Only Collections in the Building Podcast 5
27 August 2024
The fifth podcast in the series 'Only Collections in The Building' created by Heba Abd el Gawad and Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp (UCL Institute of Archaeology) is now available.
The podcast series 'Only Collections in The Building' created by researcher and museum activist Heba Abd el Gawad, and Associate Professor Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp, forms part of the AHRC-funded project Mobilising Collections for Institutional Change: Egypt at the Horniman.
Activists, artists, and indigenous practitioners are being invited to intervene in or disrupt museum spaces with the aim to bring change. But meaningful collaboration relies on much larger structural or professional changes that they rarely have the power to implement.
There is so much talk about museums, decolonisation, and social justice, but very little that is grounded in the day-to-day work of structural change and how it impacts the people who are relied on to implement it. It is in this everyday work that relationships can breakdown. Rather than having a breakdown, Heba and Johanna will ask what it means in practice to put people before collections by sharing their experience of working together on All Eyes on Her!, a community-collaborative exhibition at the Horniman.
This series is produced by Maria Christodoulou, creator of From Root to Vine.
Episode 5: Solidarity and Risk
Rather than risky places, you may be more likely to think about museums quiet and conservative spaces, ultimately resistant to change or transformation. However risk, and the perception of risk, dominates museum work in some quite fundamental ways.
One of the most obvious ways in which risk dictates museum process and practice is through the management of risks to collections.
However in this episode we focus on reputational risk at an institutional level, and the unspoken emotional risks that community members and collaborators take when they work with museums. Attending to the present moment, institutional silences relating to Palestine, and the impact on All Eyes on Her, we explore the current climate of silence, self-censorship and the politics of solidarity.
Listen again
- Only Collections in the Building Podcast series (blog post)
- Only Collections in the Building Podcast 1
- Only Collections in the Building Podcast 2
- Only Collections in the Building Podcast 3
- Only Collections in the Building Podcast 4