What strongly-expressed view about museums and galleries would’ve got you in this situation like five or six years ago, but in 2020 turns out to be just the normal mainstream view of a majority in this sector?
* Mine is “Remove all human remains from public display and return the Benin Bronzes” obvs
Go back a decade and there was that board meeting in 2010 when I suggested the @Pitt_Rivers really needed a Twitter account, to the consternation of pretty much everyone in the room
Finally the @Pitt_Rivers twitter account was registered in 2011, but it was perhaps 3 years or more? before the account started to be used in anything like a normal manner.
(Obviously anyone reading this who doesn't follow @Pitt_Rivers—now run so well by colleagues—needs to!!)
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It’s a strange calling, to get your hands dirty with the detritus of the past, to crouch with a trowel in a muddy trench, to trace the delicate contours of earth works in rainy fields, to run soil through a sieve, to ink letters and numbers onto potsherds and ziplock bags,
2/ to perhaps put what some you found on display to the public and to deposit the vast majority of it in box after box in a museum store room, all in the name of excavating ghosts, waking the dead, reading a past that was not written down but just left behind.
1/14 this announcement by the Smithsonian is another sign that we are witnessing a fundamental global shift in the ethics of museum curation
in the past a self-selected handful of the richest and most powerful institutions has sought to control, dominate and close down the debate
2/ but since the 1990s restitution has become a mainstream part of professional practice in the very different historical circumstances of returning Nazi loot or ancestral human remains to Indigenous people around the world.
every now and then working at a museum like the @Pitt_Rivers means that you experience a moment of sheer terror and shock
I had one of those moments, a truly M.R. James winter night kind of moment of revelation, while working yesterday evening
(THREAD)
I was working through some historic photographs of museum curators to send to a colleague as part of a current artist collaboration
Most of the photographs were from the first decade of the 20th century, shared with a designer we're working with for details of dress
for example I sent her this photo taken “on the occasion of the first practical examination in anthropology in 1908″, showing Beatrice Blackwood, Sir Francis Knowles, 5th Baronet, James Harley, and their tutor the curator Henry Balfour
My new interim report on what we currently know about the Benin collections of the University of Oxford has just been published online - read it here >> prm.ox.ac.uk/benin-bronzes
the 229-page report summarises
- 145 objects which provenance research suggests were looted in the Benin 1897 attack
- 15 further objects possibly from that attack
- more items taken in other expeditions in what's today Nigeria
- further Benin objects exported in the 20th century
here are some of those @Pitt_Rivers objects in a thread
1/ Carved ivory tusk burnt in the fires during the desecration of Benin city
it's been a very busy week for the return of looted objects from France to Bénin 🇧🇯 and from the UK to Benin City, Nigeria🇳🇬
here's a summary of what's been going on (THREAD) 👇
1/ a "farewell exhibition" is being held at the @quaibranly
displaying the 26 items of the Trésor de Béhanzin, looted from the Abomey Palace in the Kingdom of Dahomey in 1892—which will be returned to Cotonou next month
The exhibit is open till Sunday quaibranly.fr/fr/expositions…
2/ a major conference was held to mark this landmark return, with speeches from many of the key players including Prof @FelwineSarr and Prof Bénédicte Savoy @KuK_TUBerlin — who compared this watershed moment to the fall of the Berlin Wall: "there was before, and there was after"
the Trésor de Béhanzin—looted by General Alfred Dodds in November 1892 from the Palace of Abomey, and donated by him to the French state—is being returned from Paris to Bénin
here’s a shortlist thread of some of the 26 items involved: