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 the following panel discussion:
Monday 1 December
13-14: Dr. Madina Tlostanova “Decolonize the museum? Going beyond the slogan”
We 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.
14-15: Panel discussion “Methodological Challenges of Care and Co-Creation” (Dr. EvaMarie Lindahl, Dr. Caroline Owman, Dr. Staffan Lundén, Jans Heinerud)
Register until November 15 : https://forms.cloud.microsoft/e/z5AP9rRaY5
Spearkers:
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.
Dr. EvaMarie Lindahl is a visual artist, researcher and teacher. She obtained her PhD thesis in artistic research and critical animal studies at Edge Hill University in 2022. The project is called RESISTANCE WITHIN THE MUSEUM FAUNA, Challenging Anthropocentrism through Counter Art Histories and Non-Human Narratives. The Archive of Lost Tails was first realised as a large scale installation at Skissernas Museum for the exhibition The Museum Fauna – Lost Tails and Unheard Stories of Resistance together with artworks from the collection of Lund University depicting docked horses.
Dr. Caroline Owman is a postdoc at the Department of Culture and Society (IKOS), in the Division of Culture, Society, Design and Media (KSFM) at Linköping University. She obtained her PhD from Umeå University in 2021 with the More-Than-Human Museum : The conservator’s practice as a line of flight in the museum of modernity. Her latest publication is Museum Ecologies: Museum things as guides for how to deal with ecological challenges in the Anthropocene.
Dr. Staffan Lundén is a researcher at the School of Global studies at University of Gothenburg. He is focusing particularly on the contemporary illicit trade in looted archaeological objects and on the right to own and represent contested objects in museum collections. He is currently working on the project People, places and plunder. Diasporas and the restitution of looted heritage with Camilla Orjuela (project leader) and Fisseha Tefara.
Jans Heinerud is the Head of the Cultural Environment Department and senior curator/archaeologist at Västerbottens museum.