Transcript

Work for the project Imagining the “Post Museum” began on Monday 3 February 2025. Françoise envisioned that the project would break free from the sometimes static space of the university and think through questions related to culture, heritage, preservation memory and community within these spaces. We invited partnering institutions: the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Mosaic Rooms London, the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris, and the Sarah Remond Centre for Race and Racialisation at UCL, to map out what was at stake with this project, and the various forms that it might take over the course of the fellowship. We discussed the crises of the present, the potential and the possibilities from within institutional spaces, as well as their limitations. Below you will find a full, edited transcript of the meeting that day. It is presented here in the order it was spoken, it takes the kinds of occasional meanders that are intrinsic to conversation, and while it articulates various positions, experiences and affiliations, the voice is collectivised.

So what is a post-museum?’ It would seem people still want a museum, they are concerned about loss and looting. So why would we throw the word out? Of course, we could find another word, but the word is less important than what we imagine. It is not about taking the museum as a site in which we fight for representation, visibility, or diversity, this is the museum in a context of war and militarization. It is a context in which UNESCO reacts very swiftly to the Russian invasion in Ukraine, offering digitalization, offering to protect art — which of course is a good thing, even if it cannot protect everything from destruction — but in the case of Palestine it remains muted. In fact, instead it responded to the letter from the directors of all the major museums in Israel, just after the 7 October attack, saying, you have to condemn Hamas. And you have also to recognise that we, Israel, are a liberal state, and we love art, and we protect art, because that’s part of what is to be a liberal state. In Sudan, major museums have been looted, their collections already being trafficked. We are working in the context of climate disaster, during the floods in Pakistan, archaeological sites are damaged, collections and archives face the threat of wildfires. And of course, the most fragile places are those in the Global South.

This project has a time frame, February through to April, maybe even September. Yet we don’t know how it will look when we see one another in April, or when we meet again in September. We’re in a moment of heightened velocity. The reconstruction of principles is taking place on a daily basis now. We know how long it takes to build the infrastructures around things that we care for, yet we’re faced with the sheer speed of destruction. It could be said that we have gone beyond what Naomi Klein described as the shock doctrine, for it is not just catastrophe that allows for the introduction of new policy, but it’s policy enacting the chaos. But it is what they want, for us to be flooded, for our heads to spin and for us to be full of fear. So yes, we must think about how we might resist this temporality of the velocity.

But we ask this question ‘what might be the post-museum’ in London and Paris, two imperial cities, with prestigious museums and collections that are confronted with demands for return. Capitals of financial, political, cultural and artistic power gentrified cities, but also cities of migrants, refugees and a large diversity of communities and a lot of struggle also within. For example in Paris right now, you have 340 young people, minors, occupying the Gaité Lyrique cultural centre, asking to be recognised by the state as unaccompanied minors. At the Cité des Arts in Paris, every night hundreds of homeless people are hosted under the arcades, there is security there, some light, some shelter. It’s something that turns the institution inside out in an interesting and useful way. The Cité des Arts is somewhat like a cité within a city. There are 300 artists in residence at any given moment, they come from all over. They are from very different contexts, very different class contexts, very different origins, very different spaces of enunciation, of spaces of experiences. You see what is going on in the world through their presence at the city, because they bring with them what is happening where they are from. And this makes it a very interesting space where these questions can be heard, documented and discussed.

In both cities, London and Paris, there are enough people, enough people who can speak to this global question as well as the local ones, and even so, there is a tendency to forget them, to bring people from far away. We should pay attention to the Palestinian artists who are refugees in London, Paris and the United States, people from Congo in these cities. We should make space for Sudanese voices, because this is a totally silenced war. In Réunion the archives of the struggle are in very bad shape too. Also in Paris you have one of the oldest associations of migrant workers, the Association des Travailleurs Maghrébins de France. They actively organise and archive. We should engage with discussions with workers from Algeria, because the relationship between France and Algeria is quite simply a disaster. It always has been, but even more so now, and this case is so symptomatic of the incapacity of the French to come to terms with these colonial silences.

It is interesting to think in contrast about the rapid and expensive restoration of the Notre Dame, which is also part of a project with the Louvre museum which is to be renovated to the tune of €800 million. There is a nation building project at work. There is a reactivation of the colonial past by the far right, and for Macron, or Trump, this is important. This, all this money, all while Mayotte for example is totally devastated. Mayotte this island outpost that is becoming a laboratory for anti-migrant policy that as all part of this narrative, for they are suppressing the droit du sol. Once again the colony is a laboratory for that which will be brought back to the mainland.

