SOUTHERN MUSEOLOGY: A GLOSSARY OF LEARNING AND UNLEARNING

Editor and Project Manager Sophia Olivia Sanan, Booklet and Map Design Zakiyyah Haffejee, Sarah de Villiers, Naadira Patel. Published in Johannesburg, 2024. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0.

'Southern Museology: A Glossary of Learning and Unlearning' is the collective creative output from our work with six museums through the course of 2023.

Drawing from many conversations, field-notes and insights shared through this year-long process, this glossary aims to surface some of the depth, complexity and flux of museum practice as it manifests in these museums from India, Brazil, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique – and to raise for debate the idea of a ‘Southern museology’.

This glossary is presented as a starting point to disassemble, unlearn and unravel concrete ideas and staid concepts, but also as a starting point for playful engagement with new concepts and practices that might move us towards the kinds of museums that we need in the future. Implicit in this project is a question around the viability of the museum as we have known and inherited it, and an attempt to identify and articulate the practices undertaken by museums that might be shifting this definition. 

A special thank you to Chiedza Zharare (Mutare Museum), Kritika Rathore, Shreya Jaiswal and Kuldeep Kothari (Arna Jharna), Danford Majogo (Majimaji Museum), Ivan and Rui Laranjeira (Museu Mafalala), YSK Prerana and the team (Conflictorium), José Eduardo Ferreira Santos, Vilma Soares Ferreira Santos, Pablo Lemos, Fabricio Cumming and others on the team (Acervo da Laje), heeten bhagat (Museum Futures project team) for engaging with prompts and providing such rich feedback.

A huge thank you to the creative team, Naadira Patel (layout, conceptualisation, design), Sara de Villiers (illustration) and Zakkiyah Haffajee (mapping).

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Details from Southern Museology: A Glossary of Learning and Unlearning

SOUTHERN MUSEOLOGIES MAP

Click the image below then click again to zoom in and pan.

DECOLONIAL

"What happens when museums in six different geographic, religious, ecological and political contexts provide insight into their efforts to operate via this well-established term: ‘museum’? Are there special challenges and opportunities faced by museums in the Global South? Can we talk about a ‘Southern’ contribution to museum thinking and practice, as ‘Southern theory’ has been applied in academia? How can this kind of contribution foster greater connectivity, innovation, empathy and care within a globalised museum discourse, particularly in the historical present that is marked with extreme polarisation and violence?"

Partners from the Conflictorium asked: “Do ethnographic museums need to be abolished for actual decolonising in museums? Can we abandon the decolonial project for a more vernacular and contextualised framework? Is speculative work the only possibility of subverting archives? Where do we encounter colonial residues or tendencies in museums besides language and curation?”Partners from the Conflictorium asked: “Do ethnographic museums need to be abolished for actual decolonising in museums? Can we abandon the decolonial project for a more vernacular and contextualised framework? Is speculative work the only possibility of subverting archives? Where do we encounter colonial residues or tendencies in museums besides language and curation?”

SOCIAL MUSEOLOGY

Director of Museu Mafalala Ivan Laranjeira shared with us the theoretical foundations of this young museum in Maputo: “Social museology in Mozambique is a very recent concept that society didn’t embrace in its totality. Talking about social museology is to talk about self-knowledge, development and transformation of local communities. Through this new trend, communities were able to create new – and their own – paths reinventing the museum. This reinvention was committed to the construction of a new social practice that privileged individual memories, affirmed community’s values and promoted social transformation. IVERCA embraced this theory and built the Mafalala Museum.

In addition, the museum thinks about the right to the city on the part of peri-urban communities and therefore also discusses aspects linked to urban processes in African cities such as gentrification a

CONSERVATION

How does conservation interact with change? What are the forms of living that we wish to protect as well as to change? What level of intervention distinguishes documentation from conservation? For Museu Mafalala, documentation is inseparable from museum work.

Historian at Museu Mafalala Rui Laranjeira explains that: “assuming that documentation is everything that has recorded information, regardless of the format, one can see that the existence of Museums is directly linked to documentation. There is no Museum without documentation. I mean, without registered and exposed information for other times, spaces, and contexts. Besides, in our daily life, as Mafalala Museum, documentation plays a preponderant role in our relationship with the community in which we are inserted. Through murals, photos and other records, the Museum dynamises its relationship with the space, as it produces works and documents that mirror the life of the community”.

The telling of untold narratives in urban settings like Maputo is urgent work, and comes with its own set of complexities. We considered struggles with community buy-in and trust with the telling of histories, especially under the guise of the museum. What is repellent about the form of the museum, what is attractive? Who feels represented in the museum? Is the museum our most productive answer to a need to historicise?

CIRCULAR CURATION

This term was introduced to us by design and history student Pablo Lemos (who is part of the team at Acervo da Laje) to describe an inclusive and horizontal mode of curation, in which artists, community members, critics and curators share overlapping identities. Jose Eduardo Ferreira Santos, co-founder of the museum, elaborates on the collaborative philosophy at the heart of the Acervo da Laje’s work: “As the Acervo da Laje collection is in a peripheral community, the first relationships established are those of neighborhood, support and collaboration.

When we need to do an activity in the community, outside the physical space of the Acervo, the neighborhood collaborates and vice versa; when the community needs to use our spaces, they also give them up. For example, as the collections of the Laje Collection are built collectively, sometimes fishermen bring in shells, children bring in objects found in discards and we receive donations of works from many people”