The object of criticism even before its creation, in 2015, the Museu de les Cultures del Món on Montcada street –currently merged with the Ethnological Museum of Montjuïc as a single center with two locations (MUEC)– is once again in the center of the hurricane At a time when the critical examination of colonialism is sweeping across Europe and the great museums have begun to restore looted works, what to do with a museum that, although it does not have objects from looting, responds to a model today do you all look anachronistic?
“It is a museum out of place, absurd and meaningless”, answers Jordi Marti, head of the Culture area of the Barcelona City Council, on which the MUEC depends. Martí recalls that it was a project by Josep Lluís Alay, created with the enthusiastic complicity of the then councilor Jaume Ciurana during the term of Xavier Trias. "At that time I was very critical: it was already seen as an old museum, out of its time." Now the ball is in his court. “What would we have to do? I wouldn't have opened it, but there it is, shiny and new. We have been reflecting on it for some time, and we have not yet found the answer”, admits Martí, for whom “from a decolonial perspective, the city is much more conflictive than the museum itself”.
On the table in his office rests a report by the essayist and art critic Iván de la Nuez for the creation of a possible anti-colonial center in Barcelona. It was commissioned by Martí's predecessor in office and current Minister of Universities Joan Subirats. "But they have shelved the matter," says De la Nuez. “We started working two years ago and we could have been the first, but right now we are trailing behind in Spain, which is trailing behind in Europe. It is a tide that will come, it does not matter if the government is left or right: in Belgium, for example, it did not take a leftist government for the Tervuren Museum to start a process of decolonization. But here we are still with makeup policies, with seminars, round tables, exhibitions... that are not going to solve anything and are pure demagogy”.
De la Nuez agrees with Martí that "Barcelona is a great open-air colonial museum, with statues, palaces and churches built with the money derived from slavery." Regarding the Museu de les Cultures del Món, he is emphatic: “If it is a museum, it will not be anti-colonial, and if it is anti-colonial it cannot be a museum”. The real issue, which many people forget, he adds, is that "decolonization does not only involve the return of heritage to the countries of origin, but also the transfer of power and representation of discourses to the communities of that origin." who are here in second or third generation. The same as always are not going to be able to solve the problems they created. The danger is falling into another colonization by decolonizing ”, he warns, although he is aware that “it cannot be achieved without a broad consensus ”.
For the director of MACBA, Elvira Dyangani Ose, to speak of decolonization is to recognize that "in its initial formulation, the museum was established, together with the census and the maps, as an apparatus of the colonial metropolis that limited the symbolic and material possessions of the other . Sometimes, together with other cultural strategies such as human zoos, it deprived him of his human nature, his subjectivity”. And remember that what is exhibited in anthropological and ethnological museums is not the result of a fair and conscious exchange of knowledge by both parties, therefore, even if we have not been the direct perpetrators of certain atrocities, "this does not exempt the current institutions to recognize those dark episodes of history, intervene to preserve their memory and grant them a new place of enunciation”.
UPF professor Estela Ocampo also believes that we are immersed in an unstoppable process, but she does not believe that the Museu de les Cultures del Món "has to make a big mea culpa". “Her speech about her is not at all colonialist and the pieces are not the product of plunder, among other things because Spain had little interest in the cultures that it had under its colonial rule. It's not that she was aware of the theft, no, it's that she wasn't interested in anything. Regarding the restitution of works, she believes that it is necessary to "thread very finely and see each case, the broad brush is not useful." As an example, she gives the Australian aboriginal painting exhibition that she curated at MUAC. “It does more for Australia to show off a few pieces of eucalyptus leaf painting here, of which it has a great many, than to accumulate a few more in reserves.”
