In January 2020, Flower Manase + Molemo Moiloa + Khwezi Gule + Bernard Akoi-Jackson + Nashilongweshipwe Mushaandja + Nontobeko Ntombela came together for a few days upon the invitation of the Goethe Institut, to work on a proposal for a project centered on African museums. The document that emerged from those few days shares the imaginative, structural, and critical underpinnings of the project ...

If there is anything (identity; idea; theory) that is “authentic”, it must necessarily be “constructed”. This idea is premised on karî'kạchä seid’ou’s thoughts on art in the contemporary dispensation, that should emerge from “the void” (1). There is a lot that has been inherited by way of existing definitions and conventions that has the tendency to result in complacency in practitioners, whose constituencies and institutions tend to be demarcated, categorized and fixed. It has resulted in institutions that are fast losing relevance. To this end, there is the urgent need to re-think, re-assess and perhaps, re-constitute the entire concept of the museum(s) and what they could become. Museums are in crisis. There are often complaints over funding the dearth of professionals, or otherwise they are irrelevance because their skills are not put to use within the museum. This is ever more pronounced in an African context, where state commitment to cultural institutions is low. For anything to look like an ideal museum, to seek out "new formats /rethinking the museum", we will have to invent it.

Rather than assume an invention of possible final form of the ideal museum or new formats, we propose the beginnings of a process. This process puts museums as the centre and as the primary sight of the answers to their own challenges. It seeks to create a framework of challenge, knowledge production and community that might serve as a catalyst for museums to rethink themselves.

Working from the basis of museums as the primary target group, more specifically working with museums as spaces of experimentation, this project sets out to develop a modular project that structures museums as labs, supported by a collective of vested individuals as a study group toward the rethinking of the museum. The study group works with the museum at a country level to develop a series of financially supported programmes for rethinking the museum that will be undertaken over the period of 1,5 year. Additionally this study group will exchange with study groups happening concurrently across the rest of the continent and share processes, learnings and challenges in a series of in-person meetings over that period.

1. karî'kạchä seid’ou is an artist, mathematician, philosopher, nurturer of emergent artistic careers/practices and leader of the emancipatory drive in artistic pedagogy in the Department of Painting and Sculpture, at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi. His introduction of Critical and Contextual Studies into the erstwhile inherited colonial art curriculum of the KNUST Art College since 2003, as well as his insistence on the development of a rigorous studio and exhibition culture, through the establishment of blaxTARLINES KUMASI, has resulted in the gradual and sustained rise of independent artistic practice(s) within the Ghanaian context.