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 De_colonial? Archives, memory and power
Suelen Calonga, Obará

Today I address in particular Black African people - continental

or diasporic - who are workers and service providers in museal
institutions in Europe. In particular, people who do work that
supports or disseminates “decolonial” initiatives and discourses in
these endeavors. I think this indication of direction is important,
because we are not always truly aware of the roles we play
within institutional “diversity” narratives, especially since these
narratives are always constructed to make it seem like museums
are institutions genuinely committed to education, when in fact
they are commercial and rhetorical enterprises. Not exclusively
museums, but especially museums, and I will explain myself later.
When I refer to museums I mean all “archives of knowledge” -
all institutions dealing with the safeguarding, maintenance, and
diffusion of historical, artistic, or cultural heritage, inheritance, or
legacy (whether museums of any kind, archives, galleries, thematic
libraries, universities, repositories, cultural centers, etc.). I take
license to name and reduce all of these institutions - including
museums - to the name Archive. I have done so in many of my more
recent texts. I understand that the reason for the existence of these
enterprises and their modes of operation all converge on the same
original motivation: the articulation of the exercise of power. This
is done through the control of narratives about a given fact, theme,
biography or context, from a privileged place of enunciation. Thus,
generating an accumulation of heritage, inheritance or legacy,
and material, political or intellectual capital that accredit these
sites to position themselves as “public places of memory”. This
convergence of factors enables the construction or destruction of
a collective memory, as well as the construction or destruction
of a collective forgetting. The relationship between these “places
of memory” and their referent territories, the roles of the agents

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 working in the service of these institutions, and the procedures
of engagement with the past and “history” (remembering) are,
therefore, power-based relationships.

Throughout the 20th century, especially since the wars in African

countries for independence from Europeans, and in the struggles
of Latin American countries for sovereignty in the face of North
American domination, many philosophers, historians, social
scientists, artists, filmmakers, and authors from different fields
have proposed broader transnational discussions about the damage
that European epistemic practices cause to our subjectivities1.

The first step to restore our sovereignty and self-determination is

to get out of the condition of colonized peoples; it is to recognize
that colonization has long ceased to be territorial and is since then
installed in our collective mind; it is to recognize that we have
entered a war that we do not want and that, once inside it, we
have not yet made all the necessary moves to emerge victorious.
Sometimes because we lack the strength to resist, sometimes
because we lack the clear perception that we are being taken
away and must react. We need to understand as soon as possible
that “history is a weapon”, and that we have been systematically
and intentionally ’de-educated’ (Woodson, 1933) of everything
that would guarantee our intellectual and spiritual freedom and
emancipation. Our history is much older and much more glorious.
If white-European civilizational pattern falls today, it will not

1 Reflections on the notion of representation and the relations between different

systems of representation (Hall, 1992), the role of narratives in the constitution of
individuals and social groups (Santos & Meneses, 2010), the effects of the adoption
of a single globalizing paradigm (Silva, 2007), the politics of silencing (Kilomba,
2010), epistemicide (Carneiro, 2005), the hierarchization imposed by white-
European cultural forms in social theories and ethnic-racial relations (Munanga,
2009), the forms of territorial colonization and, above all, psychological colonization
as structuring modernity (Fanon, 1961), just to name a few exponents, are themes
addressed around the supremacy of white-European institutions, especially since
the seventeenth century.

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 have lasted half as long as any of those that existed before. The
European spirit has so imposed itself upon our minds that we have
come to believe that we are no longer capable of having ownership
over our own inventions, of maintaining our own practices, or of
best keeping the objects that we ourselves have created, for our
own use. We have been robbed, and we must stop being both
accomplices and victims of the thieves of our treasures.

That said, I will continue with my explanation starting from the idea
that power is the control over something or someone, determining
beforehand to whom I refer when I talk about the dominator and
the dominated. Simply and directly on a geopolitical scale, here I
refer to the dominator, or the holder of power as the European, or
rather, as pointed out by John R. Clarke (as cited in Ani, 1994), “the
evil spirit of Europe”. The dominated, or over whom this power
has been exercised, are the other human societies, subjugated
materially, intellectually and spiritually by the evil spirit of Europe
since Roman Imperialism and its subsequent sophistications.

Since the European is the last trunk of the human family to join
this arena we call humanity, it is necessary that we constantly
remind them that more than half of human history had already
passed when most people from Africa and Asia realized that there
was a European in the world. As with many rebellious teenagers,
unfortunately it is also part of the bad European spirit to think
that what is younger is better than what is older, and what is
more modern (in the technological sense) is better than what is
ancient. This will be reflected from micro scales of relationships to
geopolitics in general.

