosaic Rooms, the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, and the Cité internationale des Arts in order to reflect upon the objectives and outcomes of the fellowship. Considering questions of how we might imagine new ways of protecting and safeguarding collective memories and art in the face of distress and wars, of climate disaster and the rise of far-right forces; of the unleashed violence of a global counter-revolution.

The idea was to focus in particular on the asymmetry between what is protected and what is not. The latter is the case in Gaza, where artists are being murdered, where museums, historical monuments and archaeological sites have been thoroughly destroyed, and where the fate of institutional collections remains unknown. In Sudan, the national Museum of Khartoum has been looted, and its collection is said to be already trafficked. While in Ukraine, however, in the early days of the Russian invasion, UNESCO offered to digitalize its museums’ collections and to transfer art in areas protected from the bombing, (although this has not stopped the destruction of historical sites). The group asked how are the memories of migrants, refugees, homeless, exiles, of the poor and the wretched of the earth and the seas, collected and safeguarded? Where? By whom? For whom?

The project proposed to address these questions, by looking at current practices and confronting experiences. This preliminary meeting gave way to a workshop in London at Whitechapel Gallery on 28-29 April 2025, followed by a second workshop in Paris at the Cité internationale des Arts on 2-3 June 2025. Each iteration of the conversation was conceived to expand and build on the previous.