Watch recording here:

https://youtu.be/kPoo_XOvePo

Speakers:

Charlotte Hammond (Cardiff University - UK)

Cristiano Gianolla (University of Coimbra - Portugal)

Márcia Chuva (Unirio- Brazil)

Chair: Renata de Sá Gonçalves (Universidade Federal Fluminense - Brazil / Visiting researcher Universität Tübingen)

Description:

The panel frames colonialisms, decolonialities and enslavement with a focus on the current relations between arts, museums and cultural heritage from initiatives that bring the global North and the global South into dialogue. The experts gathered here show how the debate is presented in concrete situations such as museum exhibitions and anti-slavery memorials in UK, Portugal and Brazil.

Hammond will discuss critically National Museum Wales’s recent commission for artists, creatives, and activists to reframe and address the portrait of Welsh colonial governor of Trinidad, Thomas Picton, and the work of Dominican artist Firelei Baez. She argues that a fast-fix approach that aims to sideline this traumatic past represents a missed opportunity for the museum to become a site of healing and could obscure understandings of contemporary racism and racial injustice concerning Picton’s legacy. She will also consider the curation of transformative historical futures via the work of Dominican American artist Firelei Báez that has been shortlisted for the UK’s biggest art prize, Artes Mundi, and is currently on display in the National Museum in Cardiff.

Gianolla explores how the public debate on colonial heritage has been intensified and fosters the decolonisation of narratives about slavery in Portugal. Lisbon is the oldest and most enduring capital of European colonialism; its heritage has accumulated five centuries of narratives about colonial domination. The formal end of Portuguese colonialism did not challenge the colonial frontier inscribed in Portuguese heritage. On the "Memorial to the enslaved people" in Lisbon, funded as a democratic exercise in process, Gianolla questions how symbolic and political space of heritage sites can be recognized as a border between cultures, and how different epistemic perspectives frame political debates with a varying level of democracy. His presentation explores how heritage becomes an obstacle or a facilitator for "intercultural translations".

Chuva starts from the understanding that national history museums are privileged spaces of public memories and arenas of exercise of power and political control, to analyze the National Historical Museum of Rio de Janeiro, whose origins bear the mark of domination and coloniality. Choices are made on this kind of museums about what to present and represent, or about who speaks and who is silenced, producing a unique history. Firstly, she presents the Museum's history focusing aspects of the long-term exhibition. Then, she analyzes the set of decolonial interventions made at ​the same circuit, reflecting on the scope and limits of this event for which the NHM opened up and which puts it face to face with its own history.

 

About:

Renata de Sá Gonçalves holds a position as Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the Fluminense Federal University UFF - Niterói. Rio de Janeiro - Brazil. She is visiting researcher at Universität Tübingen (2020/2021) and part of "Discomforting territories: images, narratives and objects of the Global South" research team (PROBRAL Capes/DAAD). Her research activities have resulted in publications on: cultural heritage, carnival, arts and social identities. She coordinates the research group NARUA - Urban anthropology, arts and cultural heritage. - UFF.

Charlotte Hammond is a Lecturer in French Studies at Cardiff University, UK. Her current research examines how women garment and textile workers in Haiti and the Dominican Republic navigate and resist extractive global economic structures and exploitative labour conditions through arts-based practices and community organisation. She is the author of Entangled Otherness: Cross-Gender Fabrications in the Francophone Caribbean, published with Liverpool University Press in 2018.

Cristiano Gianolla is a researcher at the Centre for Social Studies (CES) of the University of Coimbra (UC), Portugal. Cristiano is the Principal Investigator of the UNPOP project (FCT, 2021-2024) and he is a team member of the ECHOES (H2020, 2018-2021) and ALICE (ERC, 2011-2016) European projects. He is a co-founding and co-coordinating member of the "Inter-Thematic group on Migrations" and co-coordinates the research group "Epistemologies of the South" at CES. Cristiano co-coordinates the PhD courses "Democratic Theories and Institutions", "State, Democracy and Legal Pluralism" and the MA course "Critical Intercultural Dialogue" at the Faculty of Economics of the UC. He has authored books, chapters and articles elaborating on democratic theory, populism, postcolonialism, intercultural dialogue, heritage processes, movement-parties, citizenship, human rights, migrations, and cosmopolitanism. His current research interests focus on emotions and narratives in democratic processes.

Márcia Chuva is a Historian, and holds a position as Associate Professor at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro - UNIRIO, and researcher at CNPq, Brazil. Márcia is also Professor in the Professional Master in Cultural Heritage at the Institute of National Historical and Artistic Heritage - IPHAN. A specialist in heritage studies, she is the author of books and articles in specialized magazines on memory, heritage and museums policies, currently focusing on post-colonial debates. Among her publications, the book Os Arquitetos da Memória stands out, already in its second edition (2017). She is a doctoral advisor on related topics and, since 2018, coordinates the Brazilian team of the ECHOES project (Horizon 2020), integrated with the Center for Social Studies of the University of Coimbra (CES-UC).