By now, almost everyone has spoken about decolonization. So much so that the debate has often turned into shouting matches. For or against. Necessary progress or ideological fixation. Now, the Ministry of Culture wants the most qualified voice to be heard: the experts. The Ministry has created, in close collaboration with the Museum of America and the National Museum of Anthropology, two advisory committees to update both institutions, as EL PAÍS was able to confirm with official sources. The two groups must prepare a technical report with proposals on the concepts, the script, the narrative and the selection of pieces exhibited in these museums. They will not have legal powers, that is, it will not be among their functions to trace the origin or propose the return of any controversial object. These works will be the basis for both centers to start with the renovation of their permanent exhibition in 2025.
This is the first concrete step by the department headed by Ernest Urtasun since the minister’s appearance in Congress on January 22. A handful of phrases that day in a long speech sparked controversy that still persists. “We have proposed […] establish spaces for dialogue and exchange that allow us to overcome a colonial framework or one anchored in gender or ethnocentric inertia. There are international commitments assumed by Spain […] which translate into a process of reviewing state collections dependent on the Ministry of Culture,” he said.
The opposition of PP and Vox has since accused Urtasun of rewriting history and tarnishing the image of the country. “There were no colonies in Spain. We are reviewing the 16th century with 21st-century eyes. There was a fusion that made us better. Anything that opens a sterile debate in culture is taking away energy and budget,” María Soledad Cruz-Guzmán García, spokesperson for the PP in the Culture Commission of Congress, summed up to this newspaper. The Ministry, on the other hand, sees it as an essential step towards modernisation and justice, a path that many institutions have taken, such as the Metropolitan in New York or the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. Culture always insisted that the process had already been underway for some time, both in the world and in Spain, driven and led by the museums themselves. And that the Government would give support when it could contribute. This has just happened.
An official source points out that the two museums contacted the Ministry of Culture to request its collaboration. And that the Ministry’s General Subdirectorate of State Museums has drawn up the selection of experts in agreement with both institutions. Each advisory committee includes the director of the museum, two of its employees and Mercedes Roldán Sánchez, deputy general director of State Museums.
The National Museum of Anthropology group is completed by Yaiza Hernández Velázquez, director of public programs at MACBA and author of studies such as Inter/Multi/Cross/Trans. The Uncertain Territory of Art Theory in the Age of Academic Capitalism; Xirou Xiao, artist, educator, researcher and intercultural mediator born in China and resident in Spain; Hasán G. López Sanz, anthropologist, researcher and curator of exhibitions such as Let’s bring blacks homein 2019 at the University of Valencia; Fernando A. Barbosa Santos Rodrigues, associate professor of the Department of Social Anthropology at the Complutense University of Madrid, and collaborator of the Institute for Feminist Research; Rubén H. Bermúdez, photographer, teacher and cultural manager, co-founder of the ConcienciaAfro collective; and Andrea Pacheco González, recent curator of the Chilean pavilion at the Venice Biennale.
The Museum of America will feature Izaskun Álvarez Cuartero, professor of Colonial History at the University of Salamanca; Halim Badawi, Colombian critic and art curator, founder of the Arkhé Archive dedicated to Latin American and LGTBIQ art, based in Madrid since 2023; Yeison Fernando García López, Afro-Colombian political scientist, cultural manager and anti-racist researcher, member and coordinator of the Afro Consciousness Association; Sandra Gamarra, Peruvian artist, whose work reflects on the mechanisms of the art world and colonial legacies and who represented Spain at the Venice Biennale; Óscar Navajas Corral, professor in the Department of History and Philosophy at the University of Alcalá; and Suset Sánchez Sánchez, a graduate in Art History and a master’s degree holder in Contemporary Art and Visual Culture, researcher of Afro-descendant art and currently working at the Reina Sofía.
The 12 experts represent those margins that have begun to take centre stage in the halls of the world’s main museums in recent years. There is parity in both committees, and their members are specialised in racialised, feminist, colonial and queeramong other aspects. One of the selection criteria was that different origins and fields of study were represented. Most of them have a migrant heritage or are directly migrants who have found in Spain the place to practice and disseminate the work they have been developing for decades from the Academy, that is, sometimes under an imposed shadow.
