Whitechapel Gallery, London, 28-29 April 2025
Would you save the museum?
During the first public workshop for Imagining the Post Museum, gathering students, educators, architects, artists, and other members of the public, three groups started to build different prototypes for possible Post-Museums. Mid-way a conversation took place, Françoise began by asking the group collectively, do we feel like we should save museums? Here, many of the issues that are germane to the project of Imagining the “Post-Museum” arose once again. Different positions and proposals emerged: some suggested building new structures, others that we need to reconsider the attachment to objects as a privileged site of transmission of knowledge and culture.
We discussed the difficulties of consensus in building spaces that serve diverse communities. We spoke about the homogenising quality of the museum, how it participates in gentrification and touristification of major cities, but also the amenities and advantages of public infrastructure such as museums and libraries.
All of the participants present contributed. Ideas, comments and thoughts were thrown out to the group, some of them explored collectively, fragmented threads reemerging later in the conversation. Below is a full, edited transcript of this debate that might serve as a resource and an archive of the thought process behind the development and evolution of the Imagining the Post-Museum project.
— So take the major institutions of London and Paris — do we consider that their collections should be saved and why and how? Considering that they are not our collections, they are private collections, privatised by the state or private individuals.
It’s an important question to ask, because conversations about the Post-Museum today are taking place within the institution of the museum. So they end up being about remaining an institution and doing something within the institution. And I think in order to build these prototypes, this is a conversation we need to have.
So, do you think we should support saving museum?
— If they change
— What if they don’t change?
— If they don’t change, I would say we should try to build other structures that would take over and different kind of function.
— But if they are threatened by the far right in the way they’re threatened today, if they are threatened by budget cuts and other difficulties that put their existence at risk…?
— Then in this case they would need to change. We can’t defend any museum that submits to the far right.
— No, not if they were to take the side of the right wing- but if they were to ask us to defend them!
— The problem is that we have been structured by preservation in our mind. You are talking about a museum, but people feel that it’s something more personal that is at stake, in the sense of the system that emotionally builds our relationship with objects, relationship with things.
So it’s very deep to talk about whether the museum survives or not, because it’s a part of our education, and it’s a part also of the western problem of change: the incapacity to imagine something else.
— Yeah. But people also want their objects back. Across Africa or Asia, or in the Americas, they want these objects back. So how do we free ourselves from the fact that the West has produced an incredible attachment to objects, transforming things that weren’t art, into art and artefacts?
— If we want to take back struggle in politics, we’re obliged to accept the restrictions of that loss.
— So do we agree with this loss? It could be a huge loss.
— Loss is already happening right now, take climate change, what if this material gets destroyed in a flood?
— It’s happening in Gaza too, this loss, it’s a part of understanding right now.
— So is resisting this loss just nostalgic, or we do think also it says something about a culture? The things you find in a museum…
— Maybe the lack of support for the existing structure of the museum in the West will mean that these objects could be free in a way. We could be asking: why don’t you just let these objects go back to the place of origin. Then you don’t have this huge demand on a financial system that supports it.
I think spaces could always be reappropriated differently. If we’re talking about the present, there’s a lot of culture archiving. Stuff that is happening in the present within communities, within various spaces that are not necessarily getting documented. So the idea of the museum in the present time is happening amongst us having conversations, even this in a way, sort of like an archiving of the whole process of forming community.
So the house we have is probably bound to crumble, but it’s just about looking at it in different ways.
— That’s a proposition that I think we should explore…
— The problem is that focusing on objects, is accepting an epistemology, which is not rational. And the problem is, is there something to return to different communities, but also to the world, to humanity? By that I mean the form of relation that has been the base of that which produced the object.
Even when you see these artefacts in Quai Branly for example, I don’t think you really see anything…
— That might not be the case for the people from these places.
— Yeah. But I think the value they see is partly produced also from here, from Europe. And I think people forget the story of how things came to be there.
— But what do we say to these people who want their object back? You are wrong?
— No, of course not, take the object back. But I think we need to keep the relation and the gesture of production in mind.
— But is it the West that produces this affective investment in objects?
— Personally, I don’t think the museum should be destroyed. But I think the real challenge that we have is that we need to talk to communities. Every day when I teach, I’m confronted with many students who still thin we should have these places. So for my discipline, in fashion, it’s the Victorian Albert Museum. It’s a hugely problematic space, and yet they still want to have that place. They still want to go there, and no matter how much I’m trying to talk about it, there still seems to be this divide. But if we do want to work with the community, there is going to be that divide. So how do we work with that? Because part of being participatory, you include everybody, but then you’re including people with the kind of views who say, we should maintain these institutions.
— But I think the problem is that there aren’t any alternatives. I think the reason so many people want to restitute objects is not so much that they want their objects back as that they’re mad that they’re somewhere else. Which is fair.
