by Daniela Ortiz
published in Decolonizing Museums, edited by Internationale Online

In a context of extreme colonial violence which the migrant and refugee populations are currently experiencing in Europe, it can be useful and necessary to think about decolonising the museum. But there is a danger that it may become a matter that is totally out of context and even insulting if it does not place at its centre a discussion concerning the situation that is currently imposed by Europe’s migratory control system on which people come from the former colonies. Decolonising a cultural institution does not just mean considering the matter and organising exhibitions and seminars. In the current context, decolonising a museum requires a constant effort to take a position in regard to the migratory control system; it requires accepting that it is impossible to continue programming activities and events while there is a total normalisation of the existence of Migrant Detention Centres, forced deportation flights on a mass and individual scale, individuals with semi-rights and anti-rights, and situations of extreme violence in border zones which are the local contexts where these projects are presented. Decolonising a museum means sending letters to the Ministry of Interior, organising press conferences to condemn the use of culture in the discourse of integration, making the legal apparatus of the museum available to persecuted people; it means acknowledging the level of urgency imposed in the European context by the backbone of coloniality.

by Trenza Collective

Dozen of pages are written about all the actors and subjects involved: about Not Dressed to Conquer/ Haute Couture 4. Transport, about the Spanish curators Paul Preciado and Valentin Roma, and the German co-curators Hans D. Christ and Iris Dressler, about the artists, the director, the King, the Queen as a sponsor of the museum, the Macba and their contract with the Wurttemberg Kunstverein. And of all these people not a single person questions if a helmeted, naked Domitila trapped between a dog and the king of Spain is really a critique of colonialism. The only statement by Doujak that is cited is the one she gives last December in the São Paulo Biennial, about how the work “plays with power relations and subverts them.” In the center of all gazes, in the very middle of an artwork that supposedly criticizes colonialism, Domitila and what she represents remains invisible to all. Here in the most mediatic moment a political artist concerned with oppression could wish for, Ines Doujak says nothing. Neither do the curators. Nobody speaks up or seems to be bothered by the objectualization of Domitila. The whole perspective that would make her struggle as a political subject to be understood is missing.

by Eve Tuck, K. Wayne Yang

Our goal in this article is to remind readers what is unsettling about decolonization. Decolonization brings about the repatriation of Indigenous land and life; it is not a metaphor for other things we want to do to improve our societies and schools. The easy adoption of decolonizing discourse by educational advocacy and scholarship, evidenced by the increasing number of calls to “decolonize our schools,” or use “decolonizing methods,” or, “decolonize student thinking”, turns decolonization into a metaphor. As important as their goals may be, social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches that decenter settler perspectives have objectives that may be incommensurable with decolonization. Because settler colonialism is built upon an entangled triad structure of settler-native-slave, the decolonial desires of white, non-white, immigrant, postcolonial, and oppressed people, can similarly be entangled in resettlement, reoccupation, and reinhabitation that actually further settler colonialism. The metaphorization of decolonization makes possible a set of evasions, or “settler moves to innocence”, that problematically attempt to reconcile settler guilt and complicity, and rescue settler futurity. In this article, we analyze multiple settler moves towards innocence in order to forward “an ethic of incommensurability” that recognizes what is distinct and what is sovereign for project(s) of decolonization in relation to human and civil rights based social justice projects. We also point to unsettling themes within transnational/Third World decolonizations, abolition, and critical space-place pedagogies, which challenge the coalescence of social justice endeavors, making room for more meaningful potential alliances.