Sandra Gamarra, perhaps one of the best-known names in the selection, has just returned from the Venice Biennale where she became the first artist not born in Spain to represent the country with a proposal that honoured indigenous cultures eliminated from the colonial narrative. Before, her exhibition Good government had been censored by the Community of Madrid, which decided to eliminate terms such as conflict or racism. Yeison Fernando García and Rubén H. Bermúdez are part of Espacio Afro, which since 2022 has become the meeting point for the Spanish Afro-descendant community. And Hasán G. López Sanz has dedicated part of his career to anthropological research linked to African heritage and is part of the team of curators who have just inaugurated an exhibition at the IVAM on how the image of Nobosudru has gone from being colonial propaganda to an anti-racist icon.
In the polarized diatribe surrounding decolonization, it is to be expected that the election of these committees will ignite new passions, both for and against. No one should expect from the experts, however, a resolution of the case of the Quimbaya treasure, the most precious piece in the American museum. Colombia has begun to demand it. Spain does not see it as the result of plundering or abuse and recalls that it was a gift to the Spanish Crown. Legal and juridical matters, in any case, are not among the competences of the two groups, whose work focuses on how to narrate a contemporary museum that challenges everyone.
In recent years, the world’s leading cultural institutions have taken steps toward equality in their exhibition programs, reviewed their holdings to compile inventories of possible stolen pieces—in some cases, such as in Germany, they have been returned to their original communities—and sought to include racial and identity diversity in their displays. In 2018, French President Emmanuel Macron commissioned a report from two experts as a starting point for considering the widespread restitution of African works in the country’s public collections.
In Spain, the Reina Sofía has reopened the rooms called Device 92: Can history be rewound? which in the last reorganization of the permanent collection carried out by its previous director, Manuel Borja-Villel, were dedicated to the effects of colonization. In 2021, the Prado dedicated its first exhibition to art produced in the American viceroyalties, an unfinished business that it resolved with Return tripa selection of a hundred Ibero-American works preserved in public and private collections in Spain. And lThe joint declaration of ministers that closed Mondiacult 2022 (the UNESCO Conference on Cultural Policies and Sustainable Development), also signed by Spain, promised “legal and public policy frameworks that defend the rights of peoples and communities to their cultural identity and heritage, including expressions of indigenous peoples’ cultures” and “to promote the protection, return and restitution of cultural property, including in consultation with the affected populations and with their free, prior and informed consent.”
The Museum of America itself updated some 200 labels months ago “to eliminate terms such as Indian or mulatto”, replacing them with “indigenous” or the person’s first and last name, and to recognize “invisible groups, such as Afro-descendants or high-ranking women.” The painting The mulattoes of Esmeraldas is now titled Portrait of D. Francisco de Arobe and his sons, chieftains of Esmeraldas, and instead of “Jíbaro Indian” can be spelled “Shuar,” “Achuar,” or “Huambisa.” The center “has to be updated and part of the process involves a colonial review,” its director, Andrés Gutiérrez Usillos, acknowledged months ago to EL PAÍS. After all, the current museographic discourse of the institution was conceived in 1994.
The aim is always the same: to revise the hegemonic canon and, thus, broaden the view. “We have many paintings of white men and women who were very important at the time, flanked by some black young men. Before, we ignored these young Africans. Now we study them. A museum must tell the story of everyone, not just 10 people,” Valika Smeulders, director of the history department at the Rijksmuseum, explained to this newspaper.
The scope of the decolonization movement is such that some consider it the theme that will mark the present, and the near future, of art. It has certainly been the focus of conversations for months between curators, historians, writers, lawyers and politicians; it ranges from the essay The whole picture, from Alice Procter, which Capitán Swing will publish in Spanish in the fall, to the documentary Latin America, song of life and hope. There is a debate about history, between those who emphasize the devastating dimension of the conquest of America and those who emphasize that Spain only had viceroyalties, that there were mixed marriages and a relatively uniform treatment between citizens. There are also legal diatribes, since the eventual restitution of looted pieces, which UNESCO promotes, depends on international treaties and above all on the will of each State, in the absence of binding laws. Finally, other concepts are discussed: if, for example, Spain were to return a work to Ecuador, what guarantees would there be that it would arrive right to the community that is its legitimate owner? Would it be displayed under the same conditions of security, care and visibility? Others see a colonial prism in just raising these questions.
The disputes are likely to continue. In the meantime, the chosen experts will meet periodically to work on their reports. They will then submit their proposals to the museums. So the possible real changes to the exhibitions will not come until 2025. We will have to wait a few months. But the most marginalized groups are used to it: they have been waiting for the whole story.
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