The TRANSMAT — Transnational Materialities project culminated this week with the international conference ‘Decolonising Museums and Colonial Collections. Towards a Transdisciplinary Agenda and Methods’ and the opening of the exhibition ‘Facing the Colonial Legacy in the Museum’, both hosted by the Santos Rocha Municipal Museum (MMSR), one of the project’s partners.

The conference was attended by around 70 people of 18 nationalities, from fields such as history, anthropology, archaeology, heritage, and art history. The aim was transdisciplinary sharing in order to rethink museum collections, namely ‘reimagining museums and their colonial collections from an inclusive and decolonial perspective’ — practices and strategies that are often omitted from debates. Speakers included Meryem Korun (TheMuseumsLab, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin), Mark Thurner (FLACSO-Ecuador / University of London / University of Florida), David William Aparecido Ribeiro (Paulista Museum, University of São Paulo), Ciraj Rassool (University of the Western Cape) and Marta Lourenço (National Museum of Natural History and Science / PRISC / CIUHCT, University of Lisbon).

At the end of the first day of the conference, participants were invited to actively collaborate in the opening of the exhibition ‘Facing the Colonial Legacy in the Museum’ by building new knowledge and raising new questions about the collection on display. The temporary exhibition — ‘an exhibition within the exhibition’ — is an intervention in the MMSR’s ethnography room, which invites visitors to reflect on the history of the collection, its complex construction process, the players and their contexts, the identification of the various levels of cultural and scientific practices, the understanding of objects through their itineraries and the multiple meanings they have received over time in the spaces through which they have circulated.

The intervention confronts the museography of 2014 with part of the research results of the TRANSMAT project, which set out to document the transnational collections of two archaeology museums founded at the end of the 19th century (the MMSR and the National Museum of Archaeology), where the ethnography collections were interpreted following a Western scientific practice that used a colonialist and racialised narrative. More than just a showcase of objects, it presents their history and the questions raised by the process of producing knowledge. The exhibition can be visited until 31 October.

In addition to the TRANSMAT’s partner organisations — IN2PAST, the MMSR and the National Museum of Archaeology —, these initiatives also had the collaboration of the Queens College of the City University of New York, the University of São Paulo, the Pitt Rivers Museum of the University of Oxford, and TheMuseumsLab. They were organised by Elisabete Pereira (TRANSMAT coordinator), Robert T. Nyamushosho (Queens College, City University of New York), Marília Xavier Cury (Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, University of São Paulo) and Lennon Mhishi (Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford). The installation was designed by architect Miguel Figueira and designers José Albergaria and Chantal de La Coste.

Photos: Elisabete Pereira and Santos Rocha Municipal Museum