In his work War Night at the Prado Museumset in bombed-out Madrid, Rafael Alberti fulfilled the childhood dream of every museum visitor: to make the pieces stored in the freezer of History come alive and become autonomous from our own gaze. If it is a recurring dream, it is because the modern museum was designed for exactly the opposite: to extract works from their contexts, presenting them outside the complex cultural, commercial, political and military relationships that explain their very presence in these warehouses of culture, where they become eternal. Because of this capacity to erase traces, the modern museum operated as a legitimation machine at the service of Western imperialism. It knew how to justify its historical reason, to illustrate the goodness of its dominion over bodies, peoples, resources and ecosystems, the government of industrial cities over pre-modern peripheries, of science over superstition, of cultured beauty over popular taste, of the nation over the indigenous.
But no freezer can withstand a prolonged blackout. And today, inside our museums, we can hear the deep vibrations of the era, the many nightmares of a very “long night of 500 years.” Feminist, migrant, and eco-social demands beat even in the echo chamber of the museum, and works and pieces seem to perform a strange dance, which is at the same time very old and unprecedented.
The aseptic fiction of the museum as a place of neutral, cumulative, universal knowledge is today a torn veil. It concealed the history of wealth, the paths that lead from the anonymous hands of creators to the palaces of ancient lords. The history of the museum is that of the State and of capital. Its limits are those of coloniality, defined by Aníbal Quijano as a system of geopolitical and epistemological tools that organizes and justifies the domination of populations and resources. These are limits that are often invisible to those who do not suffer from them, but evident from the other side of the border. This is slowly swallowing us up and soon we will not be able to close our eyes for even a second.
We must understand the legacies of conversion, exclusion, racism, slavery, trafficking, religious intolerance, labour exploitation, sexual violence, dispossession and extractivism, also in the Spanish Empire and in the States that inherited it.
Today in our museums we can no longer ignore the gold of the Indies, the Guanche mummies, the Matiabo idol, the ñáñigo drums, the remains of the Black man from Banyolesthe monumental monstrance of the Cathedral of Toledo, the statues of the Portico da Gloria of the Pazo de Meirás and we already know that none of these are neutral “objects of art”, but the fruits of looting and massacres, exterminations and deceptions. Thus, decolonizing is, first of all, returning things to their contexts, revealing the plots that the museum —a machine specialized in erasing the tracks that connect power and knowledge— captures and manages when it comes to making us imagine our pasts.
Francoism re-enforced two great myths—of a colonial nature—about the Spanish past: that of the necessary Reconquista—territorial and religious—and that of the Empire unjustly lost, updating both in the story of the Civil War as a Crusade: thus, 1939 was invoked as a new 1492, a prologue to a new Golden Age, where Madrid was Granada and the exiles, the Jews. In its monumental strategies, the regime squeezed these stories until the nation became a colony of itself. This is the case of neo-Herrerian Toledo, of the Valley of the Fallen as a modern Escorial or of the design of Columbus’ towers as new columns of Hercules.
The democratic State did not know how to break with this legacy: in Covadonga the generational continuity of the alliance of the monarchy with the nation is celebrated, in Compostela, protection is requested from the Patron Saint of Spain (the question about the colour of the horse was not so innocent). white (Santiago, Spain). With the goat and the legionary troops, every October 12th the memories of the glorious Tercios and the forgotten massacres of the Rif and the Asturian mining basins parade. After all, no matter how much we dress them up as tolerance, encounter or scientific discoveries, the racist and colonial bases of the great Spanish myths of the past still enjoy wide acceptance. How then could museums not express the biases deeply inscribed in a society often nostalgic for deeds and destinies?
The question is no longer whether museums should be decolonised, but how to do it. I believe that this can be done with studies, imagination and alliances. We must understand the legacies of conversion, exclusion, racism, slavery, trafficking, religious intolerance, labour exploitation, sexual violence, dispossession and extractivism, also in the Spanish Empire and in the States that inherited it. This work requires other points of view and sensibilities, other bodies and voices that force a change in the paradigm, since it is not enough to soften the existing one. An American-style solution, which establishes an inventory of self-assigned identity positions, from which to manage in a differential key an uninterrupted legacy of ownerless suffering, deactivates the shared nature of the problem. So does a postcolonialism that only attends to gender and bodies, without speaking of capital, work, knowledge and surplus value.
The good news—which no one notices—is that we have already made some progress. There is a collective work of almost two decades that has been changing sensibilities. And, in this, the Museo Reina Sofía, at least since the exhibition Potosi Beginninghas had importance. As an example, in the last presentation of the collection, the experience of the Republican exiles dialogued with a runaway genealogy of former slaves, anti-fascist militiamen, indigenous nations and revolutionary spiritualities. It is a sensitivity of the time, but also an imaginary, which crosses historical research with the living, embodied claim of many migrant, mestizo, erased and persecuted bodies. There are many artists, researchers, curators, managers, conservators and cultural workers – women and men, in precarious positions or with permanent jobs, national and stateless, in migrant languages or with strange accents – who have spent years, from our museums, discussing their colonial character, convinced that they can be spaces of democratic imagination, of formation, of hope and, perhaps, even of collective emancipation.
German Labrador Mendez He is a professor at Princeton University and has been Director of Public Activities at the Museo Reina Sofía. He was the curator of the exhibition The democratic skylight. Policies of life and death in the Spanish State (1868-1976).
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