There is so much going on — the outsourcing of bordering, which, if we were to summarise the characteristics of the 21st imperial state, would be of central importance. There is the notion that reproduction becomes the site of struggle once again, on which debates about citizenship and rights are based. There is the reconstruction of the nation, the patriarchal nation, which, once you start to look is all over the place, in India, in China. There is what is means to be a child, and what it means to remove that right from children all over the world, both in movement and in spaces of violence. Then this is linked to who gets rights any way? Those deemed non-human never get to be children, only born into an illegal status.

It is true that once you name Paris and London as the sites of focus, you invoke the rest of the world. Everything that is so far named is about different kinds of relational historical geographies, because you can’t think about what’s going on in Paris without thinking about the legacies of empire. Likewise in London. In whatever we end up doing we need to strongly communicate in a sense that although we’re interested in the city, the city is not something you can draw a line around. It’s also interesting to think about the museum and its role as public space, who it serves, why, what narratives it holds; especially in these particular contexts we’re evoking.

In the UK especially there has been a shift, or at least we’re seeing the legacy of previous governments and the effects of a lack of public spending. All of a sudden museums and galleries are now the places where you have to get your art education, they are having to provide youth services, early years creativity. There is a focus on these spaces to offer the kind of public services that the government no longer provides, in a context where public space is ever more restricted. Museums can even be the place that provides outdoor space, access to play, greenery. Everything outside has shrunk. And so museums are expected to hold all of this in order to get funding. But often they’re not equipped to do that, they don’t know how to talk to their community. So there is a total disparity between the pressure to do so and the delivery, it becomes simply an optics of inclusivity. We’ve seen a failure of public spaces to be able to be what people need them to be lately, which is a place where they can talk about Palestine, or genocide.

On the flip side there is the idea of neutrality, and by neutrality, this really means complicity and silence. Those who tell you they’re on your side, but really do nothing, which can in many ways be much more damaging. There will always be the far right, but silence is often more threatening. There is a conservative creep taking over, and the creep is creepy because it’s not overnight It’s happening slowly and it’s happening at almost every level. It’s these funding cuts and redundancies that are also accelerating this conservative turn, or if not a turn, the lifting of the veil, where actually everyone is toeing the line. And the bottom line is the survival of the institution and it’s funding.

So how will we run this project, how will we imagine the post museum?

The title to Françoise’s book might be a good place to start, A Programme of Absolute Disorder. Because disorder doesn’t necessarily mean anarchy or nihilism, but thinking about how to reorder the terms on which institutions, and the histories that underpin institutions, are built. This is an important challenge to consider. Because there is a sort of embedding of decoloniality that means it gets institutionalised and loses all of its political potential in the contexts that we’re speaking of.

But let’s stick with the word museum, it has strategic potential. It’s something that can be articulated and that we can grab hold of and work with. One of the things that emerged during the pandemic, was how quickly spaces were used differently. And that transformation of space, its hybridity, could be something to bear in mind for this project.

There are museums but there are also extant monuments. We could be getting out there, even if this also raises the question of criminalisation. This too is interesting. In the UK, there was a policing bill brought in two or three years ago instituting heavy fines and prison sentences for anyone caught defacing or damaging memorials or statues. Some of it was due to a moral panic about the wretched of the earth coming and defacing the nation’s statues. We weren’t even doing that in the end.

Here’s an idea — what about making an inflatable war memorial to the real war dead of the world. Inflatable because then it wouldn’t actually touch the existing one.

Yet there’s something specific around why we would try to address or why we feel the need to address all these issues within a gallery or a public space. Perhaps the question of how solidarity is being built, as something concrete that responds to cruelty or brutality. In Calais right now there are still people along the coast helping migrants on their journeys. There are teachers who see kids in their classroom living on the street, and they try to do something. There are concrete things happening.

Solidarity is a useful place to land, because there are many dangers around moving towards cynical perspectives to do with our own situation and what’s happening with resources and how corrosive that kind of cynicism is when it comes to what we can do. We should be thinking about what is actually happening, these examples that we’ve started to come up with. What are the resources available to us? How do we name it? Do we name it empathy, or do we name it something else? How do we name it cross culturally?

In the face of velocity, and in the face of destruction, it is also useful to look at longer temporalities. The Whitechapel gallery is one of the oldest public galleries in this country, possibly in Europe, established in 1901. It was built out of a Victorian, Christian moment of philanthropy, and despite the critiques we might be able to make of this time, there might be something to be redeemed there. The founders the gallery, the library, the school, and Toynbee Hall, which was sort of almost like a prototype university campus. It was the moment when the Education Act was passed. All of this was built on public subscription, meaning taxpayers had to sign up and agree to the building being constructed and invest in it. There are no steps, it’s street level, the tube line runs underneath. The Whitechapel showed Picasso’s Guernica, but in reality it was hired out to be a front for the Stepney Communist Party. The payment was a pair of boots that were sent off for Republican soldiers to fight in the Spanish Civil War. We can think of these moments, that feel so ancient, but actually feel quite radical at the moment. So yes, there is an incredible velocity that can be quite overwhelming. But there is the other side of time. This also includes the destruction of Palestinian culture which is not new, but started on day one of the Zionist occupation with the collaboration and complicity of many nations, France and Britain included. So we must bring out these histories, because there is a lack of knowledge and understanding surrounding these histories.