Take the Benin Bronzes, there are so many restitution issues with the Benin Bronzes themselves, like, who do we even restitute this to? It was also an empire. It was also implicated in slavery. Do we restitute it to the king, the other bad guys? There’s a state, there are museums. And so what happened? They go into this ultra modern museum where the ultra rich go and take pictures. Then the people in the city say that actually, they’d rather infrastructure be improved. We’d rather that money had gone to something else. This means nothing to us.
— I think we have articulated all the problematics of how people relate to objects. And we need to deconstruct that. But again, we can’t go along to a community, as you were saying, and say: no, no, – you understand objects wrong. There has to be an understanding of objects and how the objects come to stand in as proxies for all kinds of sets of power, for economic, and political relations. So in a sense, we’re putting all our attention on these objects when actually it’s something else that we need to be thinking about.
If we think about the Maritime Museum here in London for example, even without visiting it, we can assume it’s going to be showing a really violent history. There’s going to be a lot of objects that are the colonisers’ objects that we probably don’t want to save at all. There might be other objects that, as you say, community members might want to keep hold of for whatever reason. But then at the same time in London, specifically in South London around the Maritime museum, there’s so many migrant rights groups. There’s lots of people who are trying to do community outreach work. There are all kinds of housing rights projects. It would be necessary to have a conversation with those people as to what they would want to do with those objects. I’m thinking about technologies and proxies and storytelling rather than the objects.
— Yes. There’s not just a Western way. There are objects of culture or the religious or sacred. And so should we also explore the other epistemological investments in objects?
— What if we think about the object as a proxy, essentially it’s a proxy. Let’s say it’s the Palestinian family who has a key, the key itself, okay, it allows you to enter the house, but it’s also a proxy for self-determination, for memory, for belonging.
How do we incorporate these things without being fixated on the object?
— It’s really important to relativise the construction of value. How in different places the value is constructed around an object? And to share that as an educational process, because then it moves us away from the Western enchantment with the aura of the object and capitalisation and financialisation of it. If there was more educational investment in how value is created, we might be able to think about why a certain key holds much more of value than a tiny golden coin that has been stolen….
I think it has a lot to do with not taking people as stupid, but actually by offering them stories. It’s actually letting them understand, not behaving as if the museum is a central kind of intelligence, working on this Enlightenment project.
— What many of you seem to be saying is about how the object enters the realm of capitalism. I’m thinking about this documentary about craft people in Benin City who make bronzes today. And they sell for perhaps 45 Euro, 35 euro — max 50, perhaps 60. Whereas the bronzes in the museum? I mean, we cannot even imagine their value, right? So I suppose the value, there is one value within capitalism and the value outside of capital, and that has to be very important in our thinking.
— I would like to add something about the value of thinking from the Western perspective, in London or in Paris, around the fact that there might be an affective investment and a living investment in the object that has been stolen.
So of course all humans place value in objects, this is a human behaviour. But what is really specific is that we invest in the museum, in which there are mostly stolen objects and it is here in this museum that value is created, which is quite specific to Western capitalism.
— I don’t know if the specificity comes from stealing or not, because, I mean, art was always war loot, even before capitalism or outside capitalism, right? What the West did differently was to set up public museums around that and to call it art.
— Yesterday, one thing that I was thinking about was this kind of movement away from preservation and more towards the replication of the natural systems around us. When I think of these objects, I think about their haptic data, they are activated often through touch. But these objects that we find in museums are full of toxicity and infestation, bacteria that’s growing, but the approach of the Western museum is to apply more chemicals, to preserve objects that are then stored away. What if we were to move away from this sort of idea of preservation, where you open up the walls, you let people touch things, you let people activate things, and they sort of disintegrate naturally and it becomes a space of storytelling?
— This would still require a huge amount of organisation. You have to have a staff. If you leave the door open when you let people in, then some people will come to loot and to sell it. I mean, we are in a place of poverty and these objects have value, so why wouldn’t people come and sell it?
— I’m thinking of another example. A few years ago there was a presentation of an investigation into the police killing of Mark Duggan by Forensic Architecture at Tottenham Town Hall. Just up the road is a cultural centre where they had an event on restitution and they invited Dan Hicks to come and speak. So he did a presentation. Then there was the parliamentary working group on restitution. There were MPs who were involved from the UK. There were various labor politicians. There was Diane Abbot, Jeremy Corbyn. So there was this big conversation about museum restitution, which, because it was in Tottenham, because of all of the anti-black police violence and police killings there, actually became this much, much bigger conversation about state racism, political, economic inequality, and restitution in relation to economic reparations, vis-a-vis the Caribbean. It became this huge political conversation when essentially it could have been just about museum objects.
So that was one example of how in the context of London it’s never about just these objects, it’s about these global histories of reparations, police violence, state racism, so on, so forth.
— So I mean, what we are hearing, this morning, is that it is about the work we do regarding the place of the object in Western capitalism. But also that these relationships to objects have been adopted by a lot of other places globally. And then also the question of justice, reparations, police violence and how they are connected to this conversation. They’re not outside.
