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Let’s get back to museums. Let’s view them along the lines of universities. Who built these institutions? What purpose have these institutions been made for? Thinking about the history of museums in relation to coloniality is a very revealing exercise: for example when we see the trajectory followed from the development of the Kunstkamera, or “cabinets of curiosities” to the foundation of the Louvre and the British Museum we understand how museums in the West built on the one hand its own Western memory and the exotic spectacle of the non-European, people whose memory were erased or appropriated and re-written in the inscription museums of world culture place next to each exotic visual image or object. The foundation of the British Museum had very much to do with the project of collecting national objects, or objects of the Roman tradition, etc. But then, as Europeans scattered throughout the world, the coloniality of knowledge became unstoppable: China and Japan were not colonized as India was, but the Chinese and Japanese were “known” (better yet, epistemically appropriated) by Europeans, as were the objects displayed in ethnographic and natural history museums. Notice that for the Japanese it may have been a reason for pride, for some but, in general, it was irrelevant how Europe displayed Japanese culture and people in European museums. But for Europeans it was very important because Japanese cultures in European museums made them feel superior when they visited on Sunday afternoons. After that Europe began to be divided into art museums and natural history museums, for example. So museums played a fundamental role in the European construction of Western identity, whereas natural history and ethnography museums (and now museums of world cultures) are fundamental to the construction of European otherness. In keeping with this division of knowledge, all Aztec iconography, Chinese books, etc. are therefore in natural history, ethnographic or world culture museums (meaning not just different, but inferior to European civilization). So to me those are clear examples of the way universities and museums are institutions that produce and transform the coloniality of knowledge, and the coloniality of being as well, because they shape identities.
The question lies in how we approach those histories now and how we make use of those spaces for decolonial projects. Artists such as Fred Wilson are a good examples of how can you turn the museum around and build decolonial projects within colonial institutions.
Fred Wilson does installations using objects taken from museum basements (which are just as or more interesting as what is on display, except they’re not open to the public). In Mining the museum (you can find photos of his installations on the web), as one example, a work is a gorgeous silverware belonging to wealthy Baltimore families, and in the middle, the shackles of the African slaves who made that magnificent silverware possible. The entire installation is built on that principle: looking behind appearances to reveal the reality that made them possible. This is the equivalent of what in our language is the rhetoric of modernity, the visible (oh what magnificent silverwork!) and what is not seen, the logic of coloniality, the shackles of enslaved Africans. At the same time, Wilson’s installation is an act to decolonize the museum and knowledge and being at the same time.
MFC: We’ve been talking about this shift toward the visual in contemporary societies. Taking into account the contributions made by Euro-North American visual studies to denaturalize the visual, which basically stem from references such as Barthes, Foucault, Lacan, Althusser, how can we approach a visual project from the perspective of modernity/coloniality? How could we question this epistemology of Anglo-Saxon visual studies from other places?
WM: I’ll answer you with an example. A Mexican artist, Pedro Lasch, made an installation called Black Mirror/Espejo Negro for the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University; it’s now touring several museums. Like Fred Wilson, Lasch took many pieces out of the Museum’s basement, Aztec and Mayan pieces that were not being displayed: statues, plates, etc. of which the Duke museum has quite a lot. So he takes these pieces out of storage, creates a black mirror and hangs it on a wall, then places a Maya figurine on a pedestal in front of the mirror. You enter the room and see the back of all the objects, since the objects are facing the mirror and a light shines on the object. The object is reflected, so you’re behind it, but you see the front reflected in the black mirror very clearly. Once you’re facing the mirror, you start seeing hazy images, images of Castilian iconography, including personages painted by El Greco and Velázquez, i.e., elite figures of the Spanish monarchy that are in the shadows. This strikes me as another spectacular example of how installations can create visualities that also generate new theories to dismantle the coloniality of image, of the museum; producing decolonial installations and sparking decolonial conversations, theories, forms of education.
As for the other half of your question, I think that, going back to what we said before, there’s an urgent need to do away with the idea that the visual is something separate from the written, because it was the Western imperial prerogative that relegated the non-written visual to the background. That distinction is a magnificent way of controlling and devaluating knowledge both in the West and in other regions, and by both the right and left wing. On the other hand, images without verbal or alphabetic written text commenting on them, looses much of its power. This is a fundamental task in the sphere of the decoloniality of knowledge viewed as a general category, which is manifested in the coloniality of being, seeing, and feeling. That’s why for decolonial projects it’s imperative to begin with the enunciation rather than working from what is enunciated. This is because if we discuss what is enunciated, the enunciation remains in the hands of Western categories, subjectivities and institutions in Europe, the USA and the former colonies, or places that were never colonized but did not escape the epistemic expansion of the West, such as China and Japan, which incidentally are now in the process of being freed from the fantasy and white magic in which the West enveloped them since the second half of the nineteenth century. De-colonial project must take away the enunciation from the controlling hands of Western epistemology, aesthetics, theology, secular philosophy and science.
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(*) Walter Mignolo. William H. Wannamaker Distinguished Professor of Romance Studies and Professor of Literature and Cultural Anthropology at Duke University. Author of The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization; Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking, and The Idea of Latin America.
(**) La Tronkal. Working Group on Geopolitics and Symbolic Practices is an interdisciplinary collective based in Ecuador made up of artists, researchers, theoreticians and critics focusing on dialogues based on decolonial theories.
Click here to read Part 2 of the Walter Mignolo Interview
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