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Imagining the “Post-Museum”

03 February 2025, 11:00 am–4:00 pm

Francoise event

The initiative Imagining the Post-Museum led by Professor Françoise Vergès as Banister Fletcher Fellow will begin with a preliminary meeting.

This event is free.

Event Information

Open to

Invitation Only

Cost

Free

Organiser

The Sarah Parker Remond Centre – The Sarah Parker Remond Centre

Location

Whitechapel Gallery
77-82 Whitechapel High Street
London
E1 7QX
United Kingdom

This initial phase of the project will gather partnering institutions: the Whitechapel Gallery, Mosaic Rooms, the UCL Sarah Parker Remond Centre for the Study of Racism and Racialisation, and the Cité internationale des Arts in order to reflect upon the objectives and outcomes of the fellowship. We will ask how — in a time of distress and wars, of climate disaster and the rise of far-right forces, of the unleashed violence of a global counter-revolution, but also of resistance — might institutions and autonomous spaces imagine new ways of protecting and safeguarding collective memories and art. How are the memories of migrants, refugees, homeless people, exiles, of the poor and the wretched of the earth and the seas, collected and safeguarded? Where? By whom? For whom?

There will be a focus in particular on the asymmetry between what is protected and what is not. The latter is the case in Gaza, where artists are being murdered, where museums, historical monuments and archaeological sites have been thoroughly destroyed, and where the fate of institutional collections remains unknown. In Sudan, the national Museum of Khartoum has been looted, and its collection is said to be already trafficked. While in Ukraine, however, in the early days of the Russian invasion, UNESCO offered to digitalize its museums’ collections and to transfer art in areas protected from the bombing, (although this has not stopped the destruction of historical sites).

These questions will be asked from and about Paris and London, the two cities that are the focus of this fellowship. Two cities that are thoroughly gentrified, former capitals of colonial empire, fortresses of global capital, where erasures of collective memory and practice are being enacted on scales both large and small, with autonomous spaces and projects facing closures, budget cuts, or politically motivated false accusations. Yet they are also places of struggle, where marginalised and once colonised communities resist. Moreover, there remains some infrastructure and the resources that allow for the space to ask how an archive might become a source of hope in the present.

The project proposes to address these questions by looking at current practices and confronting varied experiences. This preliminary meeting will give way to continued meetings with artists, activists, and other participants through the months of February and March. In April, we will reconvene for a workshop in London, followed by a second workshop in Paris in May. Each iteration of the conversation will expand and build on the previous. Details of the upcoming workshops will be provided soon.

For enquiries, please contact jess.saxby@ulip.lon.ac.uk

About the Speaker

Professor Francoise Vergès

Honorary Senior Research Fellow at The Sarah Parker Remond Centre

Francoise Verges
More about Professor Francoise Vergès