— I just wanted to say that I bring up this example of the debate in Tottenham, because we’ve spoken about the affect of things being stolen. And in this case you could kind of feel the rage in the room where everyone was basically saying, you stole our stuff. You didn’t give it back, and you’ve stolen our money from the global south. You’ve stolen our lives. So there was this rage about the value of these objects, and the fact you got away with stealing our things, and disposing of us. So it was very affective.
— And don’t forget that you have to pay to get into the museum
— So are we still financing, funding the museum?
— I’m just thinking — not all museums you have to pay for. Not all museums are the same. I completely think everything should be returned and there should be storytelling and education of what happened in these museum. But I’m just thinking on the fly of some different kinds of museums, for example, in Bristol, you have the Colston and statue that was toppled.
There’s a lot of community conversations about what to do with it, and the communities in Bristol wanted it to go into the museum, the Bristol Museum, which is free to visit. So it is preserved, and actually that community wanted that narrative to show that particular time and history.
— But the point is do we keep the place? And if we transform it, do we keep the objects? How do we change the narrative?
— In the case of the Colston display, the statue is not standing. The value of the erection of the statue is reverted to something else because he’s lying on the floor with tags all over, and people can visit for free.
It’s a step towards the post-museum, there is something performative there.
— I wanted to reference Stuart Hall’s article about where’s the post in the post-colonial, where’s the post in the post-museum? Because it seems like this conversation is about redistribution and how do you redistribute things from the vertical to the horizontal? And those are all obviously really important and strategic questions. But in that Stuart Hall article about where’s the post and the post-colonial, there’s a question about representation as well. And I’m just sitting here looking at one of these prototypes and thinking about it as a kind of archetype of the museum: it’s got the two faces, the two sides. It says it in the brief for today as well, actually, that there is the idea of “remaining committed to showing art”. So regarding this idea of showing presence and then representing, there’s something constitutive of this project, which is evident in the box of the museum prototype. You go to one side and when you’ve come through the museum, there is a shift from the presence of the world, to the “re”presentation of the museum.
And I just think that therefore the project that we’re talking about here has got something to do with what commitment we have to projects of representation, projects of pedagogy. Can we go as far with a nonrepresentational theory that is all about practice and not the “re”presenting of life through spaces? Whether they be classrooms or museums or boxes or frames and so on.
— When I visited the Apartheid Museum in Joburg, they tell you the story of the Rainbow Nation and so you leave, and you feel that everything is good. The apartheid state filmed a lot of their repression, so you have an incredible archive of images, you are shown this, the repression, even the police violence. When you enter, there is a division. If you are coloured, whatever that means, you enter through the White entrance and if you are White, you enter the coloured entrance. And supposedly it’s going to give you a sense of what it meant to live under apartheid.
There are a lot of museums that want to provide an education, which is in fact really a pacifying, or a wiping out of these histories, of apartheid, of slavery. Ok, it says, It was bad and now we should not have slavery. But it does not explain why capitalism can have slavery and non-slavery at the same time, or that there is no end to slavery.
So, of course, museums that we are talking about are for pedagogy, education, and challenging notions of the object under capitalism, and for the representation of the question of justice, justice and reparation. But transformation…
— I also think we should consider the redistribution of power as well. Because the institution of the museum, even in yesterday’s conversation about walking into a space, is really about who has decisionary power over these objects. I think a lot of frustrations that communities have, is that everything has been dictated without them. They want their objects back, right? But whatever decision they want to make about how they either preserve or don’t preserve these objects, they want the power to have a say, as opposed to it being dictated by them. So it feels like the post-museum should also be a redistribution of power, because by having people commenting and having conversations and engaging in things, we might have more democratic ways about how everyone has a say or an input. And if a museum is about knowledge and the distribution of that, decisionary power over objects feels quite connected in that sense.
— One of the ideas I had in mind, because we’ve been doing a kind of architectural, artistic conceptual exercise, was to think about how museums have become concretised as a kind of monolithic architecture and to understand that within it there are ways in which it has functioned, whether intentionally or not, as a multiplicity of different spaces and how it meets a multiplicity of different needs for different people. So the users of the museum, from children, to people who are homeless and destitute, who are able to go somewhere, sit inside and not be bothered for a time, is, like public libraries, kind of fundamental to cities and neighbourhoods in that way.
— Is not the case in France.
— It is in London. Most museums are open access. The library is for sure.
If we take the migration museum, which is now moving from its spot in Lewisham Shopping Center, but having that space within a shopping center next to a supermarket where a neighborhood can essentially freely enter and come and go in that everyday capacity, I think is somewhat emblematic of this idea of the post-museum, in that it’s recognising that this is something that will exist in most spaces anyway. You know, train stations will have a little section with the history of the station, because parts of the museum are kind of everywhere and our day to day.