Arrogance, greed, and exacerbated competitiveness caused

Europeans to destroy more cultures and civilizations than they
built, and during the 15th and 16th centuries they not only
succeeded in colonizing the entire world, but they also colonized

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 “information about the world, developing a monopoly of control
over concepts and images” (Ani, 1994, p. xvi). “They studied
people without understanding them and interpreted them without
knowing them, making the conquest of the minds of African and
Asian people - on their original continents or in diaspora–their
greatest achievement” (p. xvii).

Also according to Ani (p. xxvi), “white nationalism” or “European

nationalism,” understood here as the ideological commitment to
the perpetuation, advancement, and defence of a white culture,
politics, race, and way of life, not determined by the boundary of
a “nation-state”, is the set of forms of white–European thought
and behavior that promote European hegemony. They identify and
hierarchize racial and cultural characteristics in a linear spectrum
that positions white-Europeans with superiority and Africans with
inferiority. This way of operating in the world leads to cultural
imperialism, the systematic imposition of an alien culture that
fractures the ancestral legacy of a population, destroying self-
determination, the political will of a collective of dominated
people, causing cultural insecurity. One of the most efficient
ways that Europeans have developed for this control is what Ani
calls scientism: an ideological use of science as “an activity that
sanctions thought and behavior, that is, [Eurocentric] science
becomes sacred, the highest standard of morality” (p. xxvi). What I
mean by this is that Archives, invented and disseminated as places
of “production” of knowledge, be they museums or universities or
even the mass media, for example, are devices for exercising power
through the control of narratives2 - through the manipulation of art

2 There are many ways in which narrative control can be exercised, from the
most violent to the most subtle, from the most concretely coercive to the most
psychologically subjective. Among the privileged places of enunciation and
attribution of narratives, notably Academia, the Media, and Art, I will choose here
to deal specifically with narratives supported by objects of art and culture, because
I understand that these objects emanate a precipitate of cultural essence (Bazin as
cited in Velthem, 2012) that will give meaning to the articulation of ideas that I
present in this text.

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 and cultural objects/information to transform them into material
heritage and white-European political capital.

Art and culture objects, whether material or immaterial, participate

decisively for the production and social reproduction and represent
important mediators for the relationships that are established
between individuals and groups, within the collectivity (...)
whose emphasis falls mainly on social and symbolic relationships
(Velthem, 2012). That is: because these objects are means for
relations, and not the end of them, it is not possible to deposit,
measure, access or transfer the values inscribed (in these objects)
without emptying them completely from what makes them valuable.
And here lies an important point to understand where I start from
and the path I will take later on: what are these meanings and
how do these emptyings occur from the accumulation, collecting,
archiving or disguising the narratives over these objects. In short:
cultural appropriation, which, contrary to what the most recent
white-European deliriums propagate–mainly on the Internet –,
has less to do with the limitation of individual liberties of white
people, who do not want to have their choices questioned in terms
of clothing, adornments, and hairstyles, and more to do with
installed processes of colonial violence. These make it possible,
for example, that central artifacts in daily, liturgical, and secular
practices of cultural groups that were stolen in the past remain
today in institutionally legal possession of their thieves–and on
exhibition.

The spoliation, dispossession, and deprivation of access that the

true owners of objects (whether material or immaterial) suffer in
the process of cultural (dis)appropriation is directly proportional
to the symbolic and financial profit that usurpers acquire by
obtaining them. The accumulation, collecting, or archiving of these
objects is today called heritage, inheritance, or legacy, depending
on the type, and the figure (person or institution) who controls it

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 is always endowed with a lot of power. Because we live immersed
in a system that attributes and prioritizes the economic/financial
value to everything, we tend to mistake power with money, but
when we observe the issues that run deep inside relationships, we
realize that money only flows in the direction of power, but they
are not the same thing. Power attracts money. Power is speculative
and ideological. The one who is powerful is so because they have
control over relationships (political, financial, coercive, etc.); is
so because they can convince others that they are powerful (the
control of the narrative of the self) and that “the other” is not as
powerful as they, so they can/should be dominated (the control of
the narrative about the other). Archives are therefore very powerful
epistemological weapons, and workers in museum institutions are
often only partially aware of the roles they play within these power
structures.

