RE-IMAGINING MUSEUMS AS PORTALS
/ˈpɔːt(ə)l/
a doorway, gate, or other entrance, especially a large and imposing one.
Similar:
doorway
gateway
entrance
way in
way out
exit
Egress
Museum
Derived from Ancient Greek ‘Mouseion’, shrine of the Muses, + ‘Mousa’, meaning muse.
An altar to inspiration. A sacred place of study. An opening through which meaning comes into the world.
_____
The museum is a product of cultural technology- employing display to create an ‘other’, taxonomy to communicate place, derealization to isolate our experience, and opacity to perform a seemingly neutral authority of knowledge. In this model, to know is to own, and self-regulate accordingly — exposing the modern museum’s origins in the context of parallel world order tools, the university and prisons. While the development of these systems are different, they work together via surveillance and discipline to protect white supremacy- each tackling body, mind, and spirit. In ‘The Exhibitionary Complex’, Tony Bennett explores this in depth, writing ”The exhibitionary complex and the carceral archipelago develop over roughly the same period — the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century — and achieve developed articulations of the new principles they embodied within a decade or so of one another.”
Entering the museum is to bear witness to these accumulative visions of power, slowly being programmed into accepting the narratives it constructs around cultural production as truth.
In Inventing Black Radical Technoculture (Week 2 of Afrotectopia) we asked ourselves,
“Should we design utilizing tools within the system or outside of it?
If we design within the system, what are the tactics?
If we design outside and create our own, what are we creating?.”
So what does it look like to intervene in these violent reproductions of policing?
How can we center anticolonial values in dismantling these systems as a whole?
Technology is not inherently a masters tool and construing it as such erases non-white, non-western, non-human invention. Built from resources extracted from Earth, the physicality of it is entangled with the land and people who do this work, both exploited ceaselessly.
A Counterimagining:
Science fiction has a thematic obsession with time travel, as though we don’t teleport everyday.
Artist and guerilla theorist Neema Githere asks, “We are the African diasporic people living in our ancestors’ future, now. What are we doing with that? How are we alchemizing our displacement? How are we activating the past, to put the present in motion, towards the future?” This way of being fiercely in the now, is what Githere describes as Afropresentism- “a distinguishing genre, less about what might have happened, or could happen; and instead, an embodiment of what did happen, what is happening.” At a time where the world is being actively reimagined, how can we look to current cultural work, our afropresent, to bring the future into being?
Black creativity is technological intervention- channeling the possibilities of our future in real time. The Black Radical Imagination as liberatory technology, citation as worldbuilding, water as memory, and the list goes on — drawing on indigenous knowledge to create anew is the kind of invention I am invested in.
By reframing a museum as a portal, there is the potential for us to see ourselves as time travelling inventors capable of creating a different world.
🏛 MUSEUM: Visibility — — -> Knowability — — -> Extraction
🛸PORTAL: Imagine — — → Feel — — -> Dream
Flight Path:
Okay so, Field Trip.
Imagine this town:
15 minutes walk from your home is your local school on Lorde Ave, adjacent to the partnered public library on Morrison street, down the street from the community portal on Octavia crescent.
Museums, now redundant relics of a colonial past, have been replaced with spaces for dreaming. After school, on the weekends, during lunch breaks, we come together and share in the creation of this world; all stakeholders in the future. Each Portal depends on the needs of its community: some are mobile, some are seasonal, some are envisioning 2270, and others are in the here and now. At the core of every portal is play, wonder, and imagination. Portal guides (I believe they were called curators back in the day) steward us into this work with speculative design, participatory exhibitions, and technology.
Display is a thing of the past, now we experiment.
All that you touch
You Change.
All that you Change
Changes you.
-Octavia Butler
This dream is in a dimension where a different concept of school exists, described by Peter Marsh in ‘Places For Learning’:
“It is no longer an isolated building surrounded by playgrounds and no fences. It is instead a community facility, set amongst shops and public buildings in the centre of a district. There is no school hall: a hall used for every purpose by the public is used by the school when it needs it. There is no dining hall: the children used a cafe open to the public and act accordingly. There is no gymnasium, the school uses the sports hall open to all. There is no school library: the public library has a far greater stock. Among the shops and offices and the district centre are scattered the classrooms and laboratories which are also used by other organisations. The daily lives of the community and its children are inextricably mixed, just as they were for most people all throughout history.”