— I also think it’s important to say that communities are not monolithic, if we take the Bristol example, there was a lot of dissonance.
With the Colston statue, the problem with it, is that when young people go into the museum, they see the history of Bristol and the statue that was part of a big historical moment, and that it is inside the museum. But the community, they threw it in the river, I think it should have stayed in there to drown because that’s what was happening there. To put it in a museum you build a different kind of narrative that is very palatable and so forth. Displaying it gives this person some kind of permanence still. He might have paint thrown on him, but Colston is still there. I think it would’ve been so much more powerful to let the statue drown.
But again, different people have different opinions and it’s also about trying to navigate the fact that people will feel differently about it. And then not everyone in the community has the same positionality and same power. Especially in a place like London, even in Whitechapel, do the South Asian communities who live here have the same power as the young White people who moved in a few years ago?
Like, what does “the community” also really mean? And how do museums also facilitate those conversations?
— Yeah, this is what I was saying. There are communities, and it’s not just a peaceful group with a dynamic that remains peaceful as we go. Things can change. And you know, when there is a divide and conquer strategy, interests can change. So for me, the point is to have to be something that could disappear at one time because there are too many conflicts and that place, that iteration of the post-museum cannot resolve them anymore…
And so it’s not just that it shouldn’t resolve things, but that something else could come. Regarding the “Museum Without Objects” in Réunion, that was evoked before — we did not want a permanent exhibition. But it costs a lot to change things. So how do you maintain a space that is constantly tasked with answering the question of people saying, oh, get rid of that. Or how do you avoid permanence?
So how do we also avoid this fixity? Because life is certainly not fixed.
— I’ve got an idea about that. Yesterday we worked on a different kind of proposal for the post museum, based on for a space of reproduction instead of considering the museum as a fixed space of representation. So the notion of the original and the reproduction are done away with in favour of creating a place where people learn how to do things, because I think I’m really engaging the idea of the long term history of humanity.
Thinking about objects in the long term, and asking: how did they do that? What were the conditions? So you learn not only on an intellectual level but you learn how by making, and so you reduce your museum. The idea of transmission is based on reproduction.
— But this idea about reproduction and learning already exists — for example in the workshops of craft people all through Asia and Africa. I mean, I’ve done a lot of workshops, last time it was weaving, and I learned weaving, which took me forever because I did not get it. The intellectual was beaten by a thread.
This was interesting. In France perhaps less, but in the UK the difference between art and craft is very strong. So some parts of the collection could become, in fact, objects for a workshop…
— I wanted to give the example of Dr Esther Mahlangu. She’s an artist from South Africa, she works in the community, on the exterior of homes, that’s her art. I was working at a gallery and the community was coming to us saying there needs to be a better way to preserve what she’s doing. They were telling us as a gallery, there needs to be a better way of preserving this type of making because it’s going to be lost.
So we then realised as a gallery that we need to create a retrospective because that’s what people wanted. They want to know the beginning of her story, and where she is now, because they want to have that form of referencing or storytelling. They didn’t want it to be in a community centre, because they felt that it was underrepresenting her value. And the thing is that we then are making sure that her value is seen outside of Africa and not just inside of Africa. So it needs to be seen. Not in a gallery because a gallery doesn’t archive it, but it must be seen in a museum, because a museum is known for archiving and preserving a story.
So there needs to be different ways of seeing her value, not just in terms of the community retaining that value in the form of craft. because essentially, her work is seen or defined in Western terms as craft because it’s not pure fine art, but actually it must be treated in the same language as fine art.
So for me to answer the question: do we defend these institutions, I do think that there is a need for museums in terms of the archiving process that they do and what that means for preservation. Yes, it is a capitalist way of preserving. But at the end of the day, communities or people want that form of preservation because it’s a way of knowing their history.
— In the capitalist world.
— Yeah. But people have to live in a capitalist world. They are aware of this, that it’s a form of production with the capitalist mindset.
— Speaking of craft, there is always a moment of discovery, right? Suddenly there is a discovery of that craft. And suddenly the value rockets, and only private collectors can acquire that kind of pottery or embroidery. And so the question is nonetheless one of capital. This structure has to be addressed because at one point there is a privatisation, which is practically inevitable because the question of value is not just a question of value in terms of preserving the history of something, but it is about producing exchange value.
So how do we avoid the commodity value? And we keep the value in terms of affect?
— I have seen this many times… for example, there was a collective of women in Mexico who were trying to preserve their embroidery against commodification. But they are incredible pieces. They are acquired by private collectors, and boom, that’s the end of it. And then it becomes mass produced and it becomes cheap…
So we have to address these two economies or these two forms of commodification and value. So how do we both preserve and at the same time avoid that kind of economy?
— We seem so troubled by the ownership of or accessibility to that one object that is being preserved in the museum. So what if we instead spent the energy or the resources on generating data that allows it to be spread around the globe? For example, you 3D scan an object and people from other places can access it and recreate it. And what accompanies that data is also the skills to recreate it. It would no longer be just one object. There will be many objects.
— But the digital economy is capital. You need the extraction of minerals from Congo. There is also the fact that a lot of people don’t have access to these digital services. The digital economy is not neutral. So I’m not saying it’s not a possibility, but we have also to reflect on what this would mean.
Think of the case of a community in Congo, from whom a statue was stolen, and is now in a museum in the United States. They wanted to raise funds by selling photographs of the statue. The museum is now suing them for copyright.
— If we come back to transmission… there are several students in the room. I think we should also be thinking about the way we nourish transmission as educators, as teachers, as artists. I was a teacher at an art school that had a partnership with a Shanghai university, so there were a lot of Chinese students, and they were there to read French theory. One day a group of like 20 students came to me and said, we’ve got a question… Why do you want each of us to be such a unique artist? Why do you want each of us to produce different works? And as a teacher I realised that for a long time I hadn’t questioned the idea that we were asking them to be hyper unique, producing very particular artworks, in order that they would then have a value, the value of not being the same as all the others.
I also remember that I criticised a student that had come with a proposal for a Master’s project that was based on something shown a few weeks before. And they had copied it. And I said, I’m sorry, but you can’t do that because this is the same as that. And she told me that it was not a problem for her, because it was producing something else by reproducing it. And I learned from from her. And she was right. Now I totally consider that we should copy and reproduce things instead of always innovate.
But in Western education, everything is based on singularity. There is no collective value that is defended. So at the end of the day, the museum is capturing what we produce and what we transmit to others as a valuable work.
— I’ve trained in art schools and all of my education, and it was all about copying from Michelangelo, and all those sorts of things. And the history of art schools is very linked to that of museums… some of you may know the Victoria and Albert museum in the UK is linked to the Royal College of Art, and that it was literally set up because of Queen Victoria panicking about the craftsmanship and the artistry in India. And copying that. It’s still at the basis of the art education model, which is about appropriation really. It’s built around these museums. The ongoing issue we have, bringing it back to the museum and pedagogy, is that it is about appropriation and it is about building a particular narrative, building a knowledge system based on appropriation, but also about perpetuating the idea of the north being better than the south.
So bringing it back to copying, I think there are many examples, but one of the reasons the museum exists is to continue this appropriation process of appropriation. And that’s why you see people drawing in museums and seeing these artworks in a particular way, decontextualised from their context.
— I mean museums are such commercial spaces, now shops are bigger than the museums.
— The Victoria and Albert Museum famously has an advert which said, great cafe with a museum attached.
— So everyone, who has not spoken yet?
— There is something about time and place. And coming back to your original question – Do we keep the museums as they are today? Or if they’re threatened, do we have solidarity with museums?
To me there’s two things. One, in terms of time, about whether we think we need objects to remember the past and to teach the past. And how important do we think it is to keep a trace of the past so that we can continue to tell it? Maybe we can do it without objects, rather a way of thinking without objects, through rituals, through just the narrative between people and generations.
To answer what do we do with the threatened museum: objects obviously don’t have to be in a museum, but then we come to the place question, which I think is your question too. Where is this place and what kind of community does it have? And we get back to the community. To know the history and the politics of the place in order to understand the charge of that moment.
The people who lived the experience had to be there to be able to have that reaction in that particular place. They had to have walls around them to some extent.
— I have quite a few different thoughts on it. Going to that question of: would I help save it or not. I guess my feeling at the moment is I wouldn’t want to save it. I wouldn’t want to help save the museum. It makes me think of the story of the Tower of Babel and in the Bible and the idea that everyone came together and kept amalgamating. Everything, making all the languages the same, bringing everything to this one place so that they can show this one type of thinking. And what rubs me up the wrong way a lot of the time, or at least the connotations I have with the museum at the moment, is that the museum absorbs a lot of cultures within it and it takes so much of it that no one else has any agency over these objects, or over the space and how it is used.
So in a way I feel like when we does get way more local, when things get way more individual, people can interact with these kinds of spaces again. And I feel like almost there needs to be an emptying out. You start from: okay, we’ve got one object and there’s five of us who have this one object and this is what we’re working with.
If it’s an object or a conversation or whatever. And we all have sort of ownership over that or authority over it. Because at the moment I feel like we don’t have any authority over these objects or narratives. We don’t have any agency over them. And that’s why there’s all these attempts to take things back, but the museum’s still taking and that’s why you have like 8 million objects in the British Museum. It’s trying to complete everything into one monolithic thing and actually, it needs to crumble a bit before we can build it a little bit more again.
— What you’re saying also made me think about land. I mean if we had all the surface of all the museums in London, I suppose we would have a huge space that could be for schools, clinics and housing.