Although the concepts of archive, memory, legacy and history

discussed in this text are of great importance for understanding
the general dimension of the subject, I cannot help but highlight
the practical and concrete dimension of the roles played by the
European national Archives in global politics, especially between
the 18th century (when most of them were established) and the
20th century (when they began to be questioned as an instrument
of state policies). This is where the real exercise of power of these
institutions lies, as they work, even today, in support of their
governments in the interdiction of the sovereignty of other peoples
and territories, and in the selective erasure of the global magnitude
of historical facts.

The institutional collections of Europe are direct legacies of looting,

appropriation, and theft of intellectual, material, and symbolic
property of peoples who were colonized by European nations.
These collections, which today make up the much visited and
lucrative European archives and museums, especially ethnological

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 museums, are derived from the private collections of missionaries,
scientists, military personnel, and artists commissioned by their
countries on ethnographic colonial journeys. The white-European
“narcissistic pact” (Bento, 2002) has allowed that, even despite the
political differences between nations at different moments in history
(during the Nazi regime, for example), there were agreements to
transfer collections from one nation to another within Europe
without, however, considering the possibility of returning them to
their original and rightful owners. The creation of museums (the
French model3, which is how we know them today all over the
world) as institutions with the purpose of educating the modern
population, having the political function of narrative control and
discourse of supremacy since its foundation, gained an even more
complex dimension with the sophistication of the capitalist system,
with the possibility of multiplying wealth working in its own
favor: treasures previously untouchable and hidden, with access
restricted to very few people, were then elevated to the condition
of tourist attraction that would bring people from all over the world
and generate even more commercial relevance. So, it would be a
two-way gain: from a single investment (the exploratory trips of
ethnographers to other lands), the set of collected objects, whether
bought, acquired in exploratory situations, or simply stolen,

3 Marlene Suano (1986) explains how the European bourgeoisie organized

knowledge and know-how in order to consolidate their newly acquired power:
education would be the great weapon of domination in modern countries, and
museums were very well suited to the needs of the bourgeoisie for this purpose. In
France, for example, the National Revolutionary Convention approved the creation
of four museums with an explicitly political purpose and at the service of the new
order in 1792 (p.28-29): The Museum of Monuments (Trocadéro), the Louvre
Museum, The Museum of Arts and Crafts, and the Natural History Museum. In the
wake of this same social movement other European cities have built museums to
hold the largest collections of ethnographic objects brought from other continents:
Vienna (1783), Amsterdam (1808), Madrid (1819), Berlin (1810), St. Petersburg
(1852). Although their collections were being migrated and merged with others
over time, and in some cases the original collections are in other museums today,
these buildings still retain the same status of “great works” that they signified in
the past. In this way, this new ruling class sought to act on different fronts for the
establishment of new national identities, acting strongly in the cultural and artistic
fields, but always with trade and finance in mind.

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 would serve both economic and political purposes. It is also worth
mentioning that memory, the central object of these enterprises,
gives legitimacy to the institutional project and the social agents
dedicated to it (Heymann, 2005). This is why museums, today,
compete with tourism over our current notion of what “heritage”
is.

This museological plan deserves attention. The narrative power

exercised expands its network of relations, produces new
meanings, establishes lines of thought, determines what should be
known, multiplies the institutions of memory (and forgetfulness)
assigning them a role of source of knowledge, light and illumination
(Chagas, 2011, p.7).

There are founding myths for every aspect of every culture. Since
Western culture (in general) is very much marked by Greek
heritage, I would like to recover a history of European tradition
that justifies not only the existence of museums as we know them
today, but the mode of operation of these institutions. Although
it has been adapted over the centuries, it still retains its easily
recognizable mythical essence today:

Zeus, god of the gods and great father of strength and order, son
of Cronos (Time) and Rhea (the Queen Mother), had the gift and
habit of disguising himself as other beings to seduce and deceive
people, always driven by a great passion. He disguised himself as a
bird to attract and deceive his sister Hera. He disguised himself as
a swan to seduce and dissuade Leda. He transformed himself into a
blue-eyed white bull to kidnap and rape Europa and have her bear
his children. Zeus even transformed himself into a golden rain that
invaded Dânae’s bedroom and penetrated her body to conceive the
famous hero Perseus. He once disguised himself as a shepherd and
lovingly conquered the titan Mnemosyne (Memory), daughter of
Uranus (Heaven) and Gaia (Earth). Over the course of nine nights,