I’m relating this to a museum context because as shown, that too is an educational project.
Recognising the museum’s role in knowledge production, I turn to bell hooks’ ‘Teaching to Transgress’. Here she offers Engaged Pedagogy, a holistic approach to education as “striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge about how to live in the world…one where teachers were willing to acknowledge a connection between ideas learned in university settings and those learned in life practices”.
She gives us more, writing “When education is the practice of freedom, students are not the only ones who are asked to share, to confess. Engaged pedagogy does not seek simply to empower students. Any classroom that employs a holistic model of learning will also be a place where teachers grow and are empowered by the process.”
Reading bell hooks with the Imagineer fellows completely shifted how I imagine myself as a curator, community educator, and artist- which really, is one and the same. Engaged pedagogy transforms curatorial practice into portal stewardship, expanding its inherent worldgrowing capacity.
For the portal model to be successful, there has to be a regenerative relationship with the people it serves. Led + Informed by community members, built by artist-inventors, and stewarded by Portal Guides (Curators). This isn’t to say that there would be zones or borders- no. Similar to how there can be many museums and galleries in a city, the same can be true for portals. Their work, and value, is not in number or exclusivity but practice.
I also want to emphasize the role of returning to feeling in this process. A lot can be said on the internal ruptures caused by colonial logic and to speak with hooks again, on Eros: “To call attention to the body is to betray the legacy of repression and denial that has been handed down to us by our professorial elders [read museum] who have been usually white and male”.
Sometime during this summer- I think it was June- I was intensely researching looted African ancestral art in museums across Europe and North America. After virtually scouring the dungeons of The Virginia Museum of Fine Art’s ‘Africa Collection’ (*the heaviest of air quotes here*) I fell sick for 2 days. How full-body the confluence of ancestor’s rage and my disgust was, shook me to my core. It was one of those late night internet rabbit holes and I was spiraling, time traveling from the hurt these institutions were born out of and back to the harm they still perpetuate today.
In the museum, I am the ‘known’, extracted, and classified.
I made my heart some salve for this realization; my mother’s Rwandan tea + CBD oil and eventually fell asleep. It was 6 am by this time.
I woke up sick and tired.
From that point I knew I needed to shift towards a completely different epistemic/cosmological/ontological understanding of the world, not only for the future but for my spirit. Reforming colonial museums is not a dream of mine. This vision is one of completely re-configuring what it means to publicly engage cultural production (ideally with all the restored wealth these institutions have violently accrued).
Water slowly wears out rock from sustained pressure, which to me is both a lesson in caring for ourselves during this journey and a tactic for pruning the decaying roots of colonial legacies.
At the time of writing this, I see the work of portal guides already happening through Ari , founder of Afrotectopia and facilitator of the Imagineer Fellowship, Neema, whose guerilla theory sessions remind me of the power of collective genius, and Legacy Russell’s poetic refusal via Glitch Feminism.
Of course, there are most definitely more portal guides-in training, witnessing the Afrotectopia community makes me sure of it. Probably somewhere hanging out on the thinly veiled line between now and then, getting ready to steward a museum of the future near you.
This dream is in conversation with:
The Exhibitionary Complex, Tony Bennett
Museums In The Colonial Horizon of Modernity, Walter Mignolo
Teaching to Transgress, bell hooks
Being Critical about Critical and Speculative Design, Matt Ward
The Digital Has Been Around For A While, Nelly Y.Pinkrah
Towards New Metaphors of Consciousness, Enos Nyamor
Black Gooey Universe, American Artist
Languid Hands on Curation and Care
Daydreaming about Edward Makuka’s imagination via Nuotama Bodomo’s film Afronauts
Kwaku Ananse Folktale on The Wisdom Pot *
*Annotation: How Embodied Knowledge + Collective Wisdom came to be
We Need New Cultural Technology: On Ephemera + Kiosk Museums,
me for Decolonize The Art World
Chinua Achebe on Art as a Form of Citizenship: Lessons in Creativity as “Collective Communal Enterprise” from the Igbo Tradition of Mbari, Maria Popova
The Role of An Artist Through The Igbo traditional concept of “Ohaka: The Community is Supreme” , me + Sabrina Citra for Decolonize The Art World
Elizabeth Gilbert, Your Elusive Creative Genius
Many of my conversations with Uzoma.
Designing an Accra-based prototype of a portal, below:
