In the 70s it was common for Barcelona children who went on a school trip to Banyoles to return with their eyes wide open. In addition to a beautiful lake and a chocolate factory as authentic as the one in the story, the school took them to see the stuffed man that was displayed as if he were a beast in the local museum.
Some still remember that cold, glassy look (the eyes were made of glass). The poor Bechuana who lived in what is now South Africa, El Negro de Banyoles, was not only dug up, gutted like an antelope and displayed like a fairground geek, but over the years he would become the bogeyman of the nightmares of many boys and girls from Catalonia.
Those who had missed the excursion to Banyoles had to settle for a pair of jibarized heads that were exhibited in the no less spooky Ethnological Museum of Montjuïc. They weren't as apparent as the prehistoric mannequins at the Archaeological, just a couple of bends away, but at least they were authentic. Definition of jibarizada: severed and reduced head.
Over the years, those cardboard busts lost track of them. Most of the human remains were no longer on display in museums and were placed in reserve rooms. But now, pieces like these are back in the news thanks to the Museu Etnològic i de Cultures del Món, which assumed the funds of that historical institution.
The fact is that it still exhibits, to this day, three decorated skulls from Papua New Guinea, which it plans to remove from the exhibition at the beginning of next year.
The museum has taken a long time to make a decision – the removal of human remains on display – that has already been applied for decades in other institutions around the world. The stuffed bechuana from Banyoles stopped being exhibited amidst international controversy in 1997.
The Hottentot Venus continued on its way, another criminal case of ethnological show business that had its epicenter in the Museum of Man in Paris. To cite just another local example, the Igualada Pell Museum removed a jibarized head no less than 23 years ago because it was considered a macabre trophy.
In short, what is progressive now is not to remove remains of corpses that should have been underground for decades, but to initiate active policies of dismantling anthropological and/or colonial collections and repatriating, to the extent possible, the bodies in reserve. .
Somehow, the museum on Montcada Street, barely visited despite the tourist whirlwind, has been choked by the City Council. It was already anachronistic when it was inaugurated in 2015, during the mandate of Xavier Trias, and the governments of Ada Colau, although it is true that they promoted interesting critical exhibitions, let it vegetate despite the doubts it raised. Remember that in the Montcada headquarters there are pieces that may come from the famous looting of Benin... And all this, having on the opposite sidewalk another municipal museum, the Picasso, strangled due to lack of space (see exploded view).
It's late, but at least the museum is making amends. In fact, the main meaning of museums with such colonial connotations (this one has them, although most of its pieces were purchased) should be, precisely, to become museums of decolonization, especially if there are unburied corpses among their collections. That is to say, there should be a tendency to transform these museums into processes of deconstruction of a perverse imaginary, even if the ultimate goal is the disappearance itself.
The Etnològic seems to have taken this reflective and critical path by opening its collections on the Internet. His ongoing exhibition Les statues també moren is also a step in this direction, which aims to “reflect on the future of ethnographic museums and the role they can play in contemporary struggles against racism, social exclusion and new forms of colonialism". This is what matters. Removing the severed heads of some anonymous unfortunates from view fell under its own weight.
