The exhibition will travel through Catalonia’s four provinces and can be visited for free.
The project “(Tr)African(t)s. Museums and collections of Catalonia in the face of coloniality” aims to trace the origins and conditions of acquisition of the pieces and collections from the Spanish colonial empire in Morocco, Equatorial Guinea and the Philippines that are now kept in the network of public museums in Catalonia, and to facilitate processes of reformulation, reinterpretation, and reparation within these institutions.
Starting from provenance research on the origin of collections, we will make visible extractivist, often compulsive, dynamics that European museums have hidden until very recently.
Due to political and symbolic pressure from diasporic communities and countries of origin, museum institutions are nowadays forced to reconsider not only the processes of acquisition and accumulation in the past, but also those of conservation, exhibition, and identification in the present.
The programme seeks to generate an academic and social debate on the so-called ‘politics of reparation’ and on the right of people belonging to diasporic communities, and communities of origin, to maintain, control, protect, develop and enjoy their cultural heritage, illegitimately held in European public museums.
