Imagining the Post-Museum with Professor Françoise Vergès

The second phase of Professor Françoise Vergès’s Banister Fletcher Fellowship at the University of London is underway with a two-day workshop scheduled in London on 28-29 April, hosted by the Whitechapel Gallery, and a further two-day event in Paris on 27-29 May, hosted by the Cité internationale des arts. 

The programme for these workshops emerged from a first day of discussions in early February that saw a core group of participants gather with Professor Vergès to scope the possibilities for exploring ‘the post-museum.’  

These discussions took their lead from the fact that the model of the Western museum has been, and still is, imitated all over the world. Whether its mission is to show art, history or sciences, the museum is conceived as a series of connected rooms in which paintings, objects, statues, stones, plants, human and non-human species are arranged according to scientific norms (art history, history of sciences, linear temporality, regions of the world, etc.). Its architecture has proven its efficiency: anyone entering the museum space expects to find, without any effort, a series of functioning elements. And in this respect the museum, like the classroom, the parliament, the hospital, has become completely naturalized as a spatial arrangement defined for particular bodies – healthy, male bourgeois bodies.  

Meanwhile, museums are increasingly concerned to address the origins of their collections and the ways they are being displayed. They are dealing with questions of the possible return of looted art or their complicities with corporations and the arms industry, as well as how their policies of diversity and inclusivity are answering to these demands for social, racial and gender justice and for restitution.  

In light of these two observations, the ‘post-museum’ project is taking a different approach. It seeks to imagine the spatial arrangement of a post-museum and asks what the founding principles of an antiracist, decolonial, feminist, anti-capitalist museum could be. It keeps the term ‘museum’ as a tool, not a mandate or a finality. It judges that it is time to imagine the basic elements of a ‘post-museum’ conceived in knowledge of impending climate disaster, of the devastating consequences of extractive economy, of the ways in which financial and colonial/racial capitalism produce vulnerability to premature death.  

The need to conceive a prototype of the post-museum soon emerged in the scoping discussions. Though it is not difficult to describe and assess the economy, objectives, spatial arrangement and philosophy of the Western museum, the tendency to revert to concepts when trying to imagine the post-museum becomes quickly overwhelming. How, then, to free the museum from the stranglehold of capitalist architecture? How to acknowledge why it works, why the architecture of the museum exercises so much power, why efforts to ‘save’ the museum from its current predicaments benefit from apparent self-evidence, why it is so difficult to imagine the museum otherwise, and how then get that imagination working? 

To address these questions the London workshop, in collaboration with the Whitechapel Gallery, will work very practically on the space of the post-museum and with the bodies (elderly, children, adults, teenagers, different genres, non-valid) circulating in and with it. It will displace the centrality traditionally accorded the collections and start with concrete questions about access, about permanence, about adaptability – questions that go to the heart of the Whitechapel’s own history. It will call on the insight and experience of emerging design and architectural practitioners to help translate ideas into volumes and space. It will aim to confront the limitations and possibilities that an immersive experiment can produce and then bring those experiences and discoveries to a general assembly to draw out the organizational potential of the ‘post-museum’ as both a proposition to think with and a horizon of desire in the face of the current counter-revolution and the melancholic paralysis that it is generating. 

Participation in the workshops is possible by registration. The link to register will be circulated on Wednesday 26 March. Participants will be requested to commit to the full duration of the workshop (morning-afternoon-morning). Further details will be published shortly.

Participation in the general assembly on Tuesday 29 April will be open. Details will also be published shortly. 

Questions

Please contact Jess Saxby on jess.saxby@ulip.lon.ac.uk if you have any questions in advance. Or Anna-Louise Milne on anna-louise.milne@ulip.lon.ac.uk for more information on the Banister Fletcher Fellowship. 

About the Banister Fletcher Global Fellowship

The Banister Fletcher Fellowship is a project supported by the University of London and the Banister Fletcher Trust Fund to build experientially embedded research that reflects and informs the ways urban environments are responding to deepening inequalities and environmental crisis, as well as the effects of rising nationalism. It extends attention beyond the built environment and the traditional parameters of architectural history to consider human and material infrastructures in both their adaptability and their persistence. In so doing, it aims to shape new understandings of the variable triangulations of public works, private investment, and civil-society action by inviting established scholars to build a programme of experimental work with colleagues, young scholars, practitioners, artists, and activists. Previous fellows include artist-writier Olivier Marbeouf, geographer and global scholar Professor AbdouMaliq Simone, urban theorist Dr John Bingham-Hall, and architectural historian Dr Min Kyung Lee.