Curatorial Politics: From Custodianship to Care

Multidisciplinary and decolonial approaches in museology have emerged alongside a range of political actions within and outside of museums. In the case of ethnographic or archaeological collections, this critical collaborative work has long been negotiated and then established by Indigenous thinkers and leaders. A core debate in this work centres on the intellectual infrastructure of museum knowledge - hampered as it is by naturalised historical legitimations. Although there is increasing emphasis on the importance of political and creative engagements in museums, the fundamental work of constructing new arrangements and narratives about and with museum collections remains limited.

This workshop reorients the dialogue about former ethnographic museums away from anthropology, archaeology and art history, to emphasise the value of fabulation and literary critique n rewriting the representational narratives in museums that are most evident in the curatorial. With a view to a later project that will necessarily broaden our discussion to include artists and fiction writers, we ask how ideas from aesthetics, literature, philosophy, and psychoanalysis can intersect with the curatorial. We hope this later platform will create space for discussions on care in museums and, as such, on restitution and reparation. While this work is theoretically global, we pay special attention to Latin America and the Caribbean, a region that is under-represented in museological literature. This small workshop brings together local scholars and students who have been thinking about the social impact of fiction in decolonial debates. We invite the group to imagine, in a first instance, how we might arrange future conversations that will bridge disciplines.

Alongside the task of opening the disciplinary possibilities to rewrite museum narratives, we take seriously the emplacement of curatorial voices and positions that have historically fixed cultures, peoples, and histories according to Eurocentric notions of space, time, civilization, and aesthetics. Key discussions of positionality emerged from Black feminist and postcolonial thought to address the fact that objectivity is a construct of rationalism and Eurocentric thinking that willfully ignores how people are emplaced by others, as well as themselves, into their worlds. This emplacement has serious consequences for those who are allowed to speak, represent, and be taken seriously.

As former ethnographic museums are grappling with their own histories of misusing curatorial positionalities to construct reductive, exploitative narratives of the Other, museums have long since questioned curatorial positionalities to engage in practices of care and repair. The ways in which museum collections are arranged, written about, and viewed are all deeply coloured by curators and custodians. Therefore, we aim to think through the relationship between ethics of positionality and literary studies methodologies. This workshop takes the subject of positionality as a key facet of care, moving forward from the premise that collections and exhibition practices cannot be cared for if we are not aware of how curatorial positionalities also shape what these collections come to mean, as well as whose voices are foregrounded or silenced.

As we are focusing on the regions of Latin America and the Caribbean, participants from our network are invited to reflect on the ways in which museum fiction – from museum-commissioned writing to speculative object biographies, counter-archival narratives, and other forms of imaginative re-engagement with collections – may open up avenues to think through their own positionalities, and acknowledge the power imbalances that shape museum narratives. To what extent can curatorial practice itself be understood as a form of narrative experimentation: one that is open to uncertainty, plurality, and challenges the expectation that museums produce stable, authoritative accounts of the past? How can decolonial world-making through critical fabulation and collaborative practices provide alternative pathways to resist erasure, invisibility, and the epistemic  violence of colonization, and disrupt universal forms of knowledge? Such fictional interventions often foreground fragmentation, contradiction, and opacity, thereby resisting the demand that objects be made fully legible within Western epistemic frameworks, and resonate with Indigenous epistemologies that privilege pluriversality. Ultimately, these imaginaries have the potential to reframe the very terms of these debates by shifting the focus from ownership to relationality, from return to transformation, and from preservation to reactivation.