Ana Bilbao

Abstract:

The Museum of European Normality: Provenance Research, Community Museums, and Practices of Display

The Museum of European Normality(2008) is an immersive piece of installation art by artists Maria Thereza Alves and Jimmie Durham. The work is composed of maps showing migration patterns across Europe, images from books, magazines, videos, and other forms of documentation. Though presented as a serious study with facts and data, the installation is in fact a caricature of today’s museums. Upon entering the installation, visitors find an anti-guest book with thousands of names of migrants who died trying to move to Europe or who are in refugee camps. During their visit attendees can volunteer to donate their head to the Maoris in New Zealand or can watch a video of a young indigenous anthropologist presenting her research on ‘the custom of some European males to touch their testicles’ in certain situations. The setting is a ‘typical European village’. In this manner, the work offers visitors a dislocated narrative of a museum experience by inverting the roles of object of display and spectator. This paper argues that the wider significance of The Museum of European Normalityis that itrenders visible uneven power relation simplicitin the very act of display, an act that mostly employsthe grammar of the coloniser. The immersive installation opens up the question of social justice within methods of display, teaching us that efforts shouldn’t be limited to restitution or due diligence in attribution or authenticity, but that colonial violence may be contained in the very way of exhibiting.

Against the backdrop of the framework introduced by this work, this paper provides an analysis of specific ecomuseums and community museums in Latin America. I argue that these spaces have, over the past 50 years, articulated a variety of decolonial methods of display, which respond to the local communities’ right to self-determination instead of to inherited colonial vocabularie.