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 they begot their nine daughters, the Muses, personifications of
the arts and sciences, of memory and storytelling, charged with
singing the victories, beauties, and divine acts that would make
humans forget anxiety and sadness and inspire them to great
deeds. The house-temple where they lived, the Mouseion, stood
high on Mount Parnassus and was a place dedicated to the worship
and contemplation of the crafts of each muse: Clio, was the
guardian of history and science and Calliope was the guardian of
literature and rhetoric – these two became known as the favorite
daughters – Euterpe of music and lyric poetry; Erato of erotic
verses; Melpomene and Thalia of tragedy and comedy, respectively;
Polyhymnia looked after sacred music and geometry; Terpsichore
of song and dance; Urania of astronomy and astrology4.

Sandra Pesavento (2003) proposes the exercise of considering

what the attributes and profile of Clio, the favorite of the muses,
would be today, in the new millennium. According to the author, it
would certainly be named Cultural History.

Serene physiognomy, frank gaze, incomparable beauty, in her

hands, the stylus of writing, the trumpet of fame. Her name is Clio,
the muse of history (...) Perhaps Clio even surpassed Mnemosyne,
since, with the stylus of writing, she fixed in narrative what she
sang, and the trumpet of fame conferred notoriety to what she
celebrated. In the time of men, and no longer of gods, Clio was
elected the queen of sciences, confirming her attributes of recording
the past and holding the authority of speech about facts, men, and
dates of another time, marking what should be remembered and
celebrated (Pesavento, 2003, p.7).

4 My way of telling the myth is freely adapted from many sources, oral and written
(and, among the written, formal and non-formal), that I gathered by reading sites
on the Internet, such as Wikipedia entries and mythology blogs, and by talking to
experts on Hellenic myths and the Olympic pantheon. Since it is a public domain
narrative, I will take the liberty of telling it in my own way, without punctually
quoting the references.

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 There are many interesting points that I would like to highlight
in the stories about Mouseion on Mount Parnassus, which helps
us understand how the museum has a program already inscribed
in it since its mythical conception. For example, despite being
discursively programmed as a place of creativity and leisure, its
patron-manager was Apollo (lord of pure reason) and not his
brother Dionysius (ruler of freedom, games and pleasure). Another
interesting point is that Clio, favorite daughter and muse of history
and science, who disseminates and celebrates great achievements,
is often evoked because she is the daughter of Mnemosyne, and
shares with her mother the gift of remembering. But people
usually don’t pay much attention to the fact that she is also the
daughter of Zeus, the King of the Gods, the greatest authority on
Olympus and owner of power (law and order); the one with the
gift of ideological falsehood, who metamorphoses his voice and
appearance to seduce and deceive, kidnap and rape other people
and other gods. Zeus is thus the bearer of power, and controls
the narratives about himself (by pretending to be something else)
and the other (dissuading and deceiving), facilitating the exercise
of physical and symbolic violence. History–Science, the privileged
inhabitant of the house-museum institution, holds attributes
inherited from its mother, Memory, but I would like to point out
that it expresses itself more in the manner of her father, Power.
This is an aspect that can never be lost sight of. This is why the
archives archive.

In my view, among the many gradations of the same original

motivator that exists among all archives, Europe’s ethnological
museum collections are the ultimate demonstration of power: the
exercise of narrative control over themselves and their colonial
ventures over the rest of the world. This exercise of power
necessarily involves detaching objects of art and culture from their
original contexts of meaning and emptying them of their holistic
communicative power by making them mere “ethnographic

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 objects,” especially if stored in an institution under the rhetorical
justification of “safeguarding”. This exercise of power also aims
to legitimize the narrative of being open spaces of education and
knowledge construction – and, more recently, of “decolonial”
efforts - by staffing them with Black or racialized people from non–
European territories. Especially in positions that deal directly with
the public, or so that the faces of these workers may illustrate a
certain notion of “representativeness”, “inclusion”, or “diversity”
in the media. These people, however, are never the Archive
holders, decision makers, or political and/or economic managers
of the enterprise’s resources. That is, within the building, they are
almost in the same role as the (ethnographic) objects on display,
whatever the type of Archive. This “ethnologization” in form and
content can be identified in all museal/archival enterprises.

