The anti-racist museum
As part of the project “anti-racist narratives”, a team of five experts developed workshops for the staff of the Museum of Communication. To round off the series, we jointly formulated guiding principles for anti-racist work processes. The next step is to share these principles and the learnings from the project with other museum practitioners and interested parties by way of an online zine which you can view and download here (in German only).
Why is the Museum of Communication a white space? Using their knowledge of anti-racism, decolonisation and anti-discriminatory museum work, Angelina Dungga, Djamila Peter, Mark Damon Harvey, Nimal Bourloud and Olga Madjinodji carefully examined the permanent exhibition. Based on their findings, they created four half-day workshops for 12 staff members from different departments within the museum.
Racism is a complex and emotional theme. More than a “theme”, it is in fact a social structure that is characterised by the longstanding history of colonialism. Even the collaboration within a project such as ours is not free from these power structures. What is obvious is that a project such as this is a start; anti-racism and decolonisation, however, are long-lasting processes of (un)learning and requires institutional transformation.
For this reason, we do not view the project as an example of best practice, but as an experience from which we can develop more ideas to use both for our work at the Museum of Communication and for anti-racist initiatives at other institutions. That is why we are sharing our experiences and thoughts in the zine. By doing so, we hope to provide stimulus and inspiration.
The project and publication received financial support from the Foundation for Art, Culture and History (SKKG), the Service for Combating Racism (SCRA) and the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia.
