I will participate on a panel at Västerbottens Museum during the research workshop Methodological Challenges of Care and Co-Creation held by UmArts and the Museology department at Umeå university. The panel will respond to the keynote Decolonize the museum? Going beyond the slogan by Dr. Madina Tlostanova as well as present our own practices. The panel is moderated by Olga Zabalueva and other participants are Dr. Caroline Owman, Dr. Staffan Lundén and Senior Curator Jans Heinerud.
From the website of UmArts:
The Museology department at Umeå university, in collaboration with UmArts and Västerbottens museum, invites you to public program of Methodological Challenges of Care and Co-Creation: an Open Lecture and panel discussion on Monday 1 December, 13.00 – 15.00.
Dr Madina Tlostanova’s lecture “Decolonize the museum? Going beyond the slogan” will focus on the museum as a modern/colonial institution for the production and dissemination of knowledge, memory and identities, evident at all levels from collections to curating, from hierarchical institutional principles to communicating with the audience, from representation models to dependency on the state or the private capital. Then we will dwell on the pro et contra of the existing approaches to decolonization of museums not only in a more instrumental sense of rethinking or repatriating different collections, actualization of the previously tabooed topics, active involvement of earlier underrepresented groups, but also in the sense of changing the very principles of relationships to more transversal and horizontal, while nurturing relationality and pluriversality towards peers, cocreators, collections, and society at large, and therefore, problematizing the modern/colonial epistemic and ontological principles of objectification and alienation. We will also zoom in several examples of conscious attempts to alter relational principles between exhibits, local communities, museum staff, curators, artists, and the architectural and natural environments.
Followed by a panel discussion “Methodological Challenges of Care and Co-Creation” (Dr. EvaMarie Lindahl, Dr. Caroline Owman, Dr. Staffan Lundén, Jans Heinerud).
Keynote speaker
Dr. Madina Tlostanova is a feminist thinker and fiction writer, professor of gender studies at Linköping University, Sweden. Her interests include epistemic and aesthetic aspects of decoloniality; the postsocialist human condition, fiction and art; critical future studies. Her most recent collection of essays and speculative fiction is Narratives of Unsettlement. Being Out-of-joint as a Generative Human Condition (Routledge, 2023). Currently she is working on a monograph on the stateless future.