The modern use of the term “ethnology” is credited to the jurist

and historian Adam Franz Kollár, defined in his Historiae ivrisqve
pvblici Regni Vngariae amoenitates published in Vienna in 1783
as “the science of nations and peoples, or, that study of learned
men in which they inquired into the origins, languages, practices,
and institutions of various nations, and, finally, into the ancient
homeland and settlements, in order to be able to better judge
nations and peoples in their own time” (as cited in Mandavilli,
2018). Today, the term is understood as the science that
studies the documents gathered by and through “ethnography”
(ethnography is the method of ethnology), seeking the analytical
and comparative appreciation of cultures and societies in relation
to the ethnographer’s place of statement. Although it is constantly
criticized, revised, and updated, the development of ethnology
over time has followed the expansion of Europe around the
world in its various dissimulations, adaptations, subtleties, and
sophistications.

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 I could say – again supported by Marimba Ani – that, being a logos,
a way of reason and understanding, ethnology can be understood
as part of the European cultural DNA and the ultimate expression
of the success of European cultural-scientific nationalist
imperialism5. That is, ethnology is the seed, the founding logic
of this culture that, in fact, does not know itself, but is able to
describe in detail everything it is not from the comparison with
others. Since this cultural seed is not self-expressing, but depends
on a cultural vehicle of others (ethnos) to make itself viable in the
world, I consider this expression to be the ethnographic method
itself. Ethnography was first established with the justification of
otherness. Then it started working to justify a fallacious ideal of
evolutionism, which proposed that it was necessary to understand
the so-called “primitive societies” (because they were older) and
analyze the path that would have been taken to reach the supposed
point of complexity of European society, considering a line of
evolution that would place Europe as more “advanced” (because it
was younger). Following this, governments and other institutions
in European countries began to see great profit opportunities in
financing expeditions of adventurers, religious missionaries and
scientists from the most diverse areas (geology, botany, zoology,
anthropology, etc.) so that they could collect reports, objects,
samples of biodiversity, minerals, fauna, flora, and often even
human individuals from other territories. The detailed description
of other peoples’ way of life, practices, behaviors, values, beliefs,

5 Marimba Ani, in dealing with the legacy of European nationalism, presents

the “universalism” of the Victorian Era (1837-1901), which, within the European
worldview, meant “a more objectively valid moral state, the assumption being that
European values were arrived at “critically” and ’rationally’ and were therefore
universally valid. This was a legacy from the ‘enlightenment’, so-called.” (Ani, 1994,
p.55). Another legacy of European nationalism identified by Ani is the cultural-
scientific imperialism institutionalized in the Academy. The transformation,
inaugurated by Plato, of “epistemology into ideology” (p.104), which, because it
dragged on for centuries in which the European cognitive style became an extension
of Platonism, caused “not only all European intellectuals, but all intellectuals to be
trained in the academy” (Ani, 1994) because this is Plato’s legacy, and, today, a
proof of the success of European cultural-scientific imperialism.

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 and social rules quickly proved efficient for European colonization
objectives. It would be easier to conquer, dominate, exploit another
territory the better one knew the details of the socio-cultural
background of the people who occupied it. The collections derived
from these assortments were composed of exoticized objects of
“people from distant lands” – which, upon their arrival in Europe,
composed what they called at that time as “freak-shows”, human
zoos or the so famous Cabinets of Curiosities that originated many
of the ethnological museums existing today mainly in England,
France, Holland and Germany – but also trophies of battles that
became government treasures: souvenirs from colonial wars,
collected and displayed for the same reason that a hunter displays
the head of a deer he has shot in the forest in his living room :
because this is a genuine expression of European power.

I observe with interest when I read a text written by a European

(or Eurocentric) author calling African populations “fetishists” for
their use of objects in ritual and daily practices. In fact, I perceive
the European practice of taking these objects out of their contexts
and senses of use in order to compose the collections of their
national Archives, as well as using the image of Black and racialized
people working in their spaces to fill the credibility gaps of the
institutions’ discourses, as the true fetishism. Ethnography is the
white-European means of expropriating and appropriating “ethno-
knowledges”, whether by collecting material or immaterial “ethno-
objects”, for analysis and later archiving, under the argument of
safeguarding, or by observation, description and academic record,
of practices and customs of the “éthneos” (others). Or, on the other
hand, trying to get rid of the label of “ethnocentric”, or mitigating
the criticism of the “colonial” character of the collections by
inviting Black people (educators, artists, employees) to compose
the staff and programs. The goal has always been, and will always
be, to enrich and empower the holder of the Archive, never to exalt
what is archived. The institutionalization of collections within

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 museums and archives – created with the rhetorical purpose of
education and preservation of memory – always has a political
character, “as memory is a political instrument, capable of creating
identities, producing a discourse about the past and projecting
perspectives about the future” (Heymann, 2005).

Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett explores the paradox of displaying

ethnographic objects in museums, since once obtained, they
will never cease to be just fragments created by ethnographers
when they define, segment, detach, and carry them away. Such
fragments become ethnographic objects by virtue of the manner in
which they have been detached. They are what they are by virtue
of the disciplines that “know” them, for disciplines make their
objects and in the process make themselves. I want to suggest that
ethnographic objects are made, not found they did not begin their
lives as ethnographic objects. They became ethnographic through
processes of detachment and contextualization. Whether in that
process the objects cease to be what they once were, is an open
and important question. That question speaks to the relationship
of source and destination, to the political economy of display.
The answer tests the alienability of what is collected and shown
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1998, p.2-3).

This means, therefore, that the process of trying to construct

a memory about the place of origin of the objects based on
ethnography; the attempt to attribute the possibility of archiving
memory (or remembrance) to these objects by forcibly inscribing
a narrative in them that does not emanate from them or from their
original users/holders and, worse, not registering the ways in which
the objects were acquired in this narrative, makes these European
Archives, true dead Archives, at the same time as Archives of
death: an accumulation of meaningless objects, that, the way
they are stored and displayed, do not even narrate the memory of
the physical and epistemological death of the objects themselves,

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 neither of the people who made use of them previously and gave
them meaning, nor of the people who is (mis)using them now.

The systematic accumulation or compilation of these objects of

memory (archiving) brings the idea of heritage legacy, or collection:
a temporal link between what necessarily refers to the past, but
is projected into the future6. Therefore, a collection of objects,
elevated to the category of legacy (of a nation, for example),
creates a permanent updating of the meaning of its creation, as
it promotes the link between memory and history on the one
hand and, on the other, the power and control over the narrative
based on the objective proof acquired from the ownership of the
objects. The collection of these memory objects becomes the more
important the more records of historical facts they accumulate.
Any collection portrays the collector better than the history of the
objects made into a collection. In the case of ethnographic goods,
when we observe all of them gathered in one place, we see a very
clear picture of the person or the society that gathered them and
made them into a collection.

I would like to leave a reflection here, which is personal, but which

deserves to be shared here in this space: there is no possibility of
doing “decolonial” work for a European Archive (or a Eurocentric
one in another territory). This is because the decolonial is not a
metaphor: it is about effectively mobilizing a concrete effort for
the destruction of a structure that oppresses bodies, knowledge,
and territories. As long as the white-European regime remains
the center of “production” of knowledge about the world, it will

6 In Portuguese, the language in which this text was originally written, the notion
of legacy (legado) is sometimes confused with that of inheritance (herança), as
they are very close in meaning. Inheritance is better understood as something
inherited by right or by attribution, usually of a material nature (related to
property, patrimony, asset), while legacy is a symbolic ballast that is passed from
one generation to another and/or that is projected to posterity, in a collective way.
Legacy can be understood as a public declaration of symbolic power.

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 present the deepest expression of the structure of its cultural
thought in collectionism. No decolonial discourse, no decolonial
art, no decolonial museum education work will do any harm if it
is hired, invited, and funded by the very colonial institution that
houses it. This is part of yet another stem of European ethnological-
ethnocentric collecting: obtaining objects, knowledge, discourses,
words, and now, more recently, faces/presences, with a view to
the same end: the maintenance and/or increase of its heritage and
legacy. The fetishism about objects of memory (be they things or
people) is one of the strongest pillars that sustain the symbolic
universe of the European colonizing spirit, and has served as
justification for the continuous material and cultural expropriation
of other peoples and the archiving of this booty in institutionalized
collections of European national museums. No matter how much
the ownership of the pieces that form a collection changes hands;
no matter how “diverse” the public programming of exhibitions
curated from the collections, no matter how institutions change
their names, one or two objects are returned (without considering
the true meaning of the word “reparation”) or if society undergoes
transformations that change the meaning of a collection over time,
the character of the intentionality of its formation follows the core
of an Archive’s collection as long as it exists. Do we work for it or
against it?

To understand the power relations that act mutually to generate

the process of building (or destroying) a memory (or a forgetting)
is to understand the negotiations made to achieve the power to
control a narrative. And at the point where we are, in a total loss
of control over our own narratives, a structured (re)organization
is urgently needed in order to reestablish our self-determination at
the individual and, above all, collective level.

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