Photos and archival documents appear to be objective sources of information. But they often reflect a colonial perspective. The names of the subjects are barely mentioned. The categorization of people and objects can be racist.
Researching the perspectives of provenance communities can be challenging. Often, a considerable amount of time elapses between the acquisition of an object and its provenance research. Moreover, voices from the past are rarely documented. This article features several Belgian experts on this topic.
At the end, Carolina Jimenez of MAS (Antwerp) suggests to look more closely at collection management, research and presentation in museums in Bolivia, Peru and Mexico, and at how indigenous communities record their ancestral knowledge in art and utensils.