We should be aware, in our reimagining, of how much culture is worth. Why would Macron put so much time and money into the restoration of the Notre Dame? Because he is concerned with his legacy. He wants a Macron wing. He wants to be the man that rebuilt the cathedral, because everything else will be superseded by history, but culture will last. There is a huge symbolic and literal value to culture. Why is the far right so invested in culture? Because it is valuable. In 2024 the book Culture is Not Just an Industry was published by Justin O’Connor, and in it, he talks about how UNESCO, in its 22nd conference finally raised the notion that culture must be seen as something that will play a very, very important role at this moment of multiple crises.

Solidity comes along with the precarity, and vice versa. The historic monument feels solid, but it is precarious. We should not underestimate our enemy, but we should realise that precarity is not just on the side of the paperless and the undocumented. It is also there amongst those who feel that their power and their position is eroding. Otherwise they wouldn’t get so upset.

So we should also be asking, what is the role of the museum in relation to democracy and citizenship, especially as it is becoming more and more privatised and increasingly dependent on private money.

So how do we impart knowledge? Especially, knowledge of struggle that goes before us? How do we reactivate imagination as a source of counterhegemonic struggle? What, moreover, do people want archiving? Maybe we don’t want objects, but rather, knowledge and technique. What might it mean to include knowledge and technique about resistance and alternative modes of doing. And who do we share this with? Because you shouldn’t share all your secrets with your enemies.

There are a number of creative ideas that can come out of these kinds of workshops. A lot of young artists and practitioners are thinking about archives, about the limitations posed by visas, and travel. It must be considered who has access to archives? What constitutes an archive? Do you really have to go to a colonial archive? There is the case of two amazing artists from Iraq, who made a film in Algeria about the nuclear test centre there in the south, what was was interesting about this film was that they decided on purpose not to go to the archive. They went to talk to people about their lives and their experiences.

We could also ask what is archiving the present? What would it mean to archive the present? For when it comes to archiving the past of course we can propose something, but this is being done, it comes with the limitations noted above. So what would it look like to archive the present? It could be about reconceptualizing the archive, something to do with ephemera, stories, experiences and meeting places. This might be one way of conceiving of the post museum.

At the Cité in 2022, there was an unprecedented number of Gazaoui artists in residency. They were all part of the collective called Sahab. The museum in the clouds. It is a very inspiring practice of imagining something from the space of such complexity and a tragic lack of infrastructure, but one that works with that lack of infrastructure.

We should come up with some founding principles for the post-museum, a way of saying “the architecture will be like this, and the functioning would be like that,” these elements would not be rigid, but available for appropriation, adaptation in Lima, or Kinshasa or Paris.

So maybe there are three elements to this project. 1) There is the proposition, which is the founding principles towards the post-museum. 2) There is the archiving of the present, which could take a very tangible form, something that happens in every day social spaces, something ephemeral, something short lived, a practice that tries to capture something, things that have been erased or lost maybe. It could manifest in the production of prototypes, because prototypes are models, they can be scaled, transformed, multiple. 3) There could be an archivers “how to” guide or handbook. For example, in London there is the Homelessness Museum, and the other is the Somers Town museum. Both of these are intervening museums, they take action, but try to show that people have lived through and survived these challenges before. We could think about a handbook for survival.

When there was an attempt to create a museum in Reunion, this segmented thinking was central. The first question that was asked was how do you get in? Because it is important, the question of how the body enters space. This lead to other questions, how to avoid the nature/culture divide? I.e. No separate beautiful park on the outside. What would the architecture be? What to do with air conditioning and natural light? How can the body circulate? You should be able to sit where you want.

The notion of prototypes is good because by thinking through different segments effectively makes us think concretely about the needs of different bodies.

There could also be digital possibilities that build towards what we’re calling a post-museum, virtual reality, or online applications that remap space and tell different stories might be able to revise or re-signify the urban spaces around which we move. Yet the economy of the digital, the environmental and social issues of extraction that are attached to it must be accounted for. Radical Ecology, a project initiated by Ashish Ghadiali have attempted to build a net zero website for the project in order to address this issue. So it’s an issue that it’s possible to apply yourself to, whether it is possible to do so sufficiently is another question.

But the question of the digital raises other issues around resources. For example, we must remain vigilant in working with people in places with different resource access, if you are in Sub Saharan Africa, you might not be able to simply download a pdf, or if you are, you might want to chose to do something different with the electricity that that requires. The financial principles are important, the economy of the post-museum must be central, so this includes the space, questions around digitization, maintenance, resource use.