— From the conversations we’ve been having, it seems there’s a lot of these things that we think are valuable, and that should be in the museum. But they are in fact present in a lot of spaces. I feel like even going to the supermarket or bumping into someone on the side of the street is something valuable. Or the uncles playing dominoes outside of shop when they have no permission being there. There are a lot of moments where things are preserved and things are debated and things are cultivated that don’t need to be in the museum. So actually we can find pieces of this thing, this post-museum or what we’re calling the museum, in our everyday actions and rituals and sort of like day to day goings on.
— I think the problem with preservation is that it creates this very sacred relationship to objects. We were talking about digital replicas, but you have noted some of the problems with that. So why not have replicas or copies of productions where everybody can access it. Not necessarily digital ones, but objects. We get rid of the original that is valuable and instead have all these replicas that are worthless…
— But replicas already exist everywhere… but you mean replicas that have no value, no monetary value
— Yeah
— But the museum would claim copyright and original value. So we fight the laws of privatisation?
— Personally I don’t know if I can add anything to the debate, but I must admit that I used to think that museums were the best way to preserve a culture and its objects. For example, when I go to the Musée Guimet for Asian culture in Paris, when I see a Cambodian object, I know it was stolen, but nevertheless, I feel a kind of pride from seeing that object in that museum. I feel attached to these objects, but I do also feel like I’ve had my awareness raised through these discussions
— That’s important what you said. Because it is also one of the arguments of the Western Museum, that if they were not there, these objects would’ve disappeared.
— Just adding to that, I just want to raise a point that there was an object that was returned to Thailand from the Met Museum around two years ago. The news went unnoticed. They returned it to the fine art department of the government and there was a little bit of debate whether to keep it in the Bangkok Museum or send it back to another province where it originally came from. But mostly the news went unnoticed. I think that speaks volumes about how these kinds of conversations are not really embedded. Museums, alternative spaces, community organising, they all play a role within bigger systems and they all contribute something different to different people.
The idea of the museum is so embedded in everyone’s thinking that it was even hard for us yesterday to think beyond that. And we, we kind of become self-censored in a way to try to move away from it that it becomes hard for us to imagine.
— As I said yesterday, there are very few public collections being built today because of the dominance of private collection. And we don’t know what is happening in that world. One of the founders of Google died and his private collection was just sold off, and his collection was bigger than that of most Western museums… Or a lot of the items of the museum of Bagdad, which was looted when the Americans invaded have never been recovered… they are in private hands. So we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about public institutions, but the post-museum should also account for the privatisation of art today by billionaires.
— There are lots of different threads that could be picked up upon. But I think I would agree with most of the people in the room in terms of responding to this question of saving museums in the context of what gets our attention and the poly-crises of the present. I mean to say, I don’t think I would dedicate myself to going to stand with a major institution to defend it and its contents. Because I’m thinking about this question of organising and of time and energy and focus. I think that we can think about other things, there are more strategic ways to think about social change. And this not to say that reflections about what we do with transmission and objects and culture are not present elsewhere, in other spaces outside the museum or the university. And I think what you were saying about people sitting outside the shop playing dominoes is important… Because it evokes an idea of where are the places we want to expend our energy? Especially on a really local level.
For example, there’s a bar in our neighborhood that just recently was sold. But for many, many years it was a kind of a microcosm of the whole neighborhood, it’s a place that contains a lot of history of the neighborhood its political and social history. It’s a kind of place where people would explain these histories of the neighborhood, of migration, of struggle to me and to each other, but it was also a meeting place for different social groups. It was a bar, a restaurant, there was an unofficial garage that the owners didn’t mind people using. And since it’s been sold, some of that has been lost slightly. And so thinking about these kinds of spaces where things are preserved and held and also where we put our energy, connects back to this question of museums, and the way that they recuperate certain stories, the way that they become depoliticised in the institutional space.
These issues are linked to the question of gentrification as well. Because at the same time as you have museums being built, you have the loss of local spaces. There are many reasons that this bar closed, but gentrification is non negligible, which is part of the history of that specific neighborhood as well. And I was thinking about the way that museums have actively gentrified neighbourhoods, or have been part of concerted strategies for gentrification, and I can’t remember exactly which institutions, but I think there’s some London museums that have gone into towards Stratford following its redevelopment for the Olympic Games, universities as well…
So these expansions into different neighbourhoods, the buying up of property, the kind of transformation that actively happens through museums and these kinds of institutions, shows us that there’s a big connection between the idea of a post-museum and questions of community — because the word community’s come up a lot: What does the community want? — But what does the community look like when it’s being radically transformed by gentrification that is also being kind of led by these cultural projects?
— That’s a very important point. I mean, the model being the Guggenheim in Bilbao that transformed a working class neighborhood into a massive tourist destination.
So it is interesting to consider how the museum became a tool of gentrification and tourism in the name of culture and effectively, pushing out working class people, migrants, and so on from the city centre. I mean, the example in France was the occupation of the immigration museum by migrants without papers and the director decided that they had to be expelled.
