Urtasun's roadmap for "decolonization": no proposal in the program and the Africa Museum in Brussels as an example

Noa de la Torre Valencia

Valencia

Updated Tuesday, January 23, 2024-17:54

• Culture National museums still ignore how to decolonize their discourses and collections

• Urtasun Announces a review of national museums to "overcome the colonial framework"

The

Africa Museum in Brussels

warns its public of the following: "Colonialism is a form of government based on military occupation, authoritarian and racist administration and exploitation. Therefore, the museum explicitly distances itself from it. It assumes the responsibility for the impact that its previous propaganda in favor of colonialism has had on today's multicultural society, and for the message of Western moral and intellectual superiority that it has conveyed in the past.

To understand such an act of contrition on the part of a museum, we must go back to the original sin, which is none other than

Leopold II of Belgium

.

The king who came to have the so-called Congo Free State under his ownership was the founder of the museum.

A museum that, in the words of the Minister of Culture, was "racist, colonialist, horrible."

According to Ernest Urtasun, however, the review he has made of his past should serve as an example to Spain.

"We have inherited that colonial culture that, in some way, we have to see and manage."

The minister thus reopened the debate on the decolonization of museums on December 30 in an interview on Cadena Ser. A topic that his predecessor in office, Miquel Iceta, had already closed when it came to the fore, and which Urtasun is now recovering with the aim of

"overcoming the colonial framework"

.

Because?

Vox has not been slow to cling to this argument to put itself at the forefront of the so-called cultural battle - it has done so through the mouth of its Valencian vice president, Vicente Barrera -, accusing Sumar of

"buying the black legend of the history" of Spain

.

But the truth is that Urtasun's announcement in the Culture Commission of Congress is not something anecdotal, although Sumar's electoral program did not even clearly point to that revisionist line.

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The platform of Yolanda Díaz to which Urtasun belongs was presented in the last general elections of 23-J with a

cultural program that expressly says nothing about the need to "decolonize" state museums

.

Sumar advocates for an "international cultural policy" on the basis that we must "understand our history as a plural, complex history, as a crossroads of peoples."

But beyond the reading between the lines that can be made of this declaration, the key to Sumar's program is in the reference to the

International Council of Museums

(ICOM), an international organization related to UNESCO and with consultative body status before the Council. Economic and Social of the United Nations.

What Sumar proposes is that the "mission" of museums adapt to the "definition updated by ICOM."

And what is that definition?

Which the organization ended up adopting in 2022, precisely as a result of the open debate on the need to embark on the path of museum decolonization.

In this sense, the new definition of a museum incorporates concepts such as diversity, ethics or inclusivity, all of them associated with the decolonizing decalogue.

For ICOM, museums must be "open to the public, accessible and inclusive", in addition to promoting "diversity and sustainability" with the "participation of communities" and from "ethical" communication.

ICOM's strategic plan 2022-2028 goes further by openly proposing "decolonization" as one of the axes of action.

According to this document, "

ICOM recognizes the role that museums have played in the colonization process

and actively defends international normative instruments, such as the Museum Recommendation of 2015, the Declaration on Cultural Diversity of 2001 and the Declaration of the United Nations on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples".

What ICOM, which has the Ministry of Culture among its collaborators, puts on the table is the need for museums to find "solutions to the legacy of colonialism."

This is what the African Museum in Brussels has done and the roadmap that the Ministry of Urtasun now intends to follow, although it remains to be seen how and where it will take shape.