COLONIALITY AND EDUCATION IN ETHNOGRAPHICS MUSEUMS
‘All these things…’, a seven year old asks the educator in an ethnographic collection display, ‘did you make them yourself?’ Besides saying ‘no’, what can the educator reply? Each possible answer, what it highlights, what it omits, implies taking a position regarding key topics of postcolonial museum critique: histories of objects brought to Europe in a colonial context, issues of ownership, of representation and power of definition in narrations of culture and difference. How do educators deal with the coloniality inscribed in their work and the institution? Based on an interview study with educators in ethnographic museums in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, and action research in the project TRACES – Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritage with the Arts, I will discuss current discourses and contradictions of museum education engaging with its colonial heritage, by asking: could ethnographic museums be sites for unlearning colonial frameworks?
Gallery educator and deputy head of the Institute for Art Education at Zurich University of the Arts. She studied Art and Communicative Practices at the University of Applied Arts Vienna and Spanish and Latin American Studies at Vienna University. As an educator, she worked at documenta 12 (2007), Kunsthalle Vienna and Shedhalle Zürich. In the project TRACES – Transmitting Contentious Cultural Heritages with the Arts (http://www.traces.polimi.it/) she is conducting research on conflict in learning and community engagement around difficult heritage. She pursues a PhD project on decolonising perspectives in education in ethnographic museums, and is active in the international network Another Roadmap for Arts Education (http://colivre.net/another-roadmap/). She teaches in the MA in art education, specialisation in curatorial studies at ZHdK.