— Now I’m not sure where that leaves us with our prototypes, I’m just wondering how are we gonna go back to them? Are we gonna go back to them? Is there, is the idea of a prototype still relevant?Because I think that was the strength of this endeavor was to do all of this thinking, but then also to actually try and translate that into something.
— I agree, but I also wanted us to confront the difficulty. I did not want to say that to end by saying there will be no prototype. But that’s also a possibility, right? So if you don’t go through the process, then you don’t confront these issues… But perhaps effectively, the conclusion could be there is no prototype because the post museum must remain a process…
— This has been a really interesting couple of days because it’s raised lots of questions that I haven’t actually ever thought about really, because, quite honestly, I’ve always found museums really boring. I’ve kind of gone in and outta them very quickly. I’ve found them very stuffy. I think mainly because it’s just these static objects on display. However, I’ve never thought about what we’ve been talking about the last couple of days. You know, what is the point of the museum as an institution? Because I’ve always thought that they’re just part of society basically.
I was actually thinking about the National Museum of Khartoum, which has been horribly destroyed. I was very sad when I saw what had happened to the Museum of Khartoum because Khartoum is in rubble basically at the moment, the whole city, including the museum. But then I was thinking it was full of artifacts that probably, when I think about it now, didn’t mean that much to contemporary Sudanese society. You know, they have very ancient archeological artifacts, kind of just like museums in Europe, a kind of encyclopedic museum really. And it’s interesting to think, when the war finishes, are they going to rebuild it? What are they going to put in? Because everything’s been looted now and it’s in markets in, in East Africa, all over the place. Are they gonna transform it in some way or are they gonna try and replicate what they had before, you know, if they get the money to rebuild the museum?
I have been interested in is restitution of stolen objects, because I think even though I’m not that fond of objects per se, I do feel that restitution is very important. But I have also been thinking about what is legal acquisition in a capitalist economy? I suppose that’s one of my questions, in a capitalist economy, it’s not just stolen objects, is it really? I’m just trying to process all these issues in my head. And it’s gonna take me a while to kind of decide what I really think about it.
— I mean, I think destroying the National Museum of Khartoum, is an act of humiliation. Just as all colonial looting has been.
— I guess the question of economy feels really pertinent. And the question of what legal acquisition is under capitalism, and I’m thinking just about what we were talking about before, about the gift shops and the commodification and the commerce of it all. I go to the gift shop to get this thing that looks like this thing, but because this thing is in the museum, I have no way of knowing how it was made, what it feels like, the practices and the crafts that we’ve been talking about. And so I feel like a really key element of the post-museum or trying to work out what that means, is that the post-museum has to be anti-capitalist. But also somehow it still has to function within the structure of capitalism. Because we are all living under that. Because, it’s not just because the object is behind glass that I don’t know how to make this object. I, like all of you, I presume, have a job and I have to sell my time and my labor to get money so that I can buy the object. But I’m not spending time learning how to make the object working with raw materials. That the practice of creating that object and bringing it into being is what would actually give it any kind of value beyond a capital value. Like that would give it meaning to me as a person to the people in my life, to the way that I use it.
So I feel like I’m taken by this idea of the post museum being a place of skill sharing and knowledge transmission and workshopping and of raw materials to be created. Like, like to to pass down that knowledge or to, or to transform the knowledge. Because we don’t need the same things that people needed a hundred years ago, or 300 years ago. We can see an object and be like, oh, this is why they needed it. This is what they needed it for. This was the purpose that it fulfilled. I also need something to fill this purpose, or I need an answer to this spiritual question. But I need to know how to create it myself. And that’s the only way I feel like we can resist capitalism is to learn these things, so that we’re avoiding dependency upon these institutions, which I keep turning back to thinking how I want the museum to exist, but I want to be able to learn there.
So yeah, I feel like the question of cultural capital that’s bestowed by institutions that just accumulates, I feel like we need to turn to ways of learning how to create it ourselves.
— The question for us becomes: what is the value we’re creating through our activity, and how do we retain that value in a way that isn’t capitalism?
I want to bring up a case in London. I’m not sure if anybody knows about the Museum of Homelessness, it’s a self-funded, London-based charity founded by an anti-colonial and anti-capitalist group of people who have also experienced homelessness. The way they work is mainly as a charity: they have a big storeroom, a resting place for anyone who needs help, and a supply room with essentials. They even provide fresh water outside their building. It’s located in Bury Park, which is significant—it’s a space closely associated with the origins of “homelessness” as a definition. So the relationship between land and homelessness ties into the idea we’re trying to explore.
Their museum events are interesting because they showcase objects contributed by people connected to the team—homeless people who want to share their experiences. They bring objects with personal stories. Some are displayed for a while, but I don’t think they actually have the resources to manage or store them long-term. It’s more of a personal-storytelling-based museum. That might be a good case study for us to look into.
— I also want to add, in relation to the British Museum: there’s an aura when you walk into certain museums that feels like surveillance, where you automatically re-assemble yourself. In a community museum, you feel one kind of atmosphere; in a large institutional museum, there’s another tempo entirely. From the onset, you sense it and embody it. For example, the first time I went to the British Museum, I was very aware of my presence and the presence of others. You read about it, you see it, you think about it—but when you interact with the objects, you also become conscious of your relationship to them. The space reminds you that you are part of a temporary narrative within it. You don’t quite have a place in it. Some people find their place, but many don’t. For some, a museum feels beautiful, welcoming, a space that tells of heritage and history. For others, it feels like surveillance, exclusion, and performance. So we need to ask: who is that surveillance for? Who benefits from it? That question is central when thinking about how a museum structures and performs itself.
— For me, the museum is a total social space. It’s not just about the objects. There’s a whole network of people doing unseen work—security guards, curators, cleaners. Even the most radical exhibitions are built on the invisible labour of people, often underpaid, often women or people of colour. So we have to think not just about the content, but about the care—how we take care of the space, the structures, the people, and the practices. It’s not only about what’s displayed on the walls, but about cleaning, maintaining, folding things up, taking them back, re-building them. Otherwise, we risk reproducing the same hierarchies.
And, for me, the question is: how do we imagine the social space we want to create? Not just in terms of what we show, but in terms of how we care for it. For example, if a project lasts ten days in a square, who takes care of it? Who cleans it? Who maintains it? These decisions matter as much as the “content.”
— The word “institution” comes up a lot, and I think it’s interesting to ask: what does that mean? How does it relate to geography? In this case, when I think about mobile prototypes situated in community contexts, I think back to the 1970s in Tower Hamlets—how institutions then reflected on community and hosting, sometimes even hosting homeless people.
— Much of my work is in archival research. There’s often a stark contrast between official institutional records and the lived experiences of people. Case notes might describe what someone was wearing, or include a blurry photograph, but they don’t transmit the experience itself. So responsibility often falls on us to synthesise narratives out of incomplete or biased materials.
This makes me wonder: how much is the space itself part of the “machine” of the museum? How much does it shape forms of display? For example, I found links between art galleries in the Renaissance and devotional practices of the time. Bourgeois patronage shaped what was collected and how it was shown. And when you look at certain devotional practices, they resemble later museum practices—rituals of looking, rituals of reverence.
So perhaps we need to free ourselves from the museum as it exists. It might be a trap. I don’t think we can save it in the way it was invented. The very premise of the museum is tied to removing objects from their lives: a toy will never again be played with, a goddess will never again receive offerings, clothing will never again be worn. That “fixing” of objects is fundamental to the museum.
— Even in community museums, this happens. Some exceptions exist—like Indigenous communities being allowed to handle and study objects that were stolen from them—but that is rare, and often comes only after long-sustained pressure. The loss of practice, of knowledge, is built into the museum system.
So the question becomes: is it possible to escape that? To skip the museum? Maybe instead, we could share examples of practices that work against authority.
— Could you tell us about one of your architectural projects with Bafalw—how you did it, and what came out of it?
— We could talk about two cinema projects we’ve done: the community cinema in Brixton and the Atlas Cinema. They worked hand-in-hand, with the first informing the second.
The first was an outdoor cinema designed under a railway staircase at Brixton Station. It was a surprising location—you wouldn’t expect to find a cinema there—and it was completely exposed. Screenings were free, and anyone could come by. You had intentional visitors, but also passers-by, workers on lunch break, security guards. It became not just a cinema but a shared space for being together. What made it work was that it lowered barriers. Galleries often feel intimidating—you see the front door and think, This is not the place for me. With the cinema, people stumbled across it naturally. It acknowledged that people have jobs, families, different schedules, and can’t always visit institutions during regular hours. It met people where they were. The materials mattered too. We used fabrics from the local market, scaffolding, and recycled materials. It felt like it belonged to the place, not like a refined “white box” gallery. People felt they could eat there, talk there, belong there.
That experience led to the Atlas Cinema, in a disused railway arch. We had no money, so we built it collectively with salvaged materials. It became a space where anyone could show their films—especially local communities who are usually excluded from mainstream cinemas. We set up a collective management system: if you screened a film, you also took care of the space, then passed it on. Everyone shared responsibility. The value wasn’t in the object, but in the community and agency it created. It was temporary, too. We knew that once the summer came, the powers that be would take the space back. But there’s a beauty in that impermanence—it forces reinvention and relocation.
So maybe, instead of trying to “save” the museum, we should imagine structures that are mobile, temporary, community-managed, and responsive to local needs. A project might travel from place to place. Maybe communities keep parts of it, transforming them into something else for their own use. That possibility of transformation is powerful—it’s against the permanence and